Feb
28
British Gas came out for the third time today. They are finally getting around the move electricity meter. It’s not exactly the engineers fault, but that of their ’system’ and their ‘process’. You phone them up, speak to someone who has absolutely no idea what you are talking about, they then log a call about something they could find on their system that seems to match what you were talking about, and finally an engineer turns up expecting to change a light bulb and not a whole electricity meter.
It’s amazing how such large companies get lost in the procedure. The call centre staff seem to be there to take calls and manage calls, and not to get the customer as quickly as possible to an engineer who can actually help or qualify your conversation. I wonder what it would be like if I could call my local British gas site, get a call logged and then speak to an engineer straight away. How much time in failed appointments would be saved?
Posted by Adrian Hollister
Feb
28
Took the plunge into the great unknown today and upgraded to Vista. I've seen a whole bunch of mixed reviews out there, but as someone interested in technology and an owner of Linux and Mac machines, I though the old Windows PC could do with a refresh. XP is fine, just about, but it does crash, it's slow after six months of use and needs to be rebooted every day to be sure of a good service. Vista claims to do away with all of these annoyances and be more Mac like for availability and eye candy.
Well no surprises with the Vista install. All went well with my fresh new install of Vista, but so many programs and drivers don't work that it's driving me insane. The damn 'local only' networking feature that seems to be designed to pop into 'unidentified network' mode every few hours is utter madness. The only way around it seems to be to turn off all the power saving features. I don't want to trawl support forums for days finding solutions, I just want it to work.
I'm still using Vista, but I hate it, and I think I've been conned into buying it. My mac just works, why won't vista work on a machine with 10 times the power, disk space and memory?
Posted by Adrian Hollister
Feb
22
To fit with our new lifestyle most of our old possessions have to go. There are two key reasons for this: to maintain the ‘only what we need’ principal, and to get rid of our external storage. Most of our possession’s are now in from storage and there is a general Christmas feeling in the house when boxes, that have been in storage for over a year, are opened. It’s amazing how much you miss stuff that you’d forgotten about. Our DVD collection for example extends to at least 20 DVD’s (ohh wow), all of which have been in storage. Once out of the box the girls cant remember how they survived without them (well almost). We’ve played tug of war with the girls over daft DVD’s they are not really interested so that we can get them on ebay.
Some our stuff is just not ebay material, and while car boots can generate some cash, in my experience the only people making money are the people on the gates collecting the entrances free. We are however doing a lot of ‘freecycle’. It’s one of those, give it away free to the first person that turns up, sites that run’s mainly via email updates. Our old fridge went in about an hour, and a load of old kids books went in 10 mins to a grandmother who wanted something for her grandkids. It’s a great idea and beats putting it in the waste or attempting to give it to a charity shop (who are increasingly picky about what they take!).
The purge ratio this week is about 5:1 - five items to ebay etc to one keep. No bad I think, but I reckon there is a second
round where some of the retained items can go….
Posted by Adrian Hollister
