Tim Hardy

I believe that while there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people’s actions. We drive on the left in Britain, but we are being driven to the right.

They call themselves libertarians; I think they’re antisocial bastards

George Monbiot turns his attention to the road rage lobby in a brilliantly argued and articulate piece that I will remember the next time some idiot jumps the lights when I am crossing the road, smug in the knowledge that he will not be hurt if his vehicle hits me.

As a Suse user, I was pleased by the ability to use pin to find packages and yast -i to install them from the command line. Pointing my yast sources to the Suse ftp servers meant I didn’t even have to reach for a disk when I wanted to install something. I thought that was pretty good.

But apt-cache search beats pin hands down and apt-get install makes yast -i seem like a dinosaur.

The more I use Debian, the more I love it.

Two weeks ago, one of my credit cards was cloned.

I pay for my internet connection using that card so, after cancelling the Visa, I tried calling Bulldog Broadband to update my payment details.

No one answered that day or the next or the next or …

This morning I held from 7.50am to 9.40am. Finally I hung up and called their sales line. The phone was picked up within two rings.

The sales person, however, was obnoxious when he realised I was an existing customer and hung up on me.

I called back and demanded to speak to a manager.

She apologised, took my new card details and promised to have my account updated with the correct details. It took less than 30 seconds. Too bad I had already wasted close to 20 hours listening to hold music in the last fortnight.

So, if you are struggling to get through to Bulldog I advise you to call their sales line instead of their Customer Service, Technical Support or Finance departments, none of whom ever answer the phone. It’s 08000 15 16 17. Be assertive.

Any company that cannot be bothered to properly staff its Customer Support areas deserves to have its sales lines tied down with non-sales issues. If this starts hitting them in the wallet by preventing new sign ups then maybe they’ll do something about the problem.

If you do not have a Bulldog account and are tempted by the adverts - resist!

As a humanities graduate who didn’t begin to tinker with computers until 1999, I have been so awed by the achievements of those who built the software that now forms part of our daily reality that I seem to have absorbed the message conveyed by a pantheon of set-up wizards and druids, that programming is an arcane art indistinguishable from magic.

I started with Windows. I considered myself, at first, a user of software. Then as I grew in confidence and began to tweak applications more and more, I became the office geek: the guy you came to when you had a problem and didn’t want to deal with the patronising sarcasm of the help desk.

I was a fledgling power user, perhaps, but that’s still a user. I wanted to go further. Windows was this impenetrable black box and all I was doing was changing the stickers pasted to its exterior. The Magic Inside ™ was still a mystery.

Switching to linux placed me at the base of a near-vertical learning curve that, after two years of use, has become a pleasant climb. GUI tools held my hand while everything was new. When I was ready, the command line showed me a glimpse of its power. From chaining commands to scripting seemed a natural progression and I began to taste the satisfaction of automating repetitive tasks. But I still felt like a user.

“I know how to write a bash script, how to pipe the output of one command line application into another and control the whole thing with loops and conditionals, but I don’t know how to program,” I thought a few months ago. And so I sat down and began to learn C++. While I’d belittled the shell scripts I’d written and used daily, I finally felt like I’d grown an honourary beard. Now this at last was real programming.

Learning about the C++ standard library, my first reaction is one of awe. That I can define something as a string and then, by virtue of having done so, find out how many characters it has without having to write an explicit routine to count them strikes me as beautiful. But then I feel doubt. Are not strings in C++, therefore, effectively microscopic applications? Is there any radical difference between tying together a series of command line apps like sed, cut and grep with a script and using the standard library when coding in C++?

When do I get my magician’s hat? Is what I am doing not in the end real programming? Do I have to wait until I’m writing my own code libraries or go closer to the metal still and write in assembly?

Or perhaps there never was any magic after all - just brilliantly engineered slight-of-hand.

Hmmm. Just been sent an email from Bulldog Broadband - they’re upgrading my ADSL connection at some point in the next month to 8 megs for free. My anger at their poor customer service evaporates in a wave of geek lust. That’s pretty damn fast. But will they deliver? Watch this space.

I received the proofs of my first article for Linux Magazine last night. It will be in Issue 56, July 2005. (Update: PDF online: Podcatching without an iPod)

Two years ago when I started playing with linux, I picked up a copy of this magazine and thought “This stuff seems fascinating - but I don’t understand a word of it.” Thanks to the hundreds of free tutorials online, the generous and patient advice of users of bulletin boards and a now well-thumbed collection of O’Reilly books, I’ve finally learned enough to start contributing back.

