denyerec.co.uk

A word of warning.
Never, ever buy a Seagate Barracuda 7 SATA drive. Ignore the reviews you have read. Ignore their marketting bulldust. This drive sounds like a Van De Graaf when it’s accessing, and has a bloody annoying “Self diagnostic” whine 90% of the time it’s idle.
I don’t care about its performance (Which is behind competitiors), the noise for this supposedly “Silent Drive” is absurd.

I have a Seagate Barracuda 5 now as my main system drive, it never makes a sound. So much for progress, I guess new does not always mean better.

Support ticketting systems are my new hatred. Not quite up there with Chavs but close.
Most of you will have used them in some form or another. The company in question will boast it improves turnaround, making your enquiry procedure more efficient, etc etc. In truth, the only thing is improves is their ability to dismiss your enquiry. Perhaps I’m being too general, some systems, such as the one used by United Hosting are superb. Every single support enquiry I’ve lodged there has been dealt with inside of 5 minutes, regardless of the time of night or complexity of the enquiry. Not only that, but the “ticket” can be dealt with via normal email instead of a crappy website editor and you never, ever get a “Cut and Paste” response.

Enter Ebuyer.

Slow. Evasive. Unhelpful. Frustrating.

You supply all the detail in the world and state clearly “The RAM was tested alone” and 24 hours later they issue a ticket asking “Did you test the RAM on its own?”. You ask them a direct question, you get a standard Cut-and-Paste reply stating that you should “Simply follow the return procedures blah blah blah”.
That’s not what I asked.

So I get frustrated, I send yet another ticket through the hellishly laggy backend interface. What is your phone number? I ask, after explaining the situation. “Please use the ENotes system to…”
Not quite sure what I’m supposed to use the ENotes system for, as rage took over. I think operating a business without a telephone number should be against the law. It’s got to be a violation of human rights to be put through the wringer like this every time you need to return a product or make an enquiry. Ebuyer have great prices and a good range of products but you better pray that nothing goes wrong.

Additional: Another company with truly abysmal support is a hosting company called EasySpace. Servicing their support email perhaps once every 48 hour period, the support worked we dealt with named “Jicko” was as useful as a chocolate kettle. Except we didn’t get to eat Jicko.
We ask….

Dear Easyspace Support,
Could you please tell us which email address must have a domain transfer request sent to, as the transferring registrar cannot complete the transfer without it.

The reply? Something along the lines of…

Dear Customer,
The weather in Spain is delightful and my mother has bought a brand new sombrero to keep the sun off her shoulders. I wish to repaint the caravan, but haven’t the time since our donkey is sick and I must now do all the shopping on foot.
Regards, Easyspace Support

If you hadn’t guessed, never, ever use EasySpace. Why is nothing ever simple?

Behold, people are buying more junkfood! I wonder whether the UK is such a depressing place that it drives people to it, or because junk food, on the whole, is cheaper and easier than eating anything healthy. If healthy base foods were damn cheap and processed crap wasn’t, I’m sure more people would wise up.

As for me? It’s 5p pasta and 35p tuna all the way.

Glad to see Tetley has outstripped PG Tips though, never did like PG Tips…

We’ve just received a reminder from dear old Powergen and they open like so:

As a customer who normally pays your bills very promptly, it is unusual for us to have not received payment by now.

Do you think they’re honestly keeping track of that? I wonder what the reminder would read like if we never paid on time? It’s not like you get a bonus for paying on time either, there’s no incentive as they blatantly rip you off whether you’re prompt or not. Perhaps it’s time to buy an army of hamsters and couple them up to dynamo running wheels?

Well, even though I installed the blacklister, which has been rather successful, there is still some arsehole using randomly generated spoofed email domains to spam my site.
I don’t give a damn about Texas Holdum and I have no idea which genius spammer thought this site would be a good vehicle to advertise it, but there you go. For the time being, comments have been switched to moderation only. Perhaps I need a wordlist or URL blacklister, as detecting on email address is obviously not robust.

Answers on a (moderated) postcard.

For those of you who tired quickly of Microsoft’s eye-punishing bright blue colourscheme, you may or may not be aware that there are alternatives. The obvious ones are the “Olive” and “Silver” themes available in your display properties dialog, or you could revert back to the Win2K look if you’re feeling retro.

If however you fancy something else, help is at hand. Handily, this isn’t some crazy WindowsBlinds GUI overhaulling thing that will crash your PC and scare your grandparents, what I am on about uses WindowsXP’s native “styling engine”.

Currently I am using the Opus 1.5 theme by a chap called Bose. It comes in 3 colours, one of which being olive green so I’m all set.

To use these funky “MSStyles” you need a modified DLL patcher which you can download from the Neowin Forums. It’s quite safe, but it might violate a EULA somewhere along the line, modifying MS files and whatnot. Ho hum.

Neowin have a bunch of themes in their forums too, for those who don’t like Bose’s.

As “Stink Bomb” (Who the…) pointed out, we do not have a television. How then am I so well informed about series’ such as The Sandbaggers ?
DVD’s and my computer, of course! 😉

That link does go through to my Amazon affiliates thingy, which has successfully earned, well, nothing over the last 9 months. Whoot! Praise be for affiliate systems. Go on, click it, buy it, I’ll get 20p.

Goodness knows I could use it.

Recently we’ve been watching the first series of a 1978 show called The Sandbaggers.
Portraying UK intelligence in a more realistic light than James Bond could ever hope to, this series is heavy on dialog, doesn’t waste any time and doesn’t have any car chases. Well, there are a few, but it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood car chase in some of the things they drive…
Check out The Ops Room for more info and get hold of it, thoroughly recommended.
I’d give you more links, but my clipboard is broken.