t-mobile billing

T-mobile sent me a letter with the latest bill saying that they were going to charge £1 a month for itemised billing which had previously been free. The bottom of the letter mentioned that this “represents an increase in our charges above the retail price index figures”. What they don’t tell you is that this means you can quite legitimately (although not hassle free) cancel your agreement with them under their own terms and conditions. I’ve tried ringing customer services up who insist they’d charge me up until september and suprise suprise there is no manager available to speak to. They did say they’d ring back before 10pm tonight though but I’m not holding my breath. An interesting forum discussion has evolved at Money SavingExpert on this problem.

Remote assistance.

I like this Remote assistance in XP. I was able to connect to the parents-in-law PC on Sunday and troubleshoot an anti-virus update problem they had. The performance was stunning and it was as if they were connected on my lan. I don’t know what sort of speed cable is in the states but its certainly faster than UK asdl connections. A 3mb patch from symantec came down extremely quickly. I had to use the same software to troubleshoot a colleagues pc at work this morning. Didn’t work quite as well, the performance was slower and for some reason I couldn’t take control of the mouse and keyboard which it said I had control over, but the screen refresh was good enough for me to talk the end user through the troubleshooting process whilst I watched the output. The end user was happy when they got the problem solved and saved me a 3 hour journey up the motorway to their house.

Microsoft KB article alert by RSS

kbAlertz are now producing RSS feeds for new knowledge base articles which is an excellent idea and something MS should really have done themselves. This is the second bit of interesting news I’ve had from kbAlertz with the first being the breaking news about MS’s approach to the Internet Explorer spoofing problem.
Update Well it would be good if the pages that they linked to didn’t come back with a 404 🙁
Update2 The first feed I looked at was the security feed and this had no articles, hence no data, hence a 404 – an oversight perhaps? I’ve sent an email to their support address to let them know about the problem.
Update3 Looks like they wont get the email as they are using Declude junkmail filtering. It detected that our isp’s mailserver is not in our domains mx records (which it wouldn’t be) and also their own mx server is not in mx records either – its therefore (i presume) junked the mail. Sounds like someone needs to properly configure their anti-spam protection.

Delirious? concert.

Went to see Delirious last night at Liverpool Cathedral. Apparently they are the first rock band to play (well actually the second since Superhero were their opening act) there since 1962. It was a bit of a weird concert as the whole thing was rather narrow but very deep. It was packed with about 3500 people and I couldn’t be bothered to stand in the crush with a jumper AND a coat so I stood at the back, leant on the barrier and enjoyed the show from a distance. It was an ok concert, probably one of the best of theirs that I’ve been to, but I don’t think I’ll bother going to a delirious gig again as I didn’t enjoy it that much. However everyone else who went did so it must have been me. Had a good laugh bluejacking the mobile phones on the way out though – there were loads of people with bluetooth switched on in their mobiles 🙂

Kristen’s NetMD

Finally got round to installing the pants Sony Sonicstage software on the pc after the rebuild over Christmas. Reading the readme files, which looks like it was randomly translated in several languages and back into english via babelfish, I can’t believe the number of restrictions (ie only w2kpro is supported, no other w2k platforms. xp ONLY if you are logged on as THE administrator, etc). I finally got through the maze of website navigations to see if there were any software updates for the system. I eventually ended up at the Sony Musiclub page which is the best portal homepage. From there you can download two updates to the main software, one 45MB the other 4MB (and you need to download and install the 45mb one before you can install the 4mb one.) There are also two player addon’s, one which determines your mood by analyzing the music you are playing (I think) and a Realone player for the software.

Kristen’s NetMD

Finally got round to installing the pants Sony Sonicstage software on the pc after the rebuild over Christmas. Reading the readme files, which looks like it was randomly translated in several languages and back into english via babelfish, I can’t believe the number of restrictions (ie only w2kpro is supported, no other w2k platforms. xp ONLY if you are logged on as THE administrator, etc). I finally got through the maze of website navigations to see if there were any software updates for the system. I eventually ended up at the Sony Musiclub page which is the best portal homepage. From there you can download two updates to the main software, one 45MB the other 4MB (and you need to download and install the 45mb one before you can install the 4mb one.) There are also two player addon’s, one which determines your mood by analyzing the music you are playing (I think) and a Realone player for the software.