MaFt

This is me. This is the stuff I find interesting. Like it or lump it, this is what you're getting!

It’s All in the Detail…

 iPhone, Random Musings  No Responses »
Jan 292013
 

I used to view Apple as a company that cared about the finer details but today’s update to iOS6.1 is making me change that view. Before I go on, let me just say that yes, I know how trivial this will seem when you read it, but it’s just one of those little things that is going to annoy the crap out of me now that I have noticed it!

iOS6 added a somewhat pointless feature whereby the volume knob would ‘reflect’ light depending on what angle the phone was being held at – as though you were looking at an old HiFi knob:

reflect

I’m not a fan of skeumorphism (making digital apps look like real-life objects like a leather-bound book etc) but this ‘reflection’ is a nice little touch without being too over the top – athough still, essentially, pointless. iOS6.1 has added this reflection to the lock-screen music controls and given them a bit of a refresh. And this is where I get annoyed…

See, they have updated the lock-screen audio controls but they’ve forgotten about the details – instead of the widely recognised ‘two arrows and a vertical line’ for skipping to the next/previous track Apple have replaced it with ‘two arrows’. ‘Two arrows’ is widely recognised as winding or scrubbing, NOT for skipping tracks. However, when you double-tap Home to pull up the app-tray the music controls are ‘correct’ – i.e. it shows the icon for skipping tracks and not for quickly scrubbing through the track. So now Apple have 2 different icons for exactly the same function – one of which I would argue is used incorrectly.

Swipe to the side in the app-tray and you get the volume slider – the plain, boring volume slider without the reflection-animation… It just seems odd to me that they add these new designs in one place but don’t use them again elsewhere for the exact, same function. Apple make a big thing about developers using recognised icons and consistency etc in their app but then here they are ignoring their own guidelines.

music-controls

Yes it’s something and nothing. Yes it’s petty. But it isn’t half annoying me already! And don’t even get me started on the totally different placement of ‘edit’ and ‘compose’ between the e-mail and SMS apps…

BT: The Saga Continues…

 Computers, Internet, Life  No Responses »
Dec 182012
 

This is getting longer than the Star Wars Saga now*… Following on from my initial moan about BT and my second blog post about it I thought I’d give an update seeing as they have annoyed me yet again. And I still have no Internetz.

On Saturday morning (5 days after BT should have installed my broadband) I submitted a support request to @BTCare who had already said that if I didn’t hear from someone by Friday at 8pm to get in touch directly with them. This is what I sent:

Hi. Still waiting for my Broadband to be connected and not happy with being lied to multiple times with promised call backs that don’t materialise. Also been billed for broadband when you haven’t even installed it yet!

Full details can be found here: http://maft.co.uk/musings/2012/moving-to-bt-not-the-best-start/ and here: http://maft.co.uk/musings/2012/bt-bloody-terrible/

Sorry, it’s too much to rewrite it all again!

Hope something can get sorted. I am really not happy.

 

That same afternoon evening I received this reply from ‘Paul S’ of @BTCare:

Hi,

Thanks for getting in touch and sorry to hear about the problems, I’ve checked this out and the what happened is that the broadband part of the order was cancelled by Wholesale meaning it had to be reissued, if you have been told anything other than this then I apologise. The order has now been replaced and an expedite request issued, a response to that should be received on Monday and at that point we will know when the service will start.

I am hopeful that the response on Monday will be a good one based on the history here so I will let you know what’s happening then, you may also be contacted by another team that are monitoring the issue for you but that’s just so you know. Sorry this happened in the first place but chat soon, one last thing, we are aware of certain restrictions on dates so that won’t be a problem, take care.

Paul
BTCare

This actually got my hopes up. It was as though someone at BT actually cared that customers we being ignored, lied to and being treated like poop. The promise that there would be a (hopefully good) response by Monday actually meant I stopped thinking about it for the rest of the weekend and all day yesterday (Monday).

As the day drew on and I still had no call from BT I was beginning to revert back to thinking that they just don’t care… It’s now 8am the morning after I was supposed to hear back from BT and still nothing…

Last night I had a little whine on The Twitter:

To which @BTCare replied:

Forgive me for being cynical, but wasn’t I promised this before? You know, someone actually getting in touch with me about the service I’m paying for that STILL hasn’t been installed??!!

It’s getting beyond a joke now, I’m only sticking it out as I probably have enough ammunition now for a fairly hefty discount for the best part of a year!

