Remote Island

In the County Press this week, we were given a break from the usual drivel of Charlotte Hofton by the self-styled, red squirrel teaser that is Alex Dyke, an Isle of Wight Radio DJ. One of his side bar snippets contained a quick article referencing the Isle of Wight Festival and the ‘Freeloaders’ who gather the other side of the River Medina to listen to the Festival.

It appears the rumours may be true and the Isle of Wight Council are proposing to close down the public right of way by the river over the festival period. This means the Freeloaders won’t be setting up camp and allegedly trashing the place as Alex describes it. I was planning to pop down to the river this year as I hadn’t bothered to get a ticket for 2008. The atmosphere down by the river is relaxed and cheerful and I think it’s great for families too – last year in Seaclose Park I had to explain to my teenage daughter what the guy in front of us was sticking up his nose just before Muse played their set.

Alex stated that Council Tax payers’ money is used to tidy up the desecration caused by the Freeloaders. I find that a little hard to believe, the site down by the river on the Monday following the weekend Festival was clear – most people tidy up after them and there were a number of people making the site tidy and restoring it to it’s former glory as the following photo proves.

As for Freeloaders, I wonder if Alex forked out from his own pocket for his ticket this year.

Am I the only remote worker on the Isle of Wight?  Do you work from home and live on the Island?  If you work from home and live on the Isle of Wight, feel free to drop me a comment here!

10 tips on doing productive web work with kids in the house

As we’re in the Summer Holidays in the UK I found this article quite fitting. I’ve been working from home for the past 8 years, 2 months before my youngest daughter was born and kids in the house has never really been a problem. Telephone headset on - Dad is in a conference call, iPod headphones on - Dad is concentrating etc. etc. My youngest thinks that most Dads work from home anyway!

A great ‘homage’ to the ZX Spectrum at the BBC website.

Whilst all my friends were playing games on this amazing piece of hardware, I decided to program it instead.  However I couldn’t resist the occasional game of Manic Miner, JetPac and Sabre Wulf now and again.

I haven’t blogged for a while. Sorry. Life has been rather busy and stressful but I needed a rant so hang on tight.

You would have thought with the recent press of broadband and MAC codes that some companies might try to start getting it right. However, my experience of Pipex is nothing but complete incompetence with a service that is about as useful as an ass-hat and a customer service about as polite as Saddam Hussein.

Due to their recent somewhat undesirable DSL performance I decided to move to a different provider. But getting a MAC code out of them is a completely different matter altogether. You see, the problem with Pipex is that they are one of those last companies out there in the UK broadband land that decide to give you a 12 month contract. They do this to tie you in, because before you know it you’ll be dialling those 0845 support numbers wondering why things aren’t working. This ‘contract’ gets renewed every time you decide to re-grade your service. Beware. I joined Pipex back in 2004 and was very happy with the service they gave me. 512K was quite some connection if you’re used to dial-up as I was. When 2MB became available in May 2005 I upgraded, and then downgraded in September 2005 to 1MB as the connection was cheaper.

When 8MB became available in 2006, I upgraded but this was when the problems started. I decided to upgrade online using the wonderfully unintuitive Pipex Control panel. I requested the ‘Go’ product as I wanted a capped service. But they rolled out the Max service to me by mistake (as admitted via email to me from them in September 2006) which was £10 a month dearer. So until September I was on a service that I didn’t ask for, or apply for and was still paying for (or at least I thought I was). Which brings me onto their other issue which is their billing department. Pipex want to charge you £2 per month extra if you’re paying by debit card. So when I upgraded Pipex Go/Max/Whatever, I switched my payments to direct debit. Four instances of their direct debit appeared in my online banking area but they never actually took any money from me. From June 2006 until January 2007, they never charged me for their service, but waited until January 2007 to contact me saying there was a problem with the direct debit. I had a bill of £175 waiting to be paid. Kids I’m sorry, there won’t be any McDonalds Happy Meals for you this month etc.

