Toms View of the World

A recent survey highlights the worst cities for Drivers in the UK.

It should come as no surprise to regular readers of this site, that Cardiff is right at the bottom thanks in part to scarce and expensive parking…

Well, last night a bloke from Scottish Power gave me a call - explained that they had been given my number by Dreams Furniture Retail, as they “thought I might be interested in changing my electricity supplier” - I explained to him that I’m registered with the TPS, so they are breaking the law by cold calling me. He explained that as my number had been passed to them (despite that action being a breach of trust, let alone the UK data protection legislation, and the Direct Marketing Association’s rules (see Section G of the Guidelines - “Matching
against the TPS or FPS file is required by legislation“), I had not authorised the company in question to sell my details on), it wasn’t a cold call.

I hung up.

I’ll put up with calls from companies I actually do business with (e.g. Sky’s incessant bugging me to take an extended warantee on my Satellite box, no matter how many times I say “no”) but any company who cold-calls will be blacklisted as a company I will never knowingly do business with by choice. Dunraven Windows have been on that list for many years…

Let me make this clear. I do not want to recieve unsolicited sales calls. Ever. From anyone, via any medium, unless I have explicitly requested to be kept up to date on your products, services and offers. If I want to recieve your marketing, I’ll ask.

I always make sure I carefully read the “by ticking this box you agree that you do not authorise us to pass your details on to carefully selected 3rd parties whose products and services we feel you might be interested in” and ensure I correctly tick it (or not) to prevent my details being passed on.

If you, as a company do not respect my wishes, and I discover you passed my details onto a 3rd party for any reason, you are as bad as the telemarketing scum you sold my details to - to put it simply, don’t expect my business in future if you break my trust.

The following companies have recently been added to that blacklist:

Barclaycard, Dreams (the furniture retailer), Clydesdale Financial Services (who do the payment handling for Dreams), Scottish Power (who bought my number from Clydesdale and dreams)

Also recently added to the blacklist for “door to door” sales-calling:

British Gas, Swalec, nPower

As you probably know, a couple of months ago, I switched my webhosting to a small hosting company after an “incident” with my previous host.

So, here are my thoughts on NCS - so far, so good - support while I got my site up and running, familiarising myself with thier online account manager and the like was excellent, even though I was still learning.

The server has been reliable with no downtime that I’ve noticed, and the net connection speed seems quick enough.

I can happily recommend NCS to someone who needs hosting - if their packages meet your needs.

I think my bike has got it in for me.

Today’s attempt to cycle to work went a little better than last time - I’ve found a better route in, and all was going just fine until the chain snapped.

So I had to push it the rest of the way into work, and have to figure out how I’m going to get it to a bike shop to have it repaired (I don’t have the tools to repair it myself)

I think I’ll just stick to the car…

The BBC are reporting that the UK remains a “car-dependant nation“.

Well, of course we are - public transport is simply not a viable or economical option - for example:

To get from my house to my parents house by public transport involves 2 trains and 2 buses - and would take 1hr 30mins for the trains, plus at least 50 mins on buses - and that doesn’t include the waiting times, at a cost of £19.50 for the train, at least £5 (total) for the buses… and that’s per person, if you travel out and back on different days, it goes up because you can’t use a return fare on the bus!

To drive it takes 40 mins (each way) and costs about 15 quid (return - including petrol and tolls) no matter how many people are going. So compare 5 hours of travelling with around an hour and half, plus the cost (which multiplies per person on the bus/train), for a day trip, it’s not worth going at all on the train - at least by car you get a decent amount of time at your destination.

Until public transport is comparable in cost and convenience, and journey times, no-one is going to use it. Of course, the government doesn’t really want to push all those tax-revenue-generating motorists onto cheap, efficient public transport - where’s the money in that?

Suffice to say, that where public transport is viable, I’ll use it - For example, I’ll happily use coaches to get the London airports, as they are often cheaper than parking, however the same is not to be said for Cardiff or Bristol airports, when the convenience of the car outweighs the time and effort involved with the bus.

I found a new way to pass the hours - categorisation of celestial objects - specifically galaxies.

Simply look at the picture and decide whether it’s a spiral galaxy, an elliptical one, or something else - then repeat.

This is a serious scientific study - using the collective intelligence of the internet to further the classification of the many millions of observable objects in space.

http://www.galaxyzoo.org

This is something I’d like to see - but never have.

A Sound-Card-Firewall.

Basically, like Zonealarm allows you to give applications permission (or deny them) to access the network/internet - how about a piece of software that allows you to give applications permission to access the soundcard… So I can have sound off for web-browsers, but on for, say the email notification sound from Outlook - preventing annoying flash ad’s for smilies from suddenly shouting something through my speakers when I’m online.