A DVD player I bought from amazon developed a fault.
I called them on Monday at lunchtime to report the problem.
Tuesday morning, they delivered a replacement before 8am. Tuesday evening a second courier came round to collect the faulty one and return it to amazon.
I’ve long been impressed by amazon but this time they have surpassed themselves.
Site back up finally - and I have hot water again for the first time in six days.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh yeah-eah-eah-eah-eah-eah
I’ve got the power!
This site is going down in a few minutes time and will stay down for several hours while the electrician is working. Enjoy the silence.
UPDATE: site back up but will go down again tomorrow. The electrician turned up three hours late without the parts he knew he needed then disappeared again to buy them. Two and a half hours later he called to say he couldn’t get them today.
Tune in tomorrow for another display of incompetence.
Perhaps he’ll manage to short-circuit the entire building. Again.
Subscribers may have noticed a slight difference in the RSS feed for this site. You are now redirected to a version managed by FeedBurner. The main change is that my del.icio.us bookmarks will be spliced into the feed on a regular basis along with thumbnails of any new photos I get around to posting on flickr.
I was very impressed the other day by the announcement that FeedBurner were going to make it easy for people to leave if they weren’t happy with the service. I repect any company that is confident enough in their product not to need to lock in users.
Before this announcement, it was of course always possible to use mod_rewrite to forward requests for your feed to FeedBurner, giving you the option to opt out in future by removing the redirect from htaccess. Geeks always find a way.
To make this process easy to manage, I’ve used Steve Smith’s WordPress FeedBurner plugin which makes the transition painless.
If anyone experiences any trouble with the new feed and/or has any thoughts on it, please let me know.
Apologies to anyone who’s been having trouble reaching this site in the last three days. I’ve been having major power problems so the server has been going up and down repeatedly. Power is back up at the moment but will definitely go down again on Monday when the fifth electrician to visit in five days tries to fix the underlying problem and undo any damage caused by the first four.
These guys charge between £85 and £135 callout fee for the first hour. I’m in the wrong business.
I frequently come across familiar names from my weblogging days on mailing lists or stumble across posts on weblogs I used to read while googling for information. It makes me happy to see this. Sometimes the web seems quite small, almost homely.
I had grown fed up with maintaining a weblog and it was a relief when I stopped. I found myself obsessing over traffic and worrying excessively about what I was posting. Since I stopped maintaining scratch this, I’ve experimented with private weblogs hidden from the wider internet by .htaccess files and in doing so have rediscovered the usefulness of a blog as a server-side annotated bookmarking system. (del.icio.us takes this idea to a new level with the addition of user-defined tags.)
Lazy journalists who earn a living droning out their opinions bore me. Op-Eds by unknown webloggers are no less irritating especially when they’re preaching to the choir about any of the thousand knee-jerk reactions the flesh is heir to, in particular when responding to the political fallout of the events of September 11 2001.
I hold strong political opinions but I’m not going to waste my time stroking the egos of those who share them in a link-loved-up political echo chamber. Nor am I going to declare comment war on those whose opinions offend me and troll up and down the internet sparking flames where I post. I don’t believe it changes anything for the better. I think it just hardens prejudices.
Action not words. Using the internet to share images of abuse of prisoners is a political action. Using the internet to expose hypocrisy from a public figure is action. Posting in sound and fury about “ragheads” or “fascists” or “bleeding heart liberals” is just a way of getting something off your chest that might better have been kept private and deleted once the mood has passed, just as a letter written in anger is best put aside for 24 hours to be reread before posting.
I’ve become fascinated by GNU/Linux which I’ve been using as a desktop operating system for the last two years. I love the community of support that has grown up as part of the open source movement and want, in my own modest way, to contribute to it. Keeping my linklog private means that google cannot slurp it up so if I post the results of my experiments with particular hardware or software, no one else can find it. It’s time to tear down that wall.
I’m going to start a public weblog again and it is going to be focussed on technical matters. No politics, no religion, no confessional posts. At times I’ll have to bite my tongue, at times I may slip a little in my aims but I will do my best to keep to this goal.