Fed up with rising energy prices - you bet! Electricity from British Gas had been underestimating my reading for a while, so I thought I'd catch up later, but when the reading came it was £90, and I had to use my TV licence money to make it up. I complained to Ofwat about them increasing the higher rate of electricity in the middle of the quarter when prices went up, as the higher rate is only chargeable at the beginning, but I did not get any results. But I did get a list of alternative suppliers with more details than Uswitch and decided to pick a low profile supplier owned by Scottish Power and telephoned them to arrange a contract. I chose Atlantic Electricity and Gas as a fairly safe low-budget bet. So far so good, although they have already billed me for the gas after the first month. If you ask nicely they will let you pay your bill by credit card over the phone - how's that for humane? Apparently some customers complain about not getting a prompt bill and running up large debts, but it was a very fair price averaging out at six pounds a week for central heating in the morning and evening and cooking. I got a covering letter from British Gas saying what I would be losing out on, including paperless billing, and had to phone at 20p a minute to point out that I had not yet received this since applying in 2002, but in spite of promises of a £10 refund it took two more emails and a long delay to get it taken off my final bill, and of the closing electricity bill there was no sign since mid December. (It has since turned up in April and after some more phone calls had £10 taken off - phew!) But hopefully I am now buying from a more humane supplier, although I am behind because of British Gas price increases. I noticed my average electricity consumption had been much higher and blamed the meter but apparently that is down to London Electricity, who are now owned by Electricite de France, who sub-own Seeboard, all of whom will be contributing no doubt to a prospective nuclear power station owned by a European conglomerate,which will involve heating gas to excessively and dangerously high temperatures, as informed by a BBC news bulletin. If you want to know more about companies do a search on the BBC website for what has gone wrong and what is to come. So there is no going back in my mind. I decided their prices were going to be way above the odds. and was glad I had switched. I worked out that since the last price increase, gas from British Gas had gone up from 45p a unit based on the new meters (or four and a half pence based on the old meters) - never mind about their therms - to 60p, which is a hefty increase, and probably worse on the way.
I got increased ram for my Christmas present (hooray)and installed AOL 9 instead of 7. I almost straight afterwards upgraded to Anti-Virus Group version 7.1 because Grisoft are discontinuing support for the old version 6. I just happened to be watching the new AOL dialler and the number had been changed to what I believe to be a premium rate American number. So somewhere between Christmas and the New Year I had to get on to AOL who said to connect through the browser instead of the dialler and fixed it somehow. I also got my cable telephone company to provide Premium Rate and International call barring. I emailed the sales department at Grisoft but they did not reply. Yahoo customer services bounced my complaint back and the anti-spam robot sent me a machine reply which was totally useless. Shortly before the upgrade AVG had stopped a Netsky virus downloaded to my email client from Yahoo pop mail, so it is possible a virus infected AVG itself. Either way it could have cost me a fortune and I still do not know who is to blame for changing my dial-up number. Not only that it did not show up on my bill so the whole thing may have been a hoax.
Some hoaxes can do more damage to your bills. Premium rate scoundrels can be foiled by call-barring - you can also complain to ICSTIS about prize offer messages which use 0901 0907 and 0908 numbers, especially if they phone you first, but it is as well to be on the lookout as well for mobile phone text freaks who offer free ringtones and drain credit for every text message sent and received. Yes I've been caught for that before.
Don't bother to do Royal Mail surveys about which mail you want as it has no effect on door-to-door mail, as I discovered when I complained about inappropriate mail including MacDonalds advertisements and car insurance with Royal Mail's logo on the envelope. When I pointed out I was a vegetarian and did not drive a car, and I had completed a customer interest survey or two, I was told that surveys do not affect the door-to-door mail service as routine circulars and leaflets all go out to everyone regardless. So what was the point of doing them in the first place? I daresay the marketing information goes towards Royal Mail's profit margins and has no bearing on customer care, like some other shoppers surveys and most online ones. You usually get promotions that you don't want, but I expected Royal Mail to be better bred. Actually it is getting worse with them now sending credit card application forms - totally despised - and prize offers which involve telephoning Premium Rate numbers to claim huge amounts of money, obviously a nasty con trick and puts the mail service in the ranks of other scoundrels and swindlers.
My daughter gave me a Nec 3G phone which is very cute albeit heavy on battery power, and gave me some amusing and entertaing downloads - until I ran out of space. With just 3 MB left there was no room for the Insomnia video - size not stated - so I complained and the customer service agent said "free up some room and try again". Eventually I lost three pounds credit even though I pressed "cancel" and they have not refunded it, in fact they rang me the other night on my landline and refused to refund it. The phone crashed also my computer when I try to connect via a USB connection, so there is no way of offloading surplus home videos or photos except onto an overpriced memory stick which is incompatible with most card readers. It is OK for casual calls. Three Pay have now improved their service and you can now buy a voucher (from Superdrug for instance) starting from ten pounds giving no time limit on use, but you may still have to phone customer servies on 333 to get it activated. The rather stroppy canned voice on 444 says it is not valid.
A police officer warned me that some neighbours in my flats had been robbed by bogus water-board officials with realistic looking ID. It is not the first time unsuspecting tenants have been ransacked by fake workers, so keep your money and cheque books in a safe place and dial 999 if you notice anything suspicious. Christmas is coming and some geese may be robbed.
