Cathles.com

… nay, I NEED one!

What am I on about you may ask?

The answer is simple….  one of these:

It’s an LG N2B1DD2 2 Bay Blu-ray Network Attached Storage 2TB which connects to the Network and provides Network Attached Disk for me to back up and archive data to.

I’ve had a 1Tb Buffalo Terastation for about five years now, and it’s choc-full of data, with my MP3 Collection, my Library of Audiobooks, copies of most of my Applications and so forth, and that’s BEFORE I count the Multi-Gigabyte’s of Documentation I’ve accumulated from all the different PC’s I look after, and various Laptops that “visit” for me to maintain!

The Buffalo was a 1Tb, the new one is 2Tb but has the added benefit of allowing me to migrate on-line storage to near-line or off line using the built-in Blu-Ray recorder, which is REALLY interesting!

The fact that it’ll work as a DLNA Server, so I could stream Video straight from the storage device to my Whizzy Samsung 7-Series TV is a huge bonus, and the iTunes Server thing is quite interesting too.

So, this is squarely on my list of gadgets to acquire.  Psst;  Anyone want to buy a 2nd hand Buffalo Terastation?? 

I’m pleased to report that I have the vast majority of my Christmas Shopping completed, and even most of what I’ve bought is already wrapped up!

I say the “vast majority” guardedly, as I’ve just arrived home to discover the latest batch of parcels have arrived from www.play.com with some stocking filler type presents in.   Unfortunately in what has to be one of the worst examples of customer service I’ve seen for some time, I’ve received two items that bear absolutely no resemblance to what I ordered.

Of a total of 8 different items, two were identical, and should have been in the “Gadgets” category.  I won’t describe exactly what they should have been here, just in case the intended recipient should drop by, instead I’ll refer to them as “Item X”; but instead I received two “5m Belkin Cat6 Snagless Patch Cables” which I notice aren’t even listed on their Website as a stock item!

So I phoned the Play.com Helpdesk, and eventually spoke to someone about the issue.  I have to say the quality of the phone line was very poor indeed, but I got the distinct impression that the chap on the other end of the phone just wasn’t listening to me.   I gave him the details including the order number and product codes of the erroneous items, and eventually he said “Ok I need to verify your identity, can I please have your postal code?”   … so I tell him quite clearly…. “so that’s {completely wrong postal code}, correct?” … uh no,  tell him this time spelling it out phonetically …. “In order to verify your identity, can I please have your full name?”  … so I tell him… and he (perhaps unsurpisingly) can’t pronounce my surname;  then…. “in order to verify your identity can I please have your full address…?”   at which point I’m starting to get annoyed, and ask just how much more he needs to verify my identity given that I’ve already given him the order numbers, and sufficient information to prove that I’m who I claim to be;   “I appreciate you’re frustrated sir, but please let me verify your details so I can help you, now can I please have the item numbers?”  which I give him again, and of course suggest that if the packing and quality control departments took half as much care as he was apparently taking, I’d never have received such a ludicrous substitution!

Anyway, to cut a fairly painful conversation short, it seems that I need to pay for the postage and packing to return the items to them, and when they receive them they will process a refund of my postage costs and dispatch replacements…. or at least they would if they had them in stock.   And of course there’s no estimated delivery date for any additional stock.   I think it’s bloody awful that I as a customer have to pay out and inconvenience myself just to fix their stupid mistake. 

And to add insult to injury, given there’s no stock left, I now need to find a couple of alternative gifts!  I knew there was a reason I stopped buying products from Play.com;   Maybe they should look at my pages of previous orders, and note that I stopped being a regular customer a few years ago!

Very poor customer service Play.com!

Weekends are meant to be time OFF work, right?

I’ve not stopped this weekend, but it’s been for a good cause.

I had to rearrange the furniture in my room to accomodate some changes I’ve been contemplating for a while now.  This included dismantling all of my Computer kit, removing all the surplus cables and the old and falling apart metal desk that it used to sit on at the foot of my bed, remove a chest of drawers, and a huge three door wardrobe unit with four drawers underneath in two columns of two drawers, and a 5 drawer tallboy unit full of clothes.

This meant the spare room also needed to be rearranged including moving the bed, a beside cabinet, and various other miscellaneous moves, including unloading a large bookcase and sorting out all the books in to Bootsale candidates, Keepers, and other bookshelves in the house.  The bookcase had to be moved to a temporary home in the lounge in order to make space.

My day started at 7am yesterday when I woke up, and showered.  I was out the door and in the centre of Colchester at 8.30, and had started visiting various furniture shops looking for a new desk, after all I wasn’t going to start moving everything around if I couldn’t track down something suitable to replace it!

