Category: Life: Personal

Here’s my “interest internet related dates”, what are yours? (I’ve highlighted “key dates”)
* November 1994: [general] Amazon.com founded
* November 1994: Started a public domain software library for BBC computer software
* December 1994: Changed the public domain software library to promote RISC OS software (upon purchase of an Acorn A3010)
* 1995: Started casually programming in Perl testing changes on the RISC OS Doggysoft Termite Internet software
* 26th December 1995: Got on the internet (over half my life ago). Started up with a dialup connection via Demon Internet on an Acorn A3010: involved about 3 floppy disks if I wanted to view the web (most of my time was originally on USENET newsgroups and email)
* March 1996: [general] Google started as “BackRub”
* June 1998: Commercially released BWGSMPlay as shareware software
* January 1997: [general] HTML 3.2 standard set
* Feburary 1997: “Upgraded” from the Doggysoft Termite Internet software to the ANT Internet Suite and the ANT Fresco web browser
* May 1998: Registered my first .com domain name and web hosting via Netlink internet
* June 1998: [general] PHP 3 released
* September 1998: [general] Acorn Group PLC closed down workstation division.
* October 1998: [general] Amazon acquires bookpages.co.uk which becomes Amazon UK
* November 1998: Registered my first .co.uk domain name
* December 1998: Launched a free (call costs only) internet service
* February 1999: Appeared on Meridian TV (ITV)’s cyber.cafe about the internet
* 2000: Got my first paid internet related job (reviewing websites for the UKPlus web directory)
* May 2000: [general] PHP 4 released
* June 2000: Wrote an article entitled “What is FTP?” for Archive Magazine
* February 2001: Got my first paid internet related programming job (Systems developer for Cradley Print: developing sites in Perl and MySQL [on Windows!] and then moving to PHP)
* 2001: Upgraded to a dedicated server at PositiveInternet
* September 2002: Joined WebmasterWorld
* November 2002: Setup this blog (although some entries date back before them as they were imported from other sources)
* February 2004: [general] Facebook founded as “thefacebook”
* July 2005: [general] PHP 5 released
* 2006: Met my “wife to be” at a search engine optimisation company (and we started “flirting” over MySpace)
* March 2006: [general] Twitter founded as “twttr”
* August 2006: Switched this blog from Movabletype to WordPress
* 2007: Joined Facebook
* February 2008: Got engaged
* September 2008: Setup an internet related Ltd company
* July 2010: Joined Twitter
* September 2012: Got married

Within the space of a day, I placed one order on Amazon and one order on Lulu (a “print on demand” service: i.e. they don’t actually “hold” any stock) and, in both cases, selected their “free shipping” option. I would expect Amazon, being the larger one and having all the books already “in stock”, to get my order to me first – but the results are below:

Lulu:
Order value: £6.56 (1 “print on demand” A4 paperback book)
Postage paid: £0.00 [Free Ground shipping]
Ordered: Thursday 20th June 20:15
Shipped: Monday 24th June 15:51 (via DPD)
Expected Delivery: Wednesday 26th June
Arrived: Tuesday 25th June 15:10
Time from order to delivery: 4 days, 18 hours, 55 minutes

Amazon
Order value: £23.46 (3 pre-printed paperbacks and 1 hardback book)
Postage paid: £0.00 [Free Super Saver]
Ordered: Wednesday 19th June 20:49
Shipped: Saturday 22nd June 09:13 (via Royal Mail)
Expected delivery date: Thursday 27th June
Arrived: Wednesday 26th June: sometime before 1pm (Royal Mail didn’t knock)
Time from order to delivery: 6 days, 15 hours, 11 minutes [working on midday delivery]

This December, we’ve had two things fail on us:
* The Hard Drive in my wife’s mid-2010 27″ iMac. She purchased it on the 10th of December 2010, and it failed around the 15th of December this year. Just outside the EU 2-year warranty (but would have been within the 3 year AppleCare coverage if she had gone for that). Now we’re having to see if it is worth her just replacing the hard drive manually, taking it into an Apple shop to be replaced or taking it into an Apple shop for a new hard drive and a secondary/new SSD drive (this isn’t something either of us feel safe adding ourselves as we’ll need to practically remove all of the iMac in order to insert it).
* Our hot water tank has burst (night of Saturday 29th). Unfortunately, British Gas no longer hold parts themselves (well, small parts are held in a warehouse in Leicester), so we’re having to wait until Thursday the 3rd of January for it to be repaired (as the earliest “the local hot water cylinder supplier is open is the 2nd for us to be able to order it”). At least we’ve got heating until then, just no hot water (annoyingly, we’ve got a wood-burning fire, a portable electric radiator and two halogen heaters: so we could have coped without heating, but we’ve not absolutely no access to hot water 🙁 ).

and so we were just waiting for the third thing.

And it’s happened, a 1Tb drive (a Western Digital WD10EAVS-00D “green drive”) has failed in my offices’s Drobo NAS. Luckily, the three other drives are keeping it running in a degraded state, but it needs to be replaced ASAP. I’m considering getting a Western Digital 2TB 3.5inch SATA6 Internal Hard Drive – Red as a replacement, but that’s £90 I hadn’t budgeted on spending. Dammit!

I’ve just closed my ISA Investor with Halifax (well, now it’s HBOS Investment Fund Managers Limited) as I’ve been unhappy with their service since the Lloyds TSB takeover (who I actually left, after 25 years, about 6 years ago as I was unhappy with their deteriorating service!). So Halifax/HBOS sent me “contract note[s] for the sale of shares from your ISA Investor”.

One for each of the individual investment trusts. So that’s 13 contract notes.

All in their own envelopes.

All with their own (UKMail) postage paid.

All with the sale deal reference number, deal date, deal time and customer account number.

And they still hadn’t updated my name correctly from early September when I went into the branch and mid-November when I telephoned them (one of the reasons for closing the accounts I have with them is their inability to be update things accurately).

I honestly don’t think Halifax will be around in 10 years time if they continue like this.