 

*Footnote:  By my calculations the entire Star Wars saga is 797 mins (all 6 episodes). As of 8am Tuesday 18th December 2012 187 hours have passed since BT should have installed my broadband. In that time I could have watched the entire Star Wars saga 14 (fourteen) times.

BT: Bloody Terrible

 Computers, Internet, Life  1 Response »
Dec 142012
 

Follow on from this post

So 8pm came and went, I called them and spent 40 minutes on the phone to India but couldn’t actually get anywhere because the orders and billing departments were both closed. So they have requested a call-back for me between 10-11am tomorrow… I wonder if THAT one will materialise?

As you can guess, I’m pretty mad – even more annoyed at the number of broken promised from BT. I mean, really, how hard is it to activate a phone line before an engineer comes?! They managed to get the hub to me on time… not that I can use it…

Moving to BT: Not The Best Start…

 Home, Internet, Life  2 Responses »
Dec 142012
 

On Friday 23rd November we exchanged contracts and agreed a moving date of Friday 30th November. On that day I also ordered BT’s Infinity 2 60MB Fibre Optic Broadband Package as my previous supplier of 60MB broadband, Virgin Media, don’t do our new address. After ordering I was told they couldn’t connect it all up until Monday 10th December. A bit annoying, but I could live with tethering on my phone.

Monday 10th came and my son had been admitted to hospital the night before however Mrs-MaFt was at home for when the engineer arrived at 8.45am. This is when the problems started… The engineer couldn’t do anything because, it turned out, BT had not activated the phone line. He had another job to get to but said he would try get back later in the day or, at the latest, he would come the following day and get it all done. Slightly more annoying but I could live with a one day delay. So, later in the day I get a text message and an email confirming the phone line is now up and running… but no broadband engineer was to be seen. That’s OK, he said he would come back the next day.

The following morning I get this text message from BT:

BT SMS 1

What?! I missed the appointment? And you expect me to wait another 2 weeks??!! I was, as you may expect, pretty fuming. I could maybe understand having to wait another 2 weeks if we had actually missed the appointment, but considering someone was in all day even while our son was in hospital I think we did pretty damn well at keeping the appointment! So, I phoned them up to see what they were playing at. Basically they admitted it was their fault and they don’t expect me to wait two weeks until the engineer can come back. So they said they would fast-track it and try get someone out in the next few days – I confirmed that any day that week would be fine. They said they would check with the engineering people and get back to me later in the day.

‘Later in the day’ came and there was still no call returned – this was about 6pm. So I phoned them back. After going through the whole story again I was told that it was on my account that they would phone me the following day (Wednesday) so I queried why I was told it would be the same day when they called back. He also said there’s nothing he could do as it’s been escalated already.

The next day I got this:

BT SMS 2

Guess what? I was a little bit annoyed… Actually, no I wasn’t, I was VERY annoyed (with capital letters). As I was told not to phone them I went to The Twitter to have a bit of a moan to @BTCare who, to be fair to that department, seemed to be trying to be helpful. However as it had already been escalated and I’d been given a date/time that they would contact me by they couldn’t really do much else.

Yesterday to rub some more salt in my wounds they sent me a bill for my broadband services. You know, the one they haven’t actually provided me with. Remember I’m still not allowed to phone them so I went to their online chat to ‘discuss my bill’. Here’s the conversation I had (click to enlarge):

BT Billing Query

 

Five o’clock came and went with no return call from Syed Saaduddin. To be honest, I’m used to being let down by BT now that it didn’t actually annoy me that much. Perhaps this is their super new business idea – annoy their customers so much that they just drop dead in exasperation!

So now, here I am, sitting, waiting for BT to call me. They currently have just over 3 1/2 hours left to call me and give me a new installation date. And explain why they haven’t done anything that they promised. And why they are charging me for a service they aren’t providing. And why they seemingly don’t understand that the ‘T’ in ‘BT’ is, basically, for ‘COMMUNICATION’ – which they seem inept at.

I’ll update later tonight or tomorrow with whether or not they actually call me before 8pm. If you want a sneak peak though you can follow me on The Twitter via @MaFt where no doubt I will be doing some suppressed swears shortly after 8pm. When BT’s lines are probably closed…

 

FOLLOW UP POST: “BT: Bloody Terrible”

 

Bad Maths…

 Scams  No Responses »
Dec 142012
 

I received this email ‘from’ a colleague the other day:

Subject: We invite you to work in your spare time for 100 Eur per hour

We invite you to work in the remote assistant position.

