Orange Outage

Not much blogging here of late.

Partly due to much family activity going on around the time of Samwise' Birthday - I'll catchup with an update on this at a later date.

Mainly due to having no Broadband at home for over a week!! 4 frustrating calls to a call centre in Mumbai, plus one to BT to confirm that there's nothing wrong with the line, until I finally got an operative that knew what they were talking about.
Basically Orange have been doing some maintenance work, and they've botched the job, resulting in no internet access for us.

I could understand this, but the frustrating thing was the lies that I was given during the first 4 calls. They said they were doing a line check, but in the meantime could I just try resetting my router?
I went through this activity four times. The last operative said that in fact no line check had been made, so the router resets were just a stalling tactic, based on a supposition that most problems are at the user end.

I was told that in fact Orange had carried out maintenance activities at 3 different times over the past week. Looks like they still haven't got it right.
I've got the name of the last operative, who has made a lot of re-assuring noises, and will be calling me back with a status update whilst further maintenance activities are carried out to repair the problem.

(As you might guess I'm not blogging from home right now).

Hopefully we'll be back online soon - although there is a Bank Holiday coming up - what's the bet it won't be resolved until after Monday?

Everything until now has been shit.

A much used line in Omid Djalili's stand up show.
I went to see him tonight with Novelist Supermum and impworks, who has posted a mini review

An hour and a half of laughter. He gets away with a lot that other comedians can't.
He's also the world's greatest "Dad Dancer".

Another Place (Again)

Brother, his family and Sister paid us a visit yesterday - prior to Samwise' Birthday. We went for a trip to Crosby beach for another viewing of Antony Gormley's Another Place (we've seen it before, but they hadn't".

Despite the day starting with a couple of showers of hail, the sun came out by the time we got to the beach in the afternoon.

Took a couple of snaps of Brother, Sister and an Iron Man (plus an artistically placed branch, that someone else had planted earlier). Brother and Sister are the one's who look like they're dressed for an expedition to the Gobi Desert.



They insisted on posing for the second snap, but I think I prefer the first one.



The kids enjoyed the beach - despite the big windmills in the sea that were making the wind blow - at least that's what I told them ;-)



Samwise' cousins gave him a remote controlled crane for his Birthday present.



It has a working winch which can be moved back and forth along the gantry, it also rotates. You also need to add counterweight ballast, as with a real crane, to stop it from toppling over with a heavy load.

Samwise, Frodo and his cousins quickly got the hang of it, but they must have been giving it some abuse because today the winch stopped moving back and forth along the gantry. Frodo initially got the blame for this, since he'd tried to move the winch along the gantry - had to apologise to him later as although he'd done the wrong thing, it wasn't his fault.

I spent about 3.5 hours this afternoon dismantling various pieces, and tracing the fault. I discovered that a weak solder joint on a connector in the rotating base had caused a wire to snap off from the connector.

I took my trusty soldering iron to the rescue, and now it's fully functional again.
I can now add crane repair man to my skill set :)

King Size Homer

What a night at work! I was asked to implement some software patches last night on the live system.

This usually involves starting around 16:00 and finishing about 21:30 (backups have to be taken, the system stopped, brought up for patching, patches applied, system brought down and restarted, tests and checks carried out).

I was told that I couldn't start the patching until an email arrived that contains files to be processed by the software that was being patched.

The email is automated and was expected to arrive around 17:15 - but not guaranteed.
Apparently it was not possible to arrange to have a person at the other end send the email through.

I spent 5.5 hours waiting for the email arrived, before the release manager asked me to abandon the work and restart the system.

I had to check the mailbox every 5 minutes or so - I could have really done with King Size Homer's drinking bird to press a 'check mail' button. I ended up devising a shell script loop to do the job for me, which whiled away about 10 minutes or so.

Net result - missed the first episode of the latest Dr Who series for 8 hours of tediom. At least I get paid "ovies" for it - and I caught up with "The Doctor" tonight on BBC3

Poisson D'Avril

"We are talking jape of the century..."

A day early perhaps, but a good one all the same.

Yesterday one of the chaps at work used AT&T Labs Text to Speech tool to create some sound files containing various wind up voice messages. He loaded these into a mobile phone and used them to make some calls.

We have a support call logging desk that is based in Mumbai (yes to ask the person who sits on the next desk to do something for us, we have to call Bombay!), so the "Anjali" voice was used.

e.g.
"Please close you're call now".
"Why have you not closed your call yet?".
"Please stop disrespecting me and close your call".
etc gradually getting more abusive (and more obviously a wind up).

Three of us were in on the wheeze, and had difficulty keeping a straight face whilst the two chosen victims took the bait, hook line and sinker. On the final call they were demanding to know the name of the person who was calling them, and who their manager was.