I’ll digress a little here.  Colchester … get  your damn act together!

• Staples along the Avenue of Remembrance, some nice desks, but “Temporarily unavailable” signs on most of them.  I asked what that actually meant, and was told the company that makes them had gone in to receivership.  Not very temporary then!  And surprise surprise … none in stock of the ones that I liked!
• The Range – only a couple of workstation style desks..
• Homebase (opposite Waitrose)… could sell me a “fitted office” solution… no thanks..
• Wickes… no desks…
• “Cheap-furniture-shop-in-what-used-to-be-Focus” (near Asda)… some nice furniture but no desks…
• Homebase at Stanway,
• Conway Pine … fantastic desks, but £1500+… a little more than I had budgeted…
• Staples at Stanway… more choice but same fundamental problem as the other one,
• Hatfields .. nothing suitable
• Focus in Harwich… had a nice desk, but when it came to choosing;  two box one of two, no box two of two… and a 8-10 week lead time on any orders.

I ended up having to resort to something from Argos… not exactly what I wanted, but as you’ll see in a moment it’s done the job.   I finally got home about 2:30 and started unloading the furniture to be moved out of my room.   Eight bags of rubbish later (I was ruthless, feeling quite proud of myself!) and I had an empty space.    The spare room having been rearranged to take most the furniture I moved out of my room.

I finally crashed for a rest at about 7pm on Saturday.

Sunday I started again at 7am, clearing up the debris from the day before, and dismantling the PC kit and the old desk that had a broken keyboard shelf.

I then assembled the new desk and the filing cabinet alongside it, moved the tall bookcase back in from the lounge, and started to reassemble the PC.  Next problem, the PC wouldn’t fit under the desk, so had to put it on top.

More putting stuff away… two trips to the tip to dump rubbish, and another trip back to Colchester to buy the Office Chair I wanted that I’d seen in Staples on Saturday… then swap out a bedside cabinet for another one, and I’m just about finished.

Here’s the finished result….

I’m absolutely pooped now, so heading for a soak in the bath and an early night!

Quite an interesting clip of Clifford Stoll in action.

I can thoroughly recommend his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg” for any Computer Security types out there.

A somewhat predictable post given today’s date.  Like many millions of others around the world, September 11th 2001 will be a date forever burned in to my memory.

And here I am, some 8 years later, and I still find the whole thing indelibly etched on my mind, it brings a shiver to my spine just thinking about it.

I was at work, and I remember my first clue that anything out of the ordinary was going on was when I started to get complaints from people thruought the company that the Internet access and e-mail was all going slow.

I investigated and was very surprised to find all of our internet links being maxed out.   I then went on a hunt and started looking at where people were going to see what was causing the abnormal use, only to find that without exception everyone was trying to get to BBC News and Sky News websites.

I accessed the sites, and was quite horrified about what I saw.  I wandered around to the restroom and found a group of people gathered around the television in a horrified silence.  At that time the plane had hit the first tower.   I made a couple of quick phone calls to my family and a friend and suggested they go turn on their TV and then stood there feeling sick to the stomach as we watched the second plane hit in more or less real time, and I told a few colleagues what had been happening before rushing back to grab a space in front of the Television.

It’s difficult to describe in hindsight how I felt at the time;  I know I was trying hard to hold on to the contents of my stomach, and found it more or less impossible to pull myself back to work later that day.  I think I must have lost about 4 hours that day just gazing in mute disbelief at the TV or reading online news articles.  In the call centres, the phones went strangely quiet, which was just as well considering how everyone else must have been feeling.

Rather peversely, I do remember feeling a newfound sense of companionship with the others watching alongside me.  An event of such magnitude did seem to bring us closer together as a community of people, I even remember smiling wryly at one couple who I noticed holding hands tightly as they watched.

I’m sure anyone reading this will join me in hoping, nay wishing, no – preying that we never ever see anything as horrific as the events of that day again, and I for one will never forget that day!  I’m sure I am not alone.

This weekend I went and collected my nice shiny new Television set.

I opted for the UE32B7020 from Samsung, which is a 32″ model in the 7-Series range of LED TV’s.

I saw a 6-Series LED in a shop a few weeks ago and was captivated by two things.  First off the Picture quality was astounding, more like a Plasma than an LCD TV, and the Black was very very Black, if you know what I mean.

The second thing that was incredible was the sheer depth of the set.  My older LCD TV wasn’t exactly large at about 5cm deep in total, but the UE32B7020 was literally less than 2cm deep!  It was slimmer than a picture.

