benking.me.uk

I have just discovered I have been bitten by the 0845 rip-off. My Orange bill arrived and despite me have 1200 inclusive minutes (nowhere near used), I still had an hours worth of calls ‘outside minutes’. This then transpired to be 0845 numbers, one of which cost me £2.81+VAT for 17 minutes… So called ‘local rate’ calls are far from it.

Anyway an angry message to HSBC got the following ‘national alternatives’.

HSBC Premier (08457 707070) -> 01226 260260
HSBC Business (08457 606060) -> 01226 260878

I suspect there are alternates for all HSBC services.

When will these companies stop using these rip-off rate numbers??

So finally the dense powers that be have realised that a fixed annual license to download whatever you want is a good idea:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/07/24/dldownloads124.xml

Really they should put me in charge, as I first suggested it here - http://www.benking.me.uk/2008/01/11/drm-copyright-the-saga-goes-on/

 Even so it is still being reported as a ‘bad thing’ i.e. naughty people will get taxed/fined £30… Get it into your thick heads, I want the flexibility to download what I want from wherever I want, whenever I want, I don’t mind paying for that privilege.

So wheres the form, where do I sign up?! I tell you what call it £60 per year and throw in movies and TV…

I have in the past posted about my experience when I got my Hotmail account hacked and how I subsequently recovered it. To save everyone the hassle of wading through my blog for the answer (and earn me a few quid hopefully), I have now written a handy document that helps you understand:

1) Why and how your Hotmail/Live Messenger was compromised in the first place.
2) How to go about getting it back.
3) How to stop it happening again.

All for a mere $10… you can buy it here.

P.S. I appreciate the irony that if you have had your Hotmail account compromised you have probably lost your Paypal account as well, so can’t actually pay me! Unfortunately its a chicken and egg problem you will have to sort out, as I can’t be arsed to set up another payment mechanism - sorry!

After our first food fail and followup discussion with the Pizza Express operations manager, Debbie Phillips, I thought that maybe we had the issue resolved.

Last Tuesday evening we went back to test the theory.

The first failure came early in the day when Jake popped in to check what time they were shutting that evening (their website says 10.30pm), Jake was in fact told they were shutting at 10pm that evening.

7 of us turned up at 9.45pm (i.e.  giving them a bit of slack), the conversation went like this (I have bolded the fails):

Me: ‘Good evening, please can we have a table for 7.’

Pizza Express Waitress 1: ‘Hold on I will just check.’ Fail 2 (The answer we were looking for was ‘Yes of course, I will see what we have available’).

Pizza Express Waitress 1 (who from now on will be known as ‘The Nice One’) runs off and has a chat with Pizza Express Waitress 2 (who from now on will be known as ‘Short Angry One’), there is obviously some debate as Short Angry One returns to talk to us.

Short Angry 1: Yes you can come and sit over here.

Me: Thanks, but that is only a table for 6 and its in the corridor, next to Kitchen, can we just go and sit upstairs.

Short Angry 1: Sorry, the upstairs restaurant is closed this evening. Fail 3 (The answer we were looking for is ‘Yes, no problem, please come this way’.

Me: I am sorry I don’t really want to sit in the corridor with one of us on the end of a table, please can we go upstairs.

Short Angry One: No, as I said upstairs is shut. Fail 4 (We gave you a second chance, you should have taken the hint).

Me: Do you mind if we have a quick chat in private… (we both move to one side).

Me: I wouldn’t normally argue any further, but your boss, Debbie Phillips assured me that we would always be able to be seated upstairs and it would never be closed, now please can we sit upstairs.

Short Angry One: I DON’T CARE, I SAID UPSTAIRS IS CLOSED, NOW PLEASE STOP INVADING MY SPACE. FAIL 5 (Don’t raise your voice to me or any other customer ever, plus you just passed up you third and final chance).

Me: Okay, as you wish.

We were shown to our table in the corridor. We then tried to shoot a video message (Tracy has blogged and posted it here), and Pizza Express Waitress 3 (Slightly taller angry but marginally concerned one) told us to stop filming! Incredible!

Anyway we ordered, and the food was good, so that was okay.

We decided then to keep drinking and stay as long as we could (just to see how long it would take them to kick us out), we asked when they would be shutting the bar, they said 11pm, so at 10.55 we did the right thing and ordered a round, this consisted of:

3 x Double Jack Daniels and Coke
1 x Double Vodka and Red Bull
2 x Peroni
1 x Coke (for the designated driver).

Now I am willing to bet there isn’t much change out of £25 at Pizza Express prices, however Short Angry One said ‘Sorry, I am not serving you anymore alcohol, you have had enough I think’. Which we hadn’t and was, IMHO, purely an act of bitterness.

Sigh… Another call to Debbie coming up.

Last night we decided to have a cheeky Chinese take away. Our usual take away, the Ruby House, is shut on Mondays so had to find another.

We decided on trying the ‘Net Mayflower Chinese Restaurant’ in Cheylesmore, it used to be okay a few years back, it isn’t anymore.

