Now you know I don’t like to moan but even the iPod touch seems to have Microsoft like inconsistencies. I’ve told you the story of how I can’t download some software because I am away from home.
Well, today I downloaded a podcast from the good old BBC of the Chelsea v Sunderland goals. I clicked on play and the posh chappie from the BBC pronounced that for copyright reasons I wasn’t allowed to see the goals.
SO WHY DID YOU LET ME DOWNLOAD THE FRICKING THING THEN?
Who are these wasters?
DW
I can’t half pick ‘em.
You know I just bought an iPod touch. I have transferred loads of music and photos etc onto it. It’s a good thing.
It tells me to update the software so I try. It tells me it cannot reach the server. Over and over again.
I write to Apple for help. They reply, I do what they say and it doesn’t work. I write back and they ignore me. I write again and TWO people reply: different solutions.
New solution one also fails.
Solution two tells me not to bother trying to update anything because the system knows that I am travelling away from home. It doesn’t like me travelling away from home. It throws a hissy fit and stops my downloads.
I write and thank them both: properly, of course, as they are only doing their jobs.
I add, though,that iPods are built to allow us to enjoy music and films etc on the move so they shouldn’t be surprised when we move around with our iPods and stuff!
In 12 day’s time I will get back home and see what might happen then!
DW
This is all I will say about the US Presidential election result.
Give me
and I will become President of the USA.
You have to be desperate and excessively wasteful to spend that amount of money just to pass a job interview.
Don’t forget, also, that McCain only spent $924,000,000 on himself.
DW
How about this? I have just been told that there is a sign at the top of the Jumeirah Sheikher water slide at Wild Wadi in Dubai that says this:
"Keep legs crossed to prevent gusset trauma."
Doesn't bear thinking about does it?
Manchester University's Toilets
I have come late to this story I think but I was told this evening that the signs on ALL Manky Uni's toilets were changed to say
Who are these people who wasted this money? Which managers allowed themselves to get involved in such a stupid, peurile discussion?
DW
I have written before about the relationship between speculation and oil prices over the last 12 months or so. We have read in the newspapers that speculation was not to blame for the rapid rise of oil prices to around $150 per barrel. Here is a quotation taken from The Times newspaper dated Tuesday, 28 October 2008, the speaker is Abdulla al Badri who is a senior executive at OPEC:
We just want to balance the market, he said. He blamed speculators for the spike in prices this year to a high of $147 a barrel on 11th July. Hedge funds were using oil as an asset class, he said. The paper market was out of control will. Nobody was controlling it. We want to see a price that is driven by fundamentals not by speculators, he said.
Mister al Badri said he was not concerned about the risk that high oil prices could ultimately harm OPEC by undermining demand.
So now you know the truth … exactly what I have been saying all along.
DW
I spent the day in Liverpool for the first time in many years and I came home brassed off!
In a good way, of course.
What happened was that I spent an hour or so in the HMV shop in Liverpool where I found and bought the DVD of the fantastic film starring Pete Postlethwaite, Brassed off!
There are two main themes in this film:
A good but simple story with some very fine acting and some excellent brass band music, courtesy of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band.
Brassed off and happy.
DW
Every year since 1975, with only one exception, I have made a Christmas Cake. This year is not an exception and as proof of that here is the cake that I have just made:
Of course, the recipe I use is the Be-Ro Recipe: there is no finer Christmas cake.
As a matter of interest, what does Be-Ro or BeRo stand for?
Look at the picture above and you might just spot that there is a second cake on the right of the main cake. Every time I make a Christmas cake I make what I call a tester. The mixture that is left over having made the main cake goes into making a smaller cake for immediate consumption.
The main cake will be stored as it matures ready for Christmas Day. I will, of course, decorate it for the big day!
DW
It is axiomatic that Adolf Hitler has had a major influence on the lives of all of us. However, I am becoming rather disturbed at the number of Hitler centric television programmes that continue to be aired these days.
I have noticed over the last week or two that as I flick through the various knowledge channels, that at any one time there is one and maybe two programmes on air that have Hitler as the central theme.
I wonder what the real demand is for these programmes; and I wonder what value they are adding these days.
As I type this they are discussing yet another book on Hitler and the Third Reich on Radio 4.
Time to leave this subject to historians I think.
DW
Everyone following this Blog knows that I am keen to keep AmerEnglish from these shores. Everyone also knows that such a mission is akin to fighting a losing battle.
I took part in a mini squabble yesterday with Edward Stourton, BBC Radio Presenter. He talked in the Sunday programme yesterday about a regular London bus. I wrote and asked,
Dear Mr Stourton,
On your Sunday programme on Radio 4 today, you talked about a "regular London bus". I would be interested to learn what such a bus looks like and what it does.
Duncan Williamson
Halifax, West Yorkshire
Stourton responded with this,
Well they tend to be large and red and ferry people about (and threaten cyclists like me, but that's another matter)
Kind regards,
Edward Stourton
Of course that wasn’t the response that he should have given so I followed up with,
Thanks for the reply but you will appreciate that my main question was to wonder what made them regular ... as opposed to, let's say, irregular.
You might gather I am an anti AmerEnglish activist.
Duncan
I have had no response to that missive so I have assumed that I have either scored a micro victory or that I have been swatted away as an annoyance.