This work takes 2-3 hours per week and requires absolutely no investment.
The essence of this work for incoming client requests in your city.
The starting salary is about 2500 EUR per month + bonuses.

You get paid your salary every 2 weeks and your bonuses after fulfilling each task!

We guarantee work for everyone. But we accept applications this week only!
Therefore, you should write a request right now. And you will start earning money, starting from next week.

Please indicate in the request:
Your name:
Your email address:
City of residence:

Please send the request to my email Benito@neweurowork.com,and I will answer you personally as soon as possible

Sincerely,
Benito Dailey

 

I wasn’t very impressed with his maths though so I replied:

Your maths is terrible…

€100 per hour, 2-3 hours per week. Even if we assume the full 3 hours a week that’s €300 per week, multiplied by 4.33 weeks in a month takes us to €1300 per month. So where do you get you 2500 EUR a month that you quote?

I think this is a scam and you’re trying to rip me off.

MaFt

Obviously the email wasn’t actually from my colleague, they just used his email address as the ‘from’ address to make it look a bit more normal. Seriously though, if they want to try and scam people they need to work on their maths – no sensible person would take them up on their offer until they get that sorted.

Self-hosted WordPress Users – A Tip About Photos

 Blogging, Sites, Work  1 Response »
Dec 142012
 

I’m just transferring all the media over for new client who is moving from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress site (using my hosting company Salt & Light Solutions) and it reminded me to write this post…! The photos that had been uploaded to the WordPress.com blog were approx 4MB each (4272 x 2848 pixels!) – this causes a few problems when you transfer to self-hosted. 1) space issues, 2) bandwidth issues and 3) visitor experience – more info:

1) Space – each photo is 4MB – on WP.com this doesn’t matter, you get as much space as you need. As soon as you pay for hosting space costs money. On a self-hosted WP site too the image you upload is duplicated 4 times – you have the original photo and then 3 or 4 different sized versions of the image so a 4MB photo ends up taking up about 6MB of space once WP makes the different versions of the file that it needs.

2) Bandwidth – if your photo is 4MB then each time the full image is downloaded it uses up 4MB of your bandwidth (the data-transfer allowance, so to speak). Most browsers will resize huge images so they fit on the screen nicely BUT you must remember that the full 4MB image will need to be downloaded before the browser will do that. Again, on WP.com, bandwidth isn’t an issue but self-hosted: bandwidth costs money!

3) Visitor experience -  if your photos are 4MB each then this means that people with slower connections will have to wait a loooooong time to see an image. Multiply that by 20 times if you have loads of images loading on your home page and you will quickly turn people away from your blog.

So, taking all the above into account, what can you do about it? One option is to resize each photo before you upload it but, let’s be honest here, we’re all busy people and isn’t it just so much easier to select 10 photos from your digital camera to upload as a gallery than to mess about resizing each one? What if the magical WordPress fairies could do all this for you once you upload the photo? Yep – much better!

As such I heartily recommend installing a plugin called ‘Imsanity‘ (just search in the plugin installer and you will find it) which basically resizes any photo you upload and removes the original massive photo. This then gets rid of all three issues mentioned above: space (the 4mb file no longer exists and will be reduced to about 0.3MB), bandwidth (each time the photo is loaded it uses 10 times less bandwidth) and the visitor experience (smaller file sizes means the site loads much faster).

Another advantage of Imsanity is that it can resize any photos already on your self-hosted WP site! One client who I recommended the plugin to freed up about 1.2GB of space!

I hope this helps some WordPress users who have made the switch from WP.com to self-hosted.

Scam Call 6: Keyboard Shenanigans (4th July 2012)

 Computers, Scams, Software  No Responses »
Jul 042012
 

This was a great one – I got the caller so wound up he actually told me to f-off! Sadly my mobile got a call so the last minute or so wasn’t recorded. I paraphrased the missing audio though at the end of the video.

Other highlights were going through every letter on the keyboard until I found the ‘flag’ key he wanted me to press.

Scam Call 5: Microsoft? Windows? Creative Solutions Online?

 Computers, Scams, Software  2 Responses »
Jul 032012
 

This was an early morning call and it caught me off guard. However I mumbled something about ‘having to do something’ (i.e. set the phone recording) and asked them to start again saying who they were. Throughout the call they couldn’t make up their mind what company they were calling from.

The highlight though was being asked if I had a false leg!

For info they called from: 004588632589 and the call quality was awful!

 Older Entries