Posts by Harman Mogul 47 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Apr 2011
My interest was piqued so I went for a look and found a promo by Donegal TV on YouTube. I learned the town is home to the Letterkenny Institute of Technology, which gets quite a lot of running time in the fillum. It's a long way to Tipperary or, for that matter, Dublin.
If you have a large collection of vinyls, it's too much of a fag to convert them to any other format, so the only game is to keep on with the turntable. But it co-exists poorly with wi-fi.
I was expecting great things from my LP12 after it was rebuilt by Peter Swain at Cymbiosis, and so it proved. But the fly in the ointment is the wi-fi signal floating about, which induces a quite audible burbling in the low-output moving-coil cartridge. This is a bloody nuisance in quiet passages.
(I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has experienced this.)
In the event, the solution is very easy. Turn off the wireless router and pay full attention to the music rather than fiddling about with digital gadgets. There's nothing like listening carefully for enhancing one's pleasure in music. This does pre-suppose that the music played is worth listening to.
A propos of which, I see that 'techUK' yesterday posted a vacancy for Programme Head – European Exit whose remit is to play a "Central role in techUK’s policy team responding to Brexit and creating a coherent policy response to ensure that UK tech continues to thrive both through the Brexit process and once the UK has left the EU."
Good luck with that!
There is another way to combat PCNs — denial. Follow the appeals procedure and make it clear that you will go to PATAS (the arbitration service) and beyond if need be. The outsourced administration (in the Midlands) will concede. It's a numbers game and it's simply too costly for it to send somebody qualified down to town to appear in front of the arbitrator to contest a determined and credible appellant.
Odd that Jim Ballard should be characterized as 'analogue'. When I interviewed him at his home (somewhere beyond Heathrow, Thames Ditton I think), I also invited him to write a piece for the magazine I was representing. He suggested a theme of the potential of computers. This was 1975 I think, some time before the microprocessor. (Although the IBM System/360 was already a decade old.) Unhappily his agent nixed the commission.
What anon forgets is that the designers of the DS forgot to equip it with a modern engine. As I recall it was fitted with a feeble pushrod engine that had originally seen service in the 1934 Traction Avant. This new car suffers from the same fault — old-school engines. Diesel is not the future of passenger cars!
No doubt PSA ran out of money to create a modern powertrain, just as Citroën did with the DS, which was intended to have an air-cooled flat-six. Surely someone, somewhere, must be trying to fit a DS with a Subaru 3.6-liter boxer engine? A Chapron convertible so modified would indeed be a car to treasure.
True. I used to have a mini-set of commands, just enough for me to get along fine with. (I am a copywriter.) I would tear off this little tool palette and park it to one side, suppressing all the others, and have plenty of room to Get On With My Work. Even the stylesheets worked for me. Alas, all gone now.
...spent re-doing large, multi-author bid docs, trying to nudge those tables into place without shagging the pagination or -- always the fear -- getting that 'out of memory' error message that meant you would have to start all over again. Again. If only I could have those chunks of my life back!
Wish I could agree with the several posters here who give a thumbs-up to BT's working engineers.
This was my experience with Openreach working for BT.
Decide, with heavy heart, to sack Virgin (had been with Cable London since 1996) on grounds of absurd congestion in street, and lamentable response time to US-based servers.
Engage Zen, who arrange for BT to install (re-install) copper. Engineer lets me know he's dong me a favour by putting master socket 4 m from point of entry into building (3 m I think is the usual limit). All works, and website edits now possible without a 2-min delay.
Months later, it is spring and the sun comes out. Time to open the windows! Oh dear, engineer has sent signal cable through window sash! Call tech support, get the usual Bangalore runaround. Eventually rep calls me back: "Good news sir, I can take ownership of your problem!" Goes on to explain, however, that the engineer call by Openreach will be chargeable, 120-something plus VAT. No, I don't think so, say I.
So I explain my predicament to the nice people at Zen, who suggest that perhaps if I made it known to the chief executive's office, it might result in a speedy and satisfactory outcome. And so it proved. Within the hour of emailing that office, an executive complaints officer phoned and arranged all.
And guess what? The Openreach engineer who came round to put it right was the same diamond geezer as made the original balls-up. It took him about 5 minutes, chuckling the while, to re-route the cable through the window sill, where of course it should have been in the first place.
Let the sun shine in!
Declaration: my father was in the GPO team that pioneered Subscriber Trunk Dialling, out of the Southampton exchange. If only everything else BT did since the introduction of STD were such an undisputed, unremarked success, the company would be an example for the world!
But as we see from the many posters here, it is not.
I didn't see any outage at CRC's ecommerce site. My card was scammed, but their customer service rep was as nice as could be when I called, and promptly sent me the £30 compo voucher mentioned above. Which I have now spent.
The Reg's coverage was pretty fair, but what I didn't see reported was how scammed cards were first tested by purchasing mobile phone top-ups before being used for bigger spends. But I understand this is an old story.
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