And for the eco-friendly, it uses LESS electricity than the equivalent 32″ LCD set!

I updated the Gadgets post with the new set, but for some reason Samsung don’t seem to have the 32″ version of the 7-Series LED posted on their website, so I had to link to the
UE40B7020WW instead.

I’ve posted previously about how dissapointed I’ve been with some of the recent film releases, particularly those I’ve picked up on Blu-Ray.

It would appear that the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010 are trying their hardest to make that up to me!

I happened to catch the trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar a few days ago, and it looks simply amazing.  That plus the description of the overall storyline sounds like it’s exactly the sort of film I enjoy.  If you like Scifi even half as much as I do, have a look at this and let me know what you think!

This prompted me to have a bit of a trawl, and aside from the news that Battlestar Galactica is getting yet another remake, this time under the guidance of Bryan Singer; which made me grin… but then I discovered that one of my favourite films ever is getting it’s own remake due for launch in 2010.

I can’t find any images or logos from the new Dune to post for your edification, but I found this while looking… and it made me laugh out loud!  So  many different things to giggle at there for a Dune affectionado like me!

On the smaller screen, work continues apace on the new adaptation of an 80’s Scifi Classic.  Those of a certain age will remember another US Imported TV show which featured Robert Englund who later went on to take the titular role of Freddy Krueger in a famous series of Horror films…   Who can forget the famous rodent eating scenes, and the Dynasty worthy shoulderpads in “V” -- even if the effects do look dated by today’s standards, the series is being “reimagined” (don’t we hear that phrase a lot in the film & tv context these days) for a 2010 screening.

Doesn’t the chap 2nd from Right look a lot like Michael J Fox…?

I’ve gone and done it… I’ve got a rotten stinking cold!

I thought late last week that my nose was a bit sniffly, and it’s taken a few days but sure enough today it’s hit me full force… The Summer Cold!

I’m hoping it’s not Swine Flu, and of course  that it’ll be over quickly, but knowing my luck, and the fact that it’s Bank Holiday weekend coming up, I’m not particularly hopeful!

In other news, I hit quite a milestone in the weightloss programme last week at my weigh in.  Total weight loss of 49lbs since January!  Hurrah!

There is a Tesco store near to where I work in Colchester that I frequently visit.   I’ve been going there for well over 10 years now, and I’ve seen the store change as it becomes a “Tesco Extra” amd on the face of it thrive.

Now, Tesco (or the current store management at least) appear to be doing something really daft, which is made a few orders of magnitude worse by the fact that a Waitrose store is opening shortly nearby.

I’ve recently been converted to Waitrose, and now more than ever I’m looking forward to it opening.

What have Tesco done that’s annoyed me so I hear you wondering?  It’s simple enough.   They’ve closed checkouts to deliberately force customers to use the self-scan checkouts.   I don’t mind having the self service ones as an option, but personally I hate the things.  That feeling of awkwardness and embarassment when they go wrong, the looks of impatience from the people queuing behind you as if they are thinking ‘doesn’t he know how to work the checkout, it’s not THAT difficult’. All of which combine to me (even though I’m a self professed gadget geek without a technology phobia) means that I hate the wretched things.

So instead of being able to shop “normally” in Tesco, I’m forced to either wait in even lengthier queues for the manned checkouts.

Some of the staff are even getting to recognise me now… I can almost hear them say “oh look, it’s that chap that won’t use the self scan checkouts”.  They know I hate them (for I can be fairly vocal!).  I know I’m not alone, other people I’ve talked to in the Checkout queues feel a similar way.

So, roll on Waitrose opening… I know where I’ll be shopping in future!

I’ve been doing some research today, as I wanted to (re) confirm the reading order for the Dune Prequels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson, and I’ve made the happy discovery that they aren’t finished with the Dune novels just yet!

It looks like in early September, a further novel called The Winds of Dune will be released.

Picking up where Dune Messiah left off, the official website says ..

“Paul has walked off into the sand, blind, and is presumed dead. Jessica and Gurney are on Caladan; Alia is trying to hold the Imperial government together with Duncan; Mohiam dead at the hands of Stilgar; Irulan imprisoned. Paul’s former friend, Bronso of Ix, now seems to be leading opposition to the House of Atreides. Herbert and Anderson’s newest book in this landmark series will concentrate on these characters as well the growing battle between Jessica, and her daughter, Alia.”

It certainly sounds good!  I hope BH and KJA can continue to develop stories.   I just pray that KJA’s influence doesn’t cause the book to have hundreds of chapters, each of which may be less than 5 pages!