Why have I persisted with this matter? Well, Stourton has a 2:1 degree in ENGLISH from Cambridge University no less and since he is just about the same age as me, he has had consciously to learn to use the American usage of the word regular in his every day speech.
I will not stop this campaign.
DW
Following my earlier post on the me, me, me syndrome, here is my initial analysis of the data from the Office of National Statistics for you. I have converted the text on the page I sent you to into tabular format and from there have prepared two pie charts.
These additional resources will help you with your understanding. There is a further chart on the ONS page that I haven’t included here.
Go to http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=192 for the original data. What follows is my analysis
| Analysis of UK GDP: Quarters 2 and 3 for 2008 | Analysis of UK GDP: Quarter 3 for 2008 | Analysis of UK GDP: Quarter 2 for 2009 |
| Q3 | Q2 | |
| GDP Whole Economy | -0.5 | 0 |
| Construction | -0.8 | -0.5 |
| Total Production Output | -1 | -0.7 |
| Manufacturing | -1 | -0.9 |
| Mining and Quarrying | -0.7 | -0.1 |
| Electricity, gas and water | -1 | -0.1 |
| Services | -0.4 | 0.2 |
| Distribution, hotels and restaurants | -1.7 | 0.2 |
| Transport, storage and communications | -0.6 | 1 |
| Business services and finance | -0.4 | 0.1 |
| Government and other services | 0.4 | 0.2 |
| Agriculture, forestry and fishing | 0.5 | 0.4 |
| Source: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=192 |
DW
The data released on Friday are the "flash estimate" of GDP, a number notoriously subject to revision. There was a grain of comfort in the fact that GDP for the second quarter was unrevised and showed zero, rather than declining, growth. (See http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7e9feb8a-a1a4-11dd-a32f-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1)
This is a tale of woe. I am not especially complaining about a poor product although that is bad enough. The HP Pavilion tx1350ee laptop computer I bought last November has suffered from three major problems in its short life. A motherboard has burned out twice, its radio/bluetooth transmitter has failed twice and now it is totally inaccessible for another unfathomable reason.
My gripe is that each time I had a problem I have had a battle with HP’s after sales service to get them to honour the international warranty that comes with the computer.
I don’t intend to set out every single battle I have gone through since last November but I am publishing here the second of two letters I have written to the company over the last three weeks or so. If HP wants to respond to my letters by way of a comment here I will publish it without any editing whilst retaining the full right of reply.
Let me tell you what has happened as a result of these letters before you read them. Following my first letter I received a call from the Customer Services Department. They acknowledged the receipt of my letter and told me they were to send me a recovery CD/DVD in an attempt to solve my problem. They called over a week after I sent my letter and almost two weeks before I wrote my second letter as a result of not having received any CD/DVD.
Today, the day after I posted my second letter, I received another call from the Customer Services Department. In that call they asked me if I had received the disc. I said no. Then I told him I had written another letter to their Director and was considering legal action to recover my losses following their failure to apply the conditions of their warranty.
Well, here is the second letter:
Dear Sir,
On 29th September I wrote to you telling you that I was at the end of my tether.
I explained how my HP Pavilion tx1350ee laptop had stopped working and that I was unable to resolve the problem on my own. I also outlined the entire day that I wasted in trying to get any sense out of your after sales service people. I went round and round in circles trying to get someone to help me but ended up in long queues on the telephone: of course I was paying heavily per minute for these calls and a cynic would accuse you of creating these queues to bolster your revenues.
I was given unobtainable numbers to call by your staff, I was generally abused and in the end, after about eight hours, 15 calls and no progress I was handed over to your customer services department whose sole recommendation to me was to call again one of the numbers where your staff were particularly unhelpful.
On Thursday 9th October I received a telephone call from someone purporting to be from your company. They referred to my letter of 29th September and after a short introduction he told me that he would be sending me the Recovery CDs that I need. Well, why am I not surprised that almost two weeks later I have received absolutely nothing from you?
I am sitting here now looking at an expensive and utterly useless laptop computer. It will not work and you are not helping me in spite of your International Warranty. You are failing in your duty to help me.
Let me explain further: I told you in my letter of 29th September that the HP laptop is my business computer and that I need it in order to carry out my duties for my clients. Since your service is so bad, so slow; and because you seem to be working in complete contradiction of your code of business ethics of course, I have had to buy another laptop to keep my business working. You alone have caused me to have to spend almost £400 of my own money to bale out HP. Depending on your response to this letter, I am considering taking legal action to recover this expense from you.
I did remind you of your code of business ethics in my previous letter; and here are the pertinent elements of that code again:
Can you hold up your hand and claim that you have not broken all of these promises? In my experience you have smashed them all.
This is the third major problem I have had with this laptop and my experience of your customer services is that they are woeful. I really don’t know how many of your customers are suffering in the way that I have or who are prepared to be as direct as I am; but you get my award for the worst customer services organisation of 2008.
Yours sincerely
I told the Customer Services man on the phone today that the service they were offering was rubbish and since I was going on a lengthy business trip starting early on Thursday, I asked him if he could get the recovery CD to me tomorrow, Wednesday. His absolutely uninspiring response was that he would see what he could do.
DW
