Avid readers will know that I have been involved in an ongoing saga with BT since December.  Basically, they screwed up and tried to charge us for it, and I’ve been kicking up a fuss ever since.  Well, my next bill came through recently, showing a late payment charge on it that really shouldn’t have been there.  If indeed the payment was late, it was down to the problems their end rather than me not wanting to pay them.  So I e-mailed in my complain and had a phone call back from them that afternoon – which was reassuringly impressive – and they said it would all be taken care of.

Now, it all gets a little confusing here, because we start dealing with the actual numbers.  The original late payment and reconnection fee that was incorrectly charged to us in February following their problems in December meant that my February bill had around £20 more than it should have done.  When I phoned up to complain they said they couldn’t take that £20 off the bill, so I had to pay it, and they would offset it against my next bill.  Not an ideal solution, but one I had to live with.  So I paid that £20, on top of the cost of line rental and calls, and kept my eyes peeled for refund on my subsequent bill.  It never appeared.

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I’ve finally got round to taking some photos of our gerbils, Diamond and Pearl.  Ellie was cleaning our their cage this morning so I had to babysit them both on the sofa, and took the opportunity to whip my camera out.  It’s actually quite hard to get a good shot of something so small and so quick moving!  They seemed more interested in trying to eat the camera strap than in posing for photographs.  I got a couple of good ones later when they were back in their home, with the camera lens right up against the glass.

The white one is Pearl, and the brown one with the white diamond on her head is… well, you work it out.  Both female, by the way.  And very sweet.

The other day I logged into my old Gmail account and discovered a pleasant surprise – Google has updated their webmail system.  The changes are subtle, but are still significant improvements.  So significant, in fact, that I’m moving all my personal mail to Gmail. (Curiously, it doesn’t appear to be a global upgrade – I also have a googlemail.com address, which hasn’t been updated, so they’re obviously upgrading in stages.)

So, what is it about Gmail that sets it apart from the crowd?  And, more importantly, why has it tempted me away from a ‘proper’ e-mail client on my computer? (more…)

Sunday it was supposed to rain.  At least, that’s what the weather report said on Thursday.  By the time it got to Sunday morning the MET office had revised its decision and said that it wasn’t going to rain.  But it was going to be grey and misty and cloudy and miserable.  And it was.  In the morning.  By the afternoon we were enjoying glorious sunshine.

And it was on this day that I went with Colchester Mini Club to the Manningtree High School Classic Vehicle Show.  Not restricted to just Minis, there were cars of all sorts in attendance, all (or at least most) shined up and tidied to be on show.  Photos of the event are in my new Picasa album.

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Work has generally been quite busy recently.  Which is a good thing.  More work means more money.  However, there is more to life than work, and there are a whole load more things I need to squeeze into my week than just work.  I’d like to share just a few of this week’s additional bits and bobs with you.  It gives me something to do after all.

This afternoon I took the opportunity to put work on hold briefly while I went outside and mowed the lawn.  It has needed doing for a while now, and I’ve been putting it off, but today I figured I ought to take advantage of the sunshine and get out there while I can.  Looking at the forecast, the weekend isn’t going to be too promising.  The lawn actually needs treating at some point, as one half of it looks to be more moss than grass.  We’ve got some moss-killer, it’s just a case of spraying it on and letting it do its job.  I didn’t get round to that today, but I did cut the grass and do the edges, so the garden is looking nice now.  I also noticed that the peas in our vegetable patch are beginning to grow too!  We’ve got carrots and parsnips in there too, but I only planted them last week so it’s no surprise they’re not topside yet.

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Yesterday my new printer arrived.  As I previously blogged, my old Epson Stylus D68 died a while back from an erratic cyan print head, and in absence of a viable fix I ended up buying a replacement.  I have to admit, I did give in to the marketing ploys of eBuyer and chose one of their special offers, but it seemed such a great deal and it had such wonderful reviews that I couldn’t resist.

The Canon PIXMA MP210 is an all-in-one jobbie, which means it’ll print, scan and copy all from one box.  There are several advantages to this approach: (more…)

I’ve been hovering on the WordPress forums recently, keeping my eyes peeled for a solution to my missing media buttons following up my upgrade to WordPress 2.5 a week or so ago. Today, prompted by a post by jeenie involving looking at the source code, I had a poke around and managed to get half way there. As you can see from the attached screenshot (which proves it all works!!), I can now access the functionality, even though the images still don’t show. It’s a curious thing, given that it looks like a fairly simple bit of code that oughtn’t to have any problems at all.

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Funny, isn’t it, how easy it is to get into a rut over the silliest things. For years I have been a great advocate for Epson printers, and have owned them exclusively since my first computer. I have always been reassured by their quality, their resillience, their affordability. Yet, on closer inspection, it would seem these qualities are somewhat unfounded, despite my years of experience with their products.

My first Epson printer was second hand, boxy, slow, and not brilliant quality. That was eventually replaced with a new, more compact model, which served me well for several years until it decided it wanted to retire – without warning or explanation it stopped working, and after much Googling I discovered that cause was an internal counter that had reached its maximum, and the only solution was to send it to an Espon dealer for them to reset it. The cost of sending it to them outweighed the cost of a new printer, so that printer just got stuffed in a box and forgotten. The replacement was slightly bigger, slightly more expensive, and lasted half as long; it’s developed a problem with one of the print heads, whereby the cyan comes out in no particular pattern and ruins every printout that uses colour. I’ve tried cleaning the heads, and got through almost half a cartridge of ink with not a sign of improvement. Since the heads themselves can’t be replaced, that printer has also been taken offline now.

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This evening I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.5, the latest version of the famous blogging software.  It’s pretty neat, has a nice revamped interface, and introduces a few nice changes along the way.  They’re not differences you’ll notice as a reader though, which is partly why I loaded up a new theme, so you’d have something different to look at!  The theme isn’t mine, incidentally, I couldn’t be bothered to spend all that time developing it and wanted something quickly, so used someone else’s.

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“Time is an illusion.  Lunchtime doubly so.”  So said the great and oft-misquoted Douglas Adams.  And how right he was in his observation.  We fill our lives with so much ’stuff’ that there is rarely time left over to indulge in that age-old tradition of ’sitting and doing nothing’.  That’s something I’ve done precious little of lately, through a combination of an unusually high quantity of work and an influx of new ways to fill that ’spare’ time in between work, sleep and mealtimes.

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