Gosh I haven't had a grievance for ages. Apart from the Blueyonder Broadband technician abandoning me with some dodgy software to perform my own installation, which resulted in me copying the modem drivers and folder containing the programs by hand onto my computer using Explorer. That's a good tip - keep the drivers in a handy folder because Windows copies it from a temp folder. You have to run 'wininetcfg' if you are on the cheaper broadband because you get allocated a number every 24 hours from a pool, so it is a well to know where wininetcfg is. I turn my modem off every night anyway. A few hackers are on the same circuit, since the number allocator is in America and sometimes goes through a server in Holland. My firewall identifies them as a major threat. I have since found a website which identifies IP numbers called networksolutions.com; it's a bit easier to understand than the Ripe database. Since we are on a DHCP random number allocation it's impossible to keep up with who they are. The person who I thought was cable.ubr.06 was the main server for the area, so it was anyone living locally, or attempting to hack into the local server.
More on Telewest. I signed up for the Teleport replay programme because it only costs five pounds and they said you could cancel it after one month. A few days later I realise I've been conned into watching repaeats of almost all children's or teenage television, and limited to BBC and Living at that. They do not appear to have any grown-up programmes - the adult stuff costs extra and is pornography. Not only that they are so afraid the under fives will be watching scenes of bloody kill or insect sex you have to put a pin in before the watershed. Watching a spider having sex and laying eggs late at night in close-up did at the time seem like a sort of horror porn show - the bearded lady doing her stuff - but I'm afraid the novelty has already worn off and when I asked to cancel it I was told I had to wait until next month and the claim the second month's money back later.
I joined the Internet Movie Database site and was keen to review Vanity Fair the film of 2004 starring Reese Witherspoon,as I did not like the review they submitted. But they would not accept my review perhaps because I said their one was rubbish. Having pruned it a bit they still would not accept it, perhaps also because it hits a bit too hard at their values. So I have included it here for your perusal - presumably snobs need not bother. The reviewer compares the film unfavourably with Thackeray's novel.
No, sorry, I haven't read the book. I read modernism at University and was afraid it would be a bit stodgy. The novel is certainly on the large side, so I was not induced to try. Vanity Fair the film is also not about someone trying to rise to power, someone on the make, or a 'gold-digger'- if Becky Sharpe comes across that way it is because of Reese Witherspoon's natural sparkle. There is a theme - it is class - it is about abuse of a person or persons by the class structure, which is so common to many modern costume dramas, viz films of Jane Austen's novels and perhaps in this case, and more appropriately, Moll Flanders, starring Alex Kington. Only in this case it is not wicked young men and their ways who are to blame. (I originally put on the razzle - it is in my dictionary). It is the stuffy arrogant attitudes of the bourgeoisie, condemning members of their own family to live as outcasts in a ruined mill because of poverty and bad fortune, as well as the snobbery of Becky's subsequent female protector who did not wish her to marry into the family, even though she was happy to use her as as a companion. Servants were meant to stay servants and not cross the lines. Becky had to live off her wits because it was all she had to live off and was unable, unlike Moll Flanders, to make a successful marriage because the prevailing snobbery was more endemic in Britain than it was in France, where so called adventuresses could marry, gain a fortune and set themselves up as countesses. That her husband lived in dire poverty was a symptom of the rigidity of the class structure in Britain where even career minded young men were obliged to live on family inheritances - or on nothing if they were cut off. Symptomatic too is the need for Becky to go abroad to get a job and escape the class structure, hence the local colour which was very exciting and stopped the plot dragging a bit. It was unfortunate, however, that Becky was unable to survive on her own terms and was eventually induced to marry a man much older than herself, which was very disappointing. Altogether the film is bright and colourful but a bit dark in its message of despair. The song which Becky sings to the piano accompaniment before her friends are forced out of their home was similarly dark and moody. 'Now sleeps the crimson petal' could be a leitmotif presaging the awful destruction of the family which was to come, where the piano was the most treasured remnant of their former cultural life together. I found it a beautiful and exciting film, but abandoned the book by Thackeray because it rambles all over the place.
Anyone who has a copy of my old Celestial Groover web page will know how ephemeral music sites can be. I had massive playlists from mp3.com and Besonic (who are still hoping to make a comeback). Cnet have not re-created mp3.com as it was, and their own music downloads are nowhere near as good. They do not archive music newsletters so if you sign up for them it's best to save them in a safe place. Click on the link and you get the most recent version. I had to wipe down after my old firewall crashed a while back and lost a trance podcast they advertised on one of their newletters, and which I had saved as an mp3. I go back to number 14 in my webmails, so it must have been 13 or 12. After several fruitless searches for a trance podcast I am forced to admit that it might just not be out there any more.
Be warned - the Times audio book download from audible.com comes with rogue software which locked me out of my login page. When I checked what had happened on 12th August around 17.45 using dos commands at the C prompt I found altered bootup files, and was unable to delete the new software. Eventually I had to reinstall Windows, boot up in safe mode and run Configuresafe to restore my configuration to a previous snapshot taken two days previously. I was then able to delete the new files. There were lots of temp files which had taken up my hard drive room too and I had to delete these manually.This method applies to Windows '98 SE. Periodically when my system will not function properly I prune my windows temp files and it goes back to normal. It is a good idea to empty the Temporary Internet Files too and get rid of old cookies, but they keep coming back.
A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all, and may all your grievances may be small ones.