We ordered:

• Crispy Chicken in Chilli
• Barbeque Spare Ribs in Chilli and Salt
• Beef Black Bean Sauce and Green Pepper
• Egg Fried Rice

The first worrying sign was in the car driving home, when the smell was something that we can only describe as ‘rotten wet bread’.

When we got it home, the ribs were dry and tough, the chicken was dry, tough and tasteless, the egg fried rice looked very brown and manky like it had seen better days…

The icing on the cake (I wish it was), was the beef which appeared to be the source of noxious odour. I put the first piece of beef in my mouth I actually had to work hard not to be sick.

We disposed of the entire meal immediately.

Worsed take-away ever, a definite FOOD FAIL!

So the other day I had a hangover, a bad one. So I twittered about how Beroccca came to my rescue.

Anyway Outside Line, the digital agency responsible for Beroccas online marketing contacted me, basically they have a special Berocca bloggers relief pack, which you can get yourself at this special microsite:

http://www.berocca.co.uk/bloggerrelief

Clever stuff Berocca/Outside Line, I like it!

Wednesday Evening 10pm, 5 of us very hungry, so we decide to go for a quick Pizza Express.

We walk into Pizza Express, Coventry and its pretty full, all the staff are still on serving, and we ask for a table for 5, the girl serving us looked concerned and ran off upstairs to ask her manager.

She came downstairs and said ’sorry no we can’t serve you as we are closed’, we went to great pains to explain that we come in all the time, and that we will be quick, and could we talk to the manager. Nothing, in fact she blanked us and walked off!

This all makes no sense, its not like they had finished for the night, in fact we probably would probably have been in and out faster than some of the people having a more leisurely meal.

We would have spent well in excess of £100, been really happy that they served us, instead they have lost out on the revenue and 5 peoples goodwill.

We ended up going to the wonderful Thai Dusit, where they were more than happy to feed us, take our money and stay open as long as we wanted.

The Coventry Pizza Express constantly dissappoints in respect of customer service, I think that at least 25% of the time I go there one of the following occurs:

1) Sorry we aren’t serving anymore (despite the restaurant staff and other customers still being there).

2) Sorry we are full (despite the fact that we know they have an upstairs seating area with no-one in it).

Basically I am coming to the conclusion that Pizza Express just don’t want my money, which is a shame because I like eating there!

So two weeks ago I ordered a new Samsung LCD TV from RGB Direct (http://www.rgbdirect.co.uk).

I should have known better when the onerous ordering system forced me to supply home phone and mobile before continuing (My only home phone line is for ADSL and fax), but I ploughed on.

I selected the free delivery because although it said delivery would take 14 days, I didn’t really need it yet, so I could wait.

The next day I got a hassling call from their logistics trying to talk me into paying for delivery so I could get it quicker, and that I would have to wait for the tv to be delivered ‘directly from the manufacturer’.

I eventually convinced them, that I was happy with the free delivery option (though I sensed I would regret it).

Yesterday they phoned me to say that delivery would be today between 10 and 6, I ensured that there was someone at the house all day. They happened to turn up while I was out with the TV, and then demanded to see the credit card I paid with (despite it being delivered to the same address as the card). The card was of course with me, so they took the TV away again. In addition they revealed how they lied to me, it was their own people delivering the TV to me rather than ‘direct from the manufacturer’, so basically their free delivery option is them delivering it whenever they can be bothered.

I phoned up to rearrange delivery and they told me that redelivery would cost me £35 - more than if I had taken their 2 day delivery option in the first place.

I just went with the, fair enough I will cancel my order… and now they are T&Cing me… (see below).

Basically rubbish, my recommendation is DO NOT USE RGB DIRECT.

—–Original Message—–
From: RGB Customer Services [mailto:service@rgbdirect.co.uk]
Sent: 27 June 2008 17:28
To: Ben King
Subject: RE: Failed Delivery Charge apply

 Dear Sir, Further to your email , please note that any failed delivery are subjectedto a charge of £35.00 for refund to process. With reference to the creditcard swipe , we always take manual verification swipe of Credit/debit cardon delivery this is completely for security reasons , we have also statedclearly on our terms and conditions  www.rgbdirect.co.uk . As you have placed order on internet , you must have seen the terms andconditions of delivery . At this stage if you wish to cancel the order ,there will be £35.00 failed delivery charge apply to your account. Pleaseconfirm accordingly and we will process the refund as per your request.   Thank you Kind regards  Customer Services Tel:  0208 478 1444Mob:0796 696 8734Fax: 0208 924 0114Email:Service@rgbdirect.co.uk

I have deployed Vyatta to a lot of different locations, however the deployment I did last week was a little different…

Yas Island is a naturual island on the coast of the United Arab Emirates of about 2,500 hectares or which 1,700 hectares is being developed. It is to be a $40 billion playground of marinas, shops, theme park, water park, hotels and villas not to mention a Formula 1 track.

