Posts from March 2007

As part of the ongoing vinyl replacement program, I finally bought Unknown Pleasures, Closer and Still today.

25 years on - 'New Dawn Fades', 'She's Lost Control' et al still sound absolutely fantastic.

What could possibly be better than a romantic city break in Amsterdam with your loved one in the glorious spring sunshine ?

That would be lovely but, unfortunately, Norma has chosen to take her loved one, Norma- Jean to Holland to indulge in culture, canals, Anne Frank, trampolining, tulips and space-cake.

Never mind. What could possibly be better than a lazy weekend dedicated to father-son bonding ? A chance to catch up in the beer garden on all the events of the week at work and school respectively. A chance to hire 'Borat' on DVD and laugh helplessly.

A chance to order pizza with garlic bread instead of defrosting that meal in the freezer. A chance to go to bed whenever we damn well please. A chance to play music loud. A chance for father and son to go to see a real football match, err, well Charlton v Newcastle.

That would be lovely but, unfortunately, Norman Junior III has foolishly spurned this glorious opportunity in favour of a 'sleepover' followed by paint-balling with his real mates.

Oh well. What could be better than a night in the pub followed by a curry with your mates ?

Nothing.

Two questions of earth shattering importance

1. Kingsbridge, Devon - where on earth is that - Somerset ?
2. Look, Norman. Theres something wrong with this darned phone again. Why is everyone continually engaged; my mum, my sister, Phyllis and now Doreen ?'

Answers:

1. Kingsbridge is in Devon.
2. There is nothing wrong with the telephone. Your mother, sister and close friends have a tendency to spend an inordinate length of time on the phone.

I am currently trying to assist with a couple of long standing Service Requests. This type of work is interesting because the issue is normally pretty deep rooted and complicated. These escalations are also very challenging because lots of very intelligent people have already spent a lot of man-hours investigating the problem.

Anyway, one of the first steps is to review associated Service Requests and try to determine whether they are indeed related to the issue under investigation.

The opening paragraph of one such SR contained this bold assertion from the customer: 'As you can see, we have populated the interface tables correctly and EIM still doesn't work.'

This was a interesting statement and was directly related to the problem I was looking at. This statement went unchallenged by Technical Support so I took it at face value and continued my analysis.

There was further empirical evidence that this data load would fail as changes to the corresponding meta-data in the Siebel Repository had been made in version 7.8. A user key definition on this table had been inactivated which was previously present in 7.5. Interesting.

A few hours later, I returned to this SR as I was about to actually try loading data into the same Siebel tables. This seemed rather pointless if it wasn't going to work. However, I started from scratch, read the documentation and created my own simple test case for a single record.

Sure enough, the customer was correct. Even though, I had populated the correct columns in the correct interface table with the correct data, Siebel failed to populate the target tables.

However, when I reviewed the EIM log files more carefully, the errors were the conventional (foreign key lookup failed) type. I fixed the test data, re-ran the load script and sure enough data appeared in the target tables and was visible in the Siebel application.

So, the customer was actually mistaken and I suspect his bold assertion including the four little words 'As you can see' also misled the technical support engineer.

Last night, my son told me that playing World of Warcraft was much, much quicker since the recent broadband upgrade from 4Mb to 10Mb. This made sense as online gaming presumably needs lots of bandwidth and Virgin customer services told me the upgrade would be effective from last Friday.

Out of curiosity, I downloaded a 100MB file (twice) and looked at the download speeds which were in the range 360-390 KB/sec. Quick but less than you would expect for a 10Mb connection.

I called my friends at Virgin Media to check the status of my broadband upgrade. Sure enough, contrary to what I was told, the 10Mb upgrade will only be activated on 23 March when the engineer installs the V+ box.

So, unless you see it with your own eyes, it didn't happen.