Then they looked up and noticed the sniggering....I'm half expecting some form of retribution today - nothing so far...

Knee Pads

A long time ago I bought a set of knee pads to help minimise skateboarding injuries.

Every now and again they turn up, usually when I'm looking for something else.

I've got no idea where they are right now, but I could really use them - I'm busy laying some oak flooring, which involves a lot of kneeling on a hard surface.

Perhaps I'll just strap on a couple of cushions?

Bitstrips

You can blame cha0tic for this post
Another truly great way to waste hours of your time on the internet...

Proof of the Existence of God 2

Further proof of the existence of god, or at least, that is, of the God of Vending Machines...

Doing some night time system patching at work tonight, and one of the code patches failed to stitch itself onto the system. Waiting for an on-call developer to show up, so I decided to purchase some sustainance (spelling?) from a nearby vending machine.

I selected and paid for a packet of smoky bacon flavoured crisps. Two dropped down from the rack into the collection tray. An unexpected and welcome Twofor (Two For the price of one), or BOGOFF (Buy One, Get One Free)!

Felt like Hodges Lucky Day in CSI (around 00:50 in this clip).

I walked away from the machine whistling "Mr Blue Sky" :)

St Patrick's Day

I've just been shopping on my lunchbreak and found that the middle of town is already filled with oversize leprechauns who have donned green hats and fake beards in the name of the patron saint of the country who used to supply us with builders and labourers.
This is going to have to change soon - who is the patron saint of Poland? :)

I'm getting lazy in this age of technology. Sent Birthday greetings by text to a couple of different pals, mainly because the date crept up on me before I could even think about sending a card. Ended up having a textual chit-chat with one of them, so it was worth it, for a little bit of not being a stranger and keeping in touch.

My boss is fleeing the country an a couple of weeks, and emigrating to Dubai. He threw a leaving bash for family, friends and a few work colleagues yesterday afternoon. We went along for a couple of hours, and quite enjoyed ourselves. Possibly because our two kiddywinkies were at their Grandma's, so we could actually spend some time chatting, rather than chasing them around the room, and preventing their antics.

The boys are off school for the Easter hols. I've just been told that I left my hosepipe out in the back garden. They've found it, and have been playing "Fireman Sam", so they've drenched each other through. I'm on the late shift this week, so I'm hoping to take them for a couple of early morning swimming sessions, to try and expend their energies a little.

Dr Who Exhibition number 3 - Blackpool

Yesterday we found ourselves visiting our third Dr Who exhibition in the past two years - this time in Blackpool. We were there for my nephews Birthday treat.

The Blackpool Exhibition has been in Blackpool since 1974 (I remembering wanting to go and see it when I was 10, but never got the chance).
It moved to new premises in 2004.

They've got props going right back to 1962, with the majority being from the seventies and eighties. Loads of costumes, masks and models that you'll recognise from across the years. The most impressive are a Tardis interior set, a cyberman diorama and a dalek diorama. There's also a display of costumes and props from series 1 of the new series.

The exhibition is darkened, and you have to light up most of the display cabinets, to view the contents, by pressing a button. This is on an extremely short time switch, which gets a bit irritating after a while.
There's a few interactive displays, plus a little animation on some of the models. A number don't work very well, or not at all.

The overall impression is of a slightly run down seaside feature - which I guess it is.

I didn't have my camera on me this time (technological breakdown - the digital snap machine is in for repair). I've found a few photos, that show what it's like here.

They've also got a display of merchandise from over the years. The shop has a good stock too - with some items that we know are hard to get.
Bought Samwise and Frodo a new action figure each.

The chap who runs the exhibition (David Boyle) had a chat with us about how we had enjoyed it - he'd spotted Samwise running about excitedly pointing things out.
He helped me to hide two more action figures (I'd bought them for Samwise Birthday next month) by taking the figures out of sight of Samwise and wrapping three carrier bags around them, so you couldn't see through the bags.

Gary Gygax has failed to make his last saving throw

It's been a long time since I camped out in the Caves of Chaos, with my pals, and it's probably oldish news now, but I've just heard (via cha0tic on twitter) that Gary Gygax has gone to meet his Dungeon Master.

Frodo - yet another Joint Assessment

We had what's now becoming the annual joint assessment for Frodo yesterday afternoon at Frodo's school.

Present this time were 2 teachers from Frodo's school (Special Needs Coordinator and Class Teacher), Outreach support assistant, and headteacher (who now aren't officially involved, but came along to 'assist'), Consultant Paediatrican, Educational Psychologist, Speech and Language Therapist, Parent Partnership volunteer and us.

All of these professionals, who were notified months in advance of the meeting, and what was the result? "We haven't quite got our act together". (The Ed Psych and Speech and Language hadn't met Frodo before) - "We'll do another joint assessment in April."