At the minute though it is little more than a lot of sand, some mounds of earth, a few roads and a lot of cranes, and I get the pleasure on behalf of my client Benoy (architects), of extending their existing Vyatta network to cover both their Abu Dhabi city office and their Yas Island site office.

There were a number of challenges with the deployment:

1. The connectivity; we had ordered a 2mbit/s leased line from Etisalat, the UAE telco, this was being delivered via a microwave link back to Abu Dhabi, at the point of landing in the country, we had no idea of the reliability, IP Scheme and weren’t even confident about the presentation!
2. Disruption; the users were using a shared network provided by the client, which was painfully slow, but worked to give them email and basic web access, we had to minimise downtime.
3. Reliability; we had to do everything we could to ensure reliability and remote maintainability of the network once we had left.

The Kit

Vyatta was the natural choice not only because we were using it across the rest of the Benoy network, but also because of the cost effectiveness of the hardware required to deploy a resilient configuration.

At each site we deployed 1U Dell 860s, with:

• Dual core Xeon processors
• 2GBs of Ram
• Hardware mirrored Sata drives
• Additional Intel Dual NIC card (giving 4 ethernet interfaces in total)
• Vyatta 2.3.1

The Configuration

• 4 Subnets: Workstations, Servers, Internet 1 (leased line), Internet 2 (ADSL)
• All subnets clustered across the two routers
• DHCP for workstation subnets (split across the two routers)
• Masquerade NAT for internal subnets
• Incoming NAT for email and video conferencing
• IPSec VPN tunnels back to the UK network and the other Abu Dhabi site
• Internal and external firewalling

The Microwave Link

The microwave link was a V35 serial presentation that we passed through a Cisco 1841 before passing onto the Vyattas, the resulting connection performed remarkably well giving us about 14ms round trip on pings back to the main Abu Dhabi office.

The Result

The end result is fantastic, speed and response of performance at both sites far exceeded expectations. At the main site we were replacing a Firebox VPN tunnel back to London, which had proved to be a little unreliable and extremely slow, we were putting this down to the quality of the Etisalat connection, however once we replaced it with the Vyatta VPN the network response and reliability was far in excess of expectations and performs as well as the MPLS circuits we have connecting other sites.

Martin Neal, IT Director of Benoy, said ’I am really pleased with the speed and also the “feel” of the network.‘

Photos

The Yas Island site office…

The Benoy team at Yas Island…

Our Microwave Link…

 <rant> 

I live in Coventry, which is as near as damnit slap bang in the middle of the UK, and within spitting distance of our second city, Birmingham, given this fact why is it soo damn difficult to get to the UKs biggest airport (Heathrow) on public transport?!

Normally when I fly its always easier and quicker to get to go from Birmingham to Frankfurt, Schipol or Copenhagen than it is to Heathrow, but this time it just wasn’t possible so I committed to Heathrow.

The options to travel from Coventry to Heathrow are:

1. Drive, while you have to endure the M40, M25, and the extortionate parking fees at Heathrow, it is nethertheless the flexible option.
2. Train to London, underground to Heathrow/Paddington then Heathrow express. This always strikes me as a dog leg of a journey and you have to suffer the underground with luggage. At least though the wheels keep turning.
3. Train to Reading, bus to Heathrow.
4. Train to Watford, bus to Heathrow.

There really is no optimum choice, and despite knowing better I went for option 4, what really irks me is that I am sure there used to be a train from Watford to Heathrow.

This should be easy but alas… my journey was:

1. Cab to Coventry Train station (less than a mile, easily done).
2. Virgin Train to Watford, just like going to London no issues.
3. 1.5 hours spent stood in the wrong place at Watford, the signs being in the wrong place for the bus. Rather than leaving from the bus terminal at the station, it leaves from over the road and down the street a bit, out of site from the station. There were about 10 of us all stood in the same wrong place, so I am confident it wasn’t just me being stupid. To add insult to injury the bus drivers actually drove past the station and obviously could see a load of people with suitcases stood at the wrong bus stop and drove on regardless with an empty bus. I asked 3 members of station staff, until I got one ansy woman who said testily ‘its obviously over the road’, this deteriorated into a full on argument and she was completely unuseful and totally jobs worth.
4. Finally I got a bus to Heathrow and once I was on it, it wasn’t too bad.

Coming home.

1. Land at Heathrow.
2. Go to designated bus stop, according to time table bus at 19:45, turns up 20:05 and departs with just 2 of us on it immediately, with no regard for the timetable.
3. Arrive Watford Junction (approx 20:40), train apparently at 20:55 to Coventry, wait on platform 20:55 completely fails to turn up, no warning, just vanished off display and a 21:05 to Preston (calling at Rugby) turns up instead… so I get on that.
4. £30 cab ride to Coventry from Rugby and I am home.

I may as well have driven, it would have been easy, and probably cheaper in the end.

Until this country gets public transport right, people will stay in their cars. Nuff said!

</rant>