06:55 Bin day. Dustbins out (from Web)

06:57 Fortnightly recycling day. Grolsch cans and newspapers out (from txt)

07:04 Radio 5 on (from ear)

07:07 Grapefruit juice. Lovely. (from tongue)

07:12 Poltergeist has re-assembled furniture in lounge (from brain)

07:17 Quick shower (from bathroom)

07:25 Twitter about twitter (from recursion)

07:34 Oh no. I feel a cold coming on. Please excuse me from gym (from Mummy)

The new machine from Dell duly arrived yesterday so I hid it safely away in a tall cupboard.

This morning, when no-one was looking, I surreptitiously retrieved the boxes out of the tall cupboard and carefully cut the boxes open.

Then I quickly hooked up the new PC to my existing keyboard, mouse and monitor and power cable.

I had a sneak peek at Windows Vista and it looked pretty nice (IE7, integrated desktop search, media player, shiny new interface).

Then I carefully packed the computer away, taped the boxes up and put them all back into the tall cupboard.

What am I ?

I currently pay £92 per month to Virgin Media:

• Telephone Rental - £5.50
• Talk Evenings/Weekends - £11
• Digital TV (L) - £11.50
• Broadband (4MB) - £25
• Additional Set Top Box - £15
• Sky Sports 1/2/3 - £24

I just called Customer Retentions on 0800 0730591 (not 150) to try to renegotiate my package after the recent loss of Sky One. It took a while (15 mins) to get through on the Freephone number but it was worth it.

Without much pushing, the gentleman kindly summarised Wednesday night's episode of 'Lost' and then offered me:

• Upgrade to 10MB broadband
• Upgrade to VIP package (XL TV and free movies)
• Free V+ box
• Price reduction to £85 per month

As my mum used to say, 'If you don't ask, you don't get.'

Curiously, after reading about the Picasa upgrade, a related article about photo management software popped up in Google Reader, courtesy of Robert Scoble's excellent link blog.

Robert Scoble had published a couple of podcasts featuring a product demo and an interview with Gibu Thomas, CEO of Sharpcast. Sharpcast is yet another photo management software tool and appears to offer a number of advantages over Picasa:

• Unlimited free storage
• Automatic synchronisation between PC and Web albums
• Original images are preserved

The unlimited storage seems too good to be true and is very useful because, at some point in the near future, I am likely to exceed Picasa's storage limit unless Google follow suit. Secondly, if I ever edit an image or perform any housekeeping, I will have to manually replicate those changes to Picasa Web Albums. As I am very lazy, that is unlikely to happen.

Finally, I have always presumed that Flickr and Picasa are compressing the images to degrade the quality of my professional photographs to save space and bandwidth. However, that is fine as you get what you pay for and I am paying nothing. Obviously, it is preferable to have the original, unmodified image available without having to continually burn another CD/DVD.

So I signed up for Sharpcast, downloaded the desktop software and quickly synchronised the 'My Pictures' folder to the server.

Sharpcast was very fast and easy to use. I was able to synchronise and upload 1,062 photos with a single click. This took less time than uploading the same content from Picasa. Although you can upload multiple albums in Picasa, one album is uploaded at at time and the remainder are queued.

Sharpcast is a genuine competitor to Flickr and Picasa and in the podcast, Gibu talks about extending the range of files to include documents. Sharpcast also includes support for Mac users and mobile phones.

My only reservation is that Sharpcast really does seem too good to be true. I am also a little hazy about the business model. It is not clear if this is Web 2.0 beta software which will subsequently charge or whether Sharpcast will attempt to make money from additional services. Currently the only paid service is photo printing.

Google have increased the amount of free storage to 1GB (previously 250MB) available at Picasa Web Albums.

This means I can now backup all of my photos comfortably (854MB) in one place.

If you have lots of photos of your cat, $500 upgrades the capacity to 250GB.

Patrick Stuebing from Leipzig (near Germany) has a few issues

• A curious red object growing out of his head
• A penchant for redheads
• Unhealthy obsession with Catherine Tate
• Unemployed ~~burglar~~ locksmith
• Father of four young children
• The mother of these children is his, err, sister.

And I thought I had problems.