Aaargh! Novelist Supermum has a rant about this too.

We've decided that in the absence of any concrete diagnosis of his condition we're trying to achieve daily, full time One to One support for Frodo in the setting of his mainstream school (this has been recommended by several of the above "professionals").

We've been refused to have him assessed for a statement of special needs. We're now about to go ahead with appealing this decision.

Earthquake

I think that I slept right through last night's earthquake.

I guess that my snoring must have been louder :-)

I've seen reports of it on the net from friends who who live in
Liverpool and Wolverhampton, and a chap from work who lives near Glossop said that he felt it too.

Orange Broadband Outage

I arrived home from work on Friday night to be told by Novelist Supermum that our Internet Connection was not working.

Checked it out and discovered that web browsers weren't loading pages, email was hanging and I could only barely connect to an ftp site - which timed out fairly quickly.

Our PC's (1 Windows and 1 Mac) were connecting OK to our wireless router and the router was connected to the internet.

Pinging a few servers that I often connect to showed me that 50 to 75% of requests were timing out. Looked suspiciously like a network or line problem to me.

Decided to wait until morning, then try again.

Same problem again in the morning so I called Orange Customer Support at 09:45

I got the sort feeling that you get when you hear an alarm clock ringing in the middle of the day - i.e. slight depression on hearing a familiar sound - when I heard an Indian accent on the other end of the phone. I usually find that the language and cultural differences when dealing with Indian Call Centre staff require great patience, and cause a good deal of frustration.

The chap at the other end was very helpful. As I expected he ran me through power cycling the router, resetting the router, checking the configuration, checking the wires, plugging in directly to the network, rather than the wireless connection - all of which I had tried the night before. I stuck with him and tried again.

Finally at 10:15 he came to the conclusion that this was due to a possible network or line problem. He said that he was requesting a line check, which would take about 2 hours. He stressed that I shouldn't call again, and that they would update me by text message with the result of the line check.

Waited for about 4 hours, and no text message. Went to pick the kids up from their Grandmas. Half an hour later at 16:00 a text message comes through saying "Hello, we tried to call you about the fault you registered but couldn't get hold of you. Please call technical support or we'll have to close the fault. Thanks.".

I sent a text back explaining that I was out and didn't have their contact number. I told them that I'd be back in a couple of hours, and asked them to give me time to return home, or text me their phone number.

I got back home and called them again about 17:45. A different Indian chap on the other end again. This one told me that the line check had been done and shown that the line was OK. He made me jump through hoops with the checking and configuration. After half an hour of this he paused for a moment (I think somebody may have been whispering in his ear). He announced that the cause was on Orange server which was down for "maintenance" at 16:30. We both cheered at this point - Hooray!).

He couldn't tell me when the "maintenance" was due to finish. (Bollocks! thinks I. This is not maintenance, this is Fix on Fail!)

I had a minor rant at him, as to why wasn't the network status checked, before he embarked on a reconfiguration of the default settings on my PC. I told him that I expected to be re-imbursed with the price of the second phone call.

He advised me to wait 24 hours before checking the connection. Being impatient I checked at 21:00 and discovered that we were back on line.

The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain

I'm looking forward to seeing The Ukelele of Orchestra of Great Britain tonight at the Phil.

Thought Control

I want one of those.

... or do I?

Valentines Day

Yeah, I know that it was the day before yesterday, but I'm still reeling from the surprise that this year I got a bunch of flowers!

Wolverhampton Poly Election Night 1989

A pal sent me a link to this blast from the past video that's on You Tube.

Trip down memory lane for any of you that were there - see who you can recognise. Blurred and out of focus of course - as was most of our time spent in the Student's Union.

HMS Bulwark

HMS Bulwark has been moored outside of the office for the past two days.

Apparently it's an anti-terrorism, anti-piracy amphibious assault warship. Better not fly the Jolly Roger from the office window then... :)

I've seen a few sailors and marines getting on and off, going into town and back. (No they're not singing "Shore Leave!" and tap dancing).

No sign of any helicopters using the flight deck.

Michael Phone

Just been out to a local music shop and bought a microphone for the kids to have fun with.

Didn't need anything of too good a quality, since it'll be plugged into my old Bass Guitar amp, and it's just for them to have some fun singing into.

I was given a choice of 3 by the man in the shop - 15 quid, 18 quid and 30 quid. The 30 quid was a Stagg "Professional Musician" mike, and the 15 quid one was another make that came in a cardboard box. I went for the 18 quid one, which was the bottom of the Stagg range "for home, karaoke and computers", so it fits the bill, and it came in a nice black plastic box, with a foam cut-out to keep the mike safe in.

(The title of this post is what the boys tend to call the device).