Neal Stephenson famously noted “unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.” Linux has grown out of that oral history and the decision to make it open source has made every user part of a community, whether they realise it or not.

I once read a Buddhist parable in a book about the Dalai Lama by Claude B Levenson, Le seigneur du lotus blanc. In the story a monk goes to live in a house filled with selfish, slovenly, morally lax individuals. Rather than preach to them about the error of their ways, the monk just picks up a broom and starts tidying. He never passes judgement on his fellows, just cleans up without comment. After several weeks, his good influence makes itself felt and the others begin to be more considerate and slowly reform their ways. Without doing anything, the silent monk changes their behaviour through his own good example alone.

In the same way, the generous individuals who create, develop, debug and document the tools that together comprise a GNU/Linux operating system through their good influence alone encourage others to share their own growing knowledge and skills.

Yeah, I’m a hippy at heart, I know. Laugh and call me unrealistic but I’d still rather live in a world where people believed in co-operation not competition, where people were rewarded for what they created rather than what they stole, either directly or indirectly through gaming the system. I want a world where technology is used to extend humanity’s reach rather than the bank balances of a few lucky rights holders, a world where we put as much collective energy into meeting the material needs of the impoverished many as we now put into the generation of artificial desires for the overfed and bored few. Open source is part of that ideal world.

I’m not saying do away with money. I’m getting paid for this article. Writing articles is how I pay my rent. I’m saying we should stop looking to make a profit at the expense of others. Doc Searls is fond of quoting Walt Whitman to describe the enemies of open source: they are “demented with the mania of owning things”. GNU/Linux is the product of people who believe that they are enriched by giving away what they know rather than jealously hoarding skills and knowledge. Using the operating system brings you into repeated contact with that radical idea and with each repetition it seems a more and more desirable way of living.

Looking for a broadband provider in the UK? Stay away from Bulldog.

Sure, their ADSL package is very fast - when it works.

But sadly it doesn’t always work and good luck on getting through to Customer Services - they don’t have enough staff to answer calls and their exchange can’t handle the call volume. In my experience, you can only get through one time in ten. (Oh and I should add that they only work from 8am to 9pm so god help you if you’re working from home on something urgent and your internet connection and phone line both go down at midnight.)

And don’t expect any help when you do get through. Each department seems to be on a different system and cannot see any notes on your account or records of calls placed by staff elsewhere in the organisation. So expect to have to repeat everything to everyone you speak to, again and again and again.

There seem to be no managers or supervisors - and no one is willing to call you back or give you a contact number for someone capable of actually helping you with your problem.

Of course, you can always email them if you can’t get through on the phones, like I did on 31 March this year after my phone line went down and stayed down for voice calls followed by my broadband connection several days later (they supply both on the same line: I don’t know why one worked, for a while, without the other).

No reply. Or to my resending it on 4/04.

Sending it a third time on 7/04 got an answer the next day - a template answer that ignored the content of my email and my description of the problem and gave me a list of patronising questions (Is your computer switched on? Dammit, I knew I was missing something simple…).

Somehow I found the patience to answer these and to repeat my original complaint.

I was told it had been forwarded to the technical department.

I got a call from an engineer the next day telling me that my line was working because they could see I’d used it since my last email. I explained to him that my issue was rather that the line had died for several days without explanation and I wanted to know why this had happened so that they could work on making sure it did not happen again. It turned out that the customer services employee had not forwarded my details at all to his department, simply told them that my line was not working. He promised to look into it and call me back.

He never called back.

Since then, nothing. And the line has gone down several times. I have emailed their customer service and technical departments each time - and even, as desperation grew, their public relations department. No answer. Not even a courtesy email.

The other week I woke up to find I had no broadband or phone line. I work from home. I cannot do my job without access to the internet.

Three hours on my mobile to bulldog customer services and six members of staff later, I finally had a supervisor on the line who was able to tell me that my local exchange was down, that they were working on fixing it, that she was sorry no one had answered any of my emails, they were short staffed and training new people. I asked to get my money back for the last month’s bill in compensation and she agreed.

My bill has just arrived. Guess what. No compensation. And their phone lines are all engaged.

UPDATE: 1/6/05

I have finally been credited with the promised refund. I still stand by my original statement, however. Bulldog Broadband’s customer service is the worst I have ever encountered. I would not recommend the service to anyone.

I’ll always love literature and I can’t bring myself to regret my choice of first degree, but IT seems the most truly creative and meritocratic space at the moment and I want in. Scott Adams does not scare me. Cube farms and pointy-haired bosses are everywhere.