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Last week, I initiated the transfer of the last of my pension funds into my Self Invested Personal Pension (SIPP). This should be a relatively straightforward transfer of the Protected Rights element of a former pension plan. The first step was a response from the pension company receiving the funds. They need me to fill in a form explicitly stating that I did not request any financial advice about this transfer to guard them against mis-selling claims.

It is ironic that the Protected Rights must be transferred into a stakeholder pension (and not my SIPP) as these contributions were made by the UK Government on my behalf so it must be entrusted to those sensible men in grey suits and not invested in the funds of my choice in my SIPP. Tell that to the people who lost thousands of pounds of their hard earned money that was supposedly secure with Equitable Life.

However this is a minor inconvenience compared with the pain, delays, bureaucracy and sheer incompetence I suffered three years ago. After twenty years working for various IT companies, I had accumulated small pots of money distributed across a variety of pension funds. I decided to consolidate all of these pension funds into a self invested pension plan (SIPP).

This was mainly so I had direct control over exactly where my money was invested and to reduce the impact of the management charges paid to the men in sharp suits. In a SIPP, you are charged for each share transaction. If you buy and hold shares for the long term, then the SIPP charges are much lower than a managed fund. In addition, one significant pension fund was invested with Equitable Life which was in dire financial straits, subject to a lot of negative media coverage and was closed to new business.

So I wrote lots of letters, filled in lots of transfer forms, made lots of phone calls and opened an account with SippDeal. The transfers of seven different pension funds were all initiated around the same time (January 2003) and the final batch of funds were made available for trading in early July 2003.

Once I learned how to play the game (write letters in the first instance, fill in the required forms promptly, take copies of all correspondence, telephone in the second instance, get names of the people you deal with, record the date and time, record what was promised, get a direct dial extension, keep comprehensive records), I found that most companies were relatively efficient in handling the transfer.

However a dishonourable mention goes to Scottish Widows who really did plunge new levels of incompetence (letters getting lost, faxes getting lost, people promising to call back etc etc). Maybe I was unlucky but all I can say is that I am really glad Scottish Widows are not managing my pension any more.

The SIPP appears to be performing really well as the funds are primarily invested in high yielding FTSE 100 companies. However, this may be misleading as the FTSE has performed well since January 2003.

What I should really do is to compare the performance of my stakeholder (with the PR funds) invested by the wise men in grey suits against my SIPP. Maybe when the transfer of this latest pot is complete, I will do exactly that.

In an earlier post, I moaned about Dells opaque pricing model on their UK Web site. However, people (especially me) are very quick to moan and complain but often slow to give thanks and appreciation.

I subsequently contacted Dell Customer Services to complain that the invoice was for a different amount agreed on the phone (strong case) and the fact I discovered that I could configure an identical PC for an even lower price (weaker argument).

The lady from Dell Customer Services initially suggested that I cancel the original order and simply place another order online at the lower price. I pointed out that this was a little silly as it would mean cancelling an order for one computer and adding a new order for a brand new computer with the identical specification.

In any event, it transpired that the PC had already been dispatched from Dell to the courier company, so I would have to call a different department 'Pre Sales Delivery' to cancel the order.

The gentleman in 'Pre Sales Delivery' was more helpful and agreed that cancelling the current order was ludicrous. He offered me a All-In-One-Printer free of charge. While this was a nice gesture, I told him I already had a printer. He then offered me a digital camera free of charge but I already had one of those too. I stood my ground and insisted on the refund and he finally agreed.

The gentleman also gave me his direct email and the name of his supervisor in case of any subsequent issues with the refund. So, I am pleased to say that Dell honoured the lowest price for the PC. It was inconvenient, took a little persistence and a few phone calls but for 54GBP it was well worth it.

There is nothing more tedious than a blog that starts:

Mood: Restless. Currently listening to: X&Y, Coldplay

However I have just burned a CD in ATRAC3Plus format using Sony SonicStage which contains 15 albums !