So due to their wonderful ‘contract of service’ offered by Pipex coupled with the bad network performance I had been experiencing, I decided to move to a different provider. I phoned customer support and requested my MAC code. No problem they said, I was put through to their retention department ‘juke box’ which played music at a 8kbps quality down my phone line at 50p per minute. I hung up after 30 minutes. Secondly, I requested my MAC code by email. I never received a reply. And today, I phoned them up asking them for my MAC code, only to be greeted by customer service saying I’m tied in until the September 2007 and will have to pay a cancellation charge. The reason of September 2007 you may ask? Because that was the time a year ago when they ‘regraded their mistake’ they made. Complete fools I tell you. The customer service adviser even had the balls to tell me that when this service was regraded, I was informed that it was a 12 month contract. I can tell you now, when you corrected your mistake, I wasn’t notified via the telephone. You sent me an email apologising. Remember? Naagghhh!11!

So the reasons you shouldn’t go with them?

• Do you really want to be tied into a 12 month contract when others offer a 1 month contract?

• They rarely answer customer support emails.

• Billing Department doesn’t know difference between arse/debit card, elbow/direct debit although this may have been sorted recently.

• There are much better providers out there.

And the reasons you should?

• David Hasselhoff seems to like them.

Cracking line up for the festival this year, albeit looks like a repeat of the Brits but nonetheless great for the weekend. Looking forward to seeing Muse as I haven’t seen them play live yet. I wonder who will play Sunday night?

If I could ever book a Fantasy Festival, it would probably look something similar to last year’s splendid effort by Solo. Headliners included The Prodigy on Friday Night, Foo Fighters on Saturday, and Coldplay rounding up events nicely on Sunday evening. News on the 2007 festival has been rather scarce of late. Around this time of year we usually have an initial announcement of who is going to attend. So, to get the ball rolling, here are my three headliner predictions. This goes on the usual IoW festival theme of a dancey Friday night, a rock fuelled Saturday evening, and a more mainstream event on Sunday to finish.

Fri: Kylie (doubtful), Leftfield - I really struggled for a dance act here, it’s difficult to find something better than the Prodigy, although Kylie is a rather obtuse choice compare to those guys
Sat: Muse, Red Hot Chili Peppers - these guys have to come to the Isle of Wight at some stage.
Sun: Snow Patrol - please, please, back again for the 2nd time, did an absolutely splendid job first time round so I was told.

Who would you want to see?

Before Sunday of last week, I was the owner of a wonderful Sony Ericsson K750i phone.  I would say it was the best phone I had ever owned – it was a great unit, perfectly sized, with a decent camera bundled in.  Shame it wasn’t waterproof.  It didn’t make it through the ‘E’ cycle of our washing machine over the weekend.  I don’t have insurance for the phone, I’m on a contract with 3 months left and I don’t have a phone to carry me through to the end of the contract.  Until my daughter found an old Sony Ericsson T68i of mine that is.

I’m starting to like going back to the ‘retro’ side of things.  It’s even prompted me to go looking for a Sony Z7 on eBay (I owned a Z5 previously).  Too many times in my life I’ve gone chasing after the latest and greatest gadget.  I’ve had PDAs, Treos, Graphics Cards, Processors, and Camera Phones and I’ve spent far too much time and money trying to get a new toy.  I use a phone for making the occasional call and receiving an SMS now and again.  I think I could do without the camera, web browser, video camera, mp3 player etc built into one unit.  I’m going back to basics and I’ll use a phone for what it was designed for.  Making and receiving calls.  That E61 will have to wait for now

Finally, the Isle of Wight County Press website has been redesigned. The previous design didn’t take advantage of the rich content on offer. Now we have a decent navigation system, RSS, and a great fresh and consistent look. Well done CP.

A great post from Rob Sanheim describing his experiences of working from home. I agree with most of the points that Rob makes, productivity goes up, but there are still those distractions such as the family pet trying to jump onto your lap.
The closing paragraph should sell it to anyone…

All in all, for most knowledge workers it just makes more sense to work from home. I think in ten years we may see a good third or even half of all programming work done by workers from home as more companies figure it out and realize that “eight hours in an office” doesn’t equal “eights hour of productivity”.