Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Text of a letter I sent today to Virgin Media, my ISP:

This letter is a complaint about the recent decision to throttle my internet access.

I understand that I have been placed on an automatic list of the top 5% of users, and that with effect from Monday 28/4/2008 and for the ensuing week, my access will be throttled. This is completely unacceptable.

Why was I not told of the decision to throttle my access? An email notification would have avoided 3 expensive and unnecessary calls to technical support trying to diagnose a non-existent fault.

I made 3 premium rate calls to Technical Support today to query the slow speed I was experiencing. On the first 2 calls, the call handler simply fobbed me off from their script. Only on the third was it explained to me that my access was being throttled. I would like you to refund the costs of these calls which I estimate at 20 minutes x 25p = £5.00.

It was explained that I have been throttled as I fall within the top 5% of users. I simply do not believe that I fall within the top 5%. I am a light user of the internet, I do not for example download music or DVD's. Please tell me how much was downloaded and over what period of time to 'justify' this action.

It is not satisfactory that I am left waiting until Sunday for my broadband to be switched back on. I am a light user, and can only assume this is a mistake. Please restore unthrottled access immediately.

My experience with Virgin broadband has been one of consistently slow speeds and poor customer service - your "8 MB" service has turned out to be slower in use than the 1MB I used to receive from Tiscali. This incident is just the latest in a line of complaints and technical issues that I have had. I can no longer tolerate such a poor service. I wish to be released from my contract with Virgin WITHOUT PENALTY PAYMENT so that I can take a contract which actually supplies what is advertised. Please will you speak to whichever senior manager has the authority to waive the cancellation charge and release me.

I am thoroughly disgusted with the "service" received from Virgin Media. I expect a response well within the 10 days quoted by the call handler on your customer service line. My only alternative is to escalate this complaint to Ofcom as an unwarranted abuse by Virgin Media of the terms on which the service is supplied.

I look forward to your reply.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Strike day across the Civil Service today. I'm in work, but Deb is off. Always a source of tension.

The office is empty, but I am using my own form of subversion by not actually doing any work.

It's not that I don't agree with the point of the strike. In fact, as the pay deals have got worse and worse over the years, and the conditions have deteriorated - along with the attempt to remove some of our pension rights (let's face it, a lot of civil servants have always accepted poorer pay on the basis that the pension makes up for it to some extent - I've worked in areas where senior management have made this an explicit selling point for below inflation pay rises) I've become more in favour of industrial action. I'm increasingly of the opinion that what the government is doing effectively amounts to the destruction of the civil service. Large parts are now run privately, with the movement of further civil service roles into private hands (particularly most of JobcentrePlus) in the pipeline. Pay continues to deteriorate - and despite popular opinion, most civil servants are poorly paid. I'm a middle manager with 15 years experience, but I earn less than £25,000.

No, the main reason I'm in work now rather than on strike is that I can't abide the union, on a number of different levels. I have never believed that Mark Serwotka has the strategy or ability to do the best job of representing members interests. He has been militantly in favour of industrial action, even when it blatantly wasn't effective, ever since he was elected. In the dispute over the removal of screens for JobcentrePlus, PCS shamelessly abandoned staff who had gone without pay for 6 months during the strike and caved in to a deal they could have had months earlier. And lastly, I've never yet met a local PCS rep that I felt I could believe in. Most seem too full of their own importance and their ability to get one over local managers, and don't really have local members' best interests at heart.

So the long and short is that I find it hard to support PCS, even though I disagree strongly with the direction the civil service is being taken. So I'm in work, saving myself a day's pay, but being subversive by writing a blog entry rather than working.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

I'm currently celebrating getting Microsoft Office 2000 to install on my FreeBSD desktop using Wine. I'd never tried this before for 2 main reasons - first, I don't do a lot of word processing, and the open source tools available (particularly Abiword) have always seemed adequate; second, installing under Wine has a reputation for being exceedingly difficult.

Anyway, the situation finally came up that Deb needed to do some work at home that needed her to access a Word document that Abiword was having trouble converting. So I took the plunge (with a small twinge of guilt about tainting my FreeBSD installation with MS software).

Wine installed from ports without any difficulty (cd /usr/ports/emulators/wine && make install clean). After 2 hours of fiddling around, I have learnt the following things:

  • For this to work smoothly, the first thing to do is use Wine to install a basic version of Internet Explorer 6.
  • The install routine for Office should then run smoothly. Make sure you add a name and organisation during installation.
  • After installation follow the instructions listed in the Wine AppDB entry for Office 2000. Specifically, hack the Wine registry using Regedit to ensure that the specific keys mentioned exist and are modified too the specified values.

    And after that, it works. Or at least it seems to. I haven't tried out much of the functionality yet, but it runs and allows you to type a document using Office 2000 on FreeBSD 6.3.

Monday, April 21, 2008

First blog post for a while, mostly because I was on holiday over Easter, and have since changed jobs into one where I'm much busier than I was previously. I'll try to catch up from where I left off.

We took the week after Easter off and stayed in a cottage in Canon Pyon a few miles north of Hereford.

We approached it in a similar way to our summer holiday last year - lots of walking, some sightseeing, eating out, and generally spending time together as a family. It was really refreshing, and helped to get us all back together again.

I won't go over each day in detail. Here are some of the things we did - Severn Valley Railway; Ironbridge museums (kids favourite - Enginuity); Hereford Cider Museum; Dunkertons' Cider.

We also managed to fit in around 12 miles of walking, mostly in short 2 mile countryside strolls although we did manage one large walk covering 6 miles (!) at the Brockhampton estate - a National Trust property near Leominster. This was wonderful - a sculpture trail (which the kids enjoy) through mature woodland in glorious sunshine.

Since coming back, I've moved into a new job. Same manager as before, but I no longer have staff and I've given up all the finance responsibilities, which were never really me anyway. So my job is now more about gathering stats for the region and doing analysis, which is much more up my street to be honest. It helps that I've also been extremely busy, and that makes me feel much more comfortable. Having a quiet day once in a while is all very well, but if it happens every day I start to feel like I'm stagnating.

Kids are all OK, they are enjoying our new "play room" extension or "sugar cube" as it's been christened (it's all white). I should blog about this more fully, but it was finished in four weeks, and now contains our Wii and a television, although getting an aerial installed has turned into a bit of a saga.

That'll do for the moment, more to follow shortly.