• The Killers - Hot Fuss
• Interpol - Antics
• Snow Patrol - Final Straw
• British Sea Power - The Decline of British Sea Power
• The Chameleons - Live at the Academy (2 discs)
• Morrissey - Beethoven is Deaf
• Radiohead - The Bends
• R.E.M - Reveal
• Ride - Nowhere
• Idlewild - The Remote Part
• New Order - Get Ready
• Interpol - Turn On The Bright Lights
• Nirvana - Never Mind
• The Chameleons - Strip
• The Fall - Psykick Dance Hall (3 discs)

There was even 3MB left free. I don't care that ATRAC is a lossy format. I am used to listening to bootlegs on TDK 90's that sound as though they were recorded in a bunker.

Things I like about Wordpress after a couple of days...

• The dashboard summary which includes Incoming Links, recent posts and comments at a glance. Wordpress also provides? basic statistics (hits, entry page, referrer). It looks like the data? is automatically cleaned of spiders and bots so the figures you get are more likely to relate to actual human beings. You can also remove hits incurred as part of administration.
• Being able to easily and quickly define a hierarchy of categories and tag your posts. I thought that the RSS feed for an individual category is really good as it means that Oracle types can choose to only subscribe to that element of the blog (and ignore football, music and gadgets).
• Categories also helps navigation. If someone wrote a gem of an article two years ago about Linux, you are more likely to be able to find it using categories rather than trawling through the complete blog.
• RSS feed for comments.
• Clean, quick, intuitive, well designed interface.
• The post editor which includes a WYSIWYG preview. I used to dislike the? fact that the Blogger Preview used a larger font so? sub-consciously I didn't view it? as the finished article. The Blogger Preview, Close, Edit, Preview? cycle required a lot of key clicks and wasted time. The Wordpress preview is precisely that.
• Automatic pings to ping-o-matic (and on to 15 services including Technorati).
• The fact that pasting in text from Blogger preserved the hyperlinks. I am still perplexed as to how that worked.
• Posting seems much quicker compared to Blogger. No more waiting and nervously watching 'This may take a while if you have a large blog'.
• Indenting quoted text correctly uses the 'blockquote' tag.
• Support for trackbacks and pingbacks as opposed to Blogger's backlinks.
• Support for breaking long posts using 'More'.
• The price.

Minor things I don't like so much

• The lack of template editing isn't a big issue for me. If I was that fussed, I would use wordpress.org and host it myself. Manually tweaking HTML templates isn't exactly my idea of fun. What I would really like though is a Template Editor so you can select which elements (RSS feed, Comments feed, individual Category feeds) appear on the main page. My Yahoo! provide something similar to select and arrange content on the home page.
• The fact the tagline 'Blog in Isolation' does not appear in the Pool theme.
• No automated tool to import from Blogger. I think one exists but is currently in for repair. My blog was only 30 articles so I laboriously cut and pasted all my blogger articles (and lost the two comments).
• No support for Technorati tags in the post editor but I think I prefer using Wordpress categories anyway.

So, you can now buy the program for last Sundays Manchester United game against Chelsea in WH Smiths.

I used to go to Old Trafford every fortnight in the late 70s and 80s (Stretford Paddock, Stretford End, United Road). Part of the experience was travelling there, getting to the ground early, securing your position on a barrier, reading the program, the atmosphere building, the smell of pies and bovril, the chanting, the opposition fans, the players warming up, the tension, the goals, the celebrations, the moaning, everything.

Then I moved away from Manchester and was relegated to a barstool correspondent and finally a slave to Sky Sports in my armchair. Still, at least now, I can read the program a full week after the game has finished.

I was investigating the bewildering world of trackbacks, pingbacks and blog comments and found that my existing provider, blogger.com, supports backlinks (inbound links to a specific article from a Google search) but not trackbacks.

Then I discovered Wordpress.org which is a blogging tool that supports proper trackbacks, pingbacks (and a whole lot more besides). Although Wordpress is a freely available OpenSource PHP based application, I would need to upgrade my current web hosting to include PHP (for the massive sum of an additional 4GBP per month).

Then I discovered the hosted service Wordpress.com which offers the same functionality so I registered for an invitation email. A little more research unearthed the useful fact that the recently released Flock browser also includes a free Wordpress.com account. I immediately downloaded Flock and got myself this new, shiny Wordpress blog.

I like the blog editing facilities (you can tag each post in multiple categories) which may render that tedious task of manually adding Technorati tags obsolete.

Pros: trackbacks, pingbacks, categories, builtin referrer tracking, immediate WSIWYG preview, automatic Technorati pings

Cons: no direct access to Web server logs and statistics, need to manually import existing blog from blogger, centred formatting, need to burn new feed, lose thousands of readers

I have got an old radio cassette in my car with a aerial mounted in the rear windscreen. The MW reception is pretty poor and if you go under a bridge, the interference nearly makes your ears bleed. As I listen to Radio 5 Live quite a lot, this is rather irritating.

After months of prevaricating and thinking, I impetuously went out and bought a Sony DAB6650. This is a DAB radio (with FM/MW/LW as well) and a CD player. The unit looks and sounds great and I now have access to lots of different DAB stations.

Although I haven't travelled that far yet, the digital sound quality is excellent, even in towns and under bridges.

The only slight downside is that the CD formats include MP3 or Atrac but does not include WMA. Unfortunately all my CD's are ripped in WMA format but I have a handful also copied in Atrac format for my Sony MD player.

Dear Reader

We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end.

I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me.

The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog.

However, unfortunately my owner's head has been turned by the use of 'categories', an RSS feed for 'Comments', trackback links which he still doesn't understand and a new, trendy beta version of a blogging platform used by the Scobleizer (and Eddie Awad) so he has dumped me in favour of http://andyc.wordpress.com/

Wordpress automatically provides a feed for the new blog from http://andyc.wordpress.com/feed/ and a separate feed for comments (which is a nice idea) - http://andyc.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

My owner also deleted and recreated the Feedburner feed despite the dire warnings (he was too stupid to fathom out the fancy auto-redirection) so http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndyC may or may not still work or you might have to remove and recreate it.

After all we have been through, you still mean a lot to me and I hope that we can still be good friends.

All my love

The Blogger bytestream that was 'Blog in isolation'

I used to work for Ingres (in London) who were a fantastic company to work for. Amazingly, they are the only company I have ever worked for to use newsgroups for internal technical discussions and knowledge sharing instead of email aliases. I once read that processing an individual email costs a company 10 cents.

In the early 90's, Ingres was under commercial pressure from another large relational database vendor, Oracle. Instead of responding to this challenge, Ingres tended to 'fiddle while Rome burned', discuss the API naming convention by committee and stoutly defend the technical purity of page level locking (Oracle supported row level locking and capitalised heavily) from a lofty ivory tower.

Eventually, Computer Associates took over Ingres which most staff viewed as the end of the world. The truth was that CA saved Ingres from Chapter 11 (bankruptcy).

Although I had never visited Alameda and Islandia (Ingres' and CA's respective corporate headquarters), I still have this vision of hard nosed businessmen in sharp suits invading the Alameda campus to interview all these bearded techies in sandals.

On the day of the takeover, Oracle parked a truck outside Ingres' UK offices with a billboard 'Oracle are hiring now'. The story got a lot of coverage in the UK computer press. Once again, superb marketing from Oracle.

The Ingres engineers left the company in droves, formed self-help groups and arranged annual wakes to commemorate the anniversary of the black day.

CA subsequently rebranded the product OpenIngres but it largely disappeared from view into CA's vast portfolio of thousands of different software products.

So, it was nice to see Ingres back in the news this week as CA announced that Ingres Corporation will be once again be a separate company and the product will be available as an Open Source database.

Dear Cathy & Claire

I have just started going out with a boy much older than me...

No - sorry. I have just started blogging and find myself increasingly worrying about blogging etiquette. For example, I just read an interesting article about Oracle by Jeff Moss and wrote a followup on my blog. I felt my article was too long to be posted as a comment on Jeff's blog.

So what do I do ? I want to acknowledge Jeff's original article. Do I post a comment on Jeff's blog saying 'Nice article Jeff. This inspired me to write my own followup here' (with a link to my blog).

Or would that be considered rude and close to spam or trawling for traffic by the blogging community ?

Should my thoughts truly been a lengthy comment on Jeff's blog ?

Also, people occasionally comment on my blog but don't leave an email address so I am unable to followup directly with the individual. Again, I don't think it merits a comment from me on my own blog to say 'Thanks for popping by. I found your blog on the Palm PDA very useful'.

Alternatively, if I visit their blog and add a comment, it would be totally out of context.

Thanks for any advice

Norman