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Richy's Random Ramblings

Personal: Holiday Photos Now Available

As some of you may be aware, in September last year, I treated myself to a 16 day holiday in Tokyo, Japan. I’ve just got round to uploading around 340 photos (230Mb!) to http://japan04.rac.me.uk/ for viewing. Pictures are variable in quality and most don’t have descriptions at the moment (I’ll try and add them later on).

You’ll notice that the pictures start on “Day 5” – this is because when I went to Japan, I took my little Kodak EZ-200 camera with me: but by day 5 I had filled it up. However, whilst I had the cables and my laptop with me – I forgot to bring the drivers for the camera so I couldn’t download the photos! I had to buy a quite nice Ricoh Caplio RX 3.2Megapixels camera and use that. But when I got back to the UK, I found out the Kodak camera managed to somehow get corrupted! So the first 5 days photos of my first “own” holiday are now lost! It’s a double shame as on Day 2, I had a tour around Tokyo and took lots of good pictures 🙁

Life: Switching back to Amazon

A month or so ago, I was scouting around on UK Nova for some interesting “B.T’s” to download (my justification: I pay around £20 a month for a TV licence and NTL Cable Basic TV package, but I haven’t turned by TV on for a month), and then I saw 2DTV for download – but with a note that it was available for just £4.99 from Play.com so I went off to buy it on DVD (I try and keep “as legal as possible”).

Whilst there, I notice they had Red Dwarf DVDs for sale (note: I already have every single Red Dwarf episode on “recorded from TV” tape and all but the last series on commercial VHS) and The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy TV Series for sale (again, I already have this on 3 commercial VHS tapes). I ended up spending over £120 there!

However, I’m having to switch back to Amazon for my purchase for Red Dwarf [Order from Amazon.co.uk] series 6 and Amazon also have a number of books I wanted for Christmas (Ben Elton’s Past Mortem [Order from Amazon.co.uk] and Tom Sharpe’s Wilt in Nowhere [Order from Amazon.co.uk] ) and need to get the purchase price up to cover shipping…

I did intend to buy the books from my local Borders book shop, but they were expecting me to pay full retail price AND only had them in Hardback…

Personal: Well, that’s a different phone call

Here’s the *exact* transcript of a phone call I just received:
-RING- (yep, I got it on the first ring)
Me: Hello?
Caller: Hello – who is this?
Me: May I ask who is calling?
Caller: Sorry, I think I’ve got the wrong number.
Me: Yes. Bye
-click-

If this conversation is familiar and you called somebody at 20:04 on Saturday 19th of Feb 2005 from a mobile telephone number ending in 775 (with a total of five 7’s in the number), then hello! And thanks the the baffling call!

Work: Yessss! Another chargeback fought!

Last month we had someone disputing (with their Credit card company) a payment that made to us for over a few hundred pounds! Quite a bit of money – and now the CC company (Visa) was trying to claw it back from us and then hit us with an additional charge.

I spent half an hour composing a nice letter to them, pointing out a few key facts (the customer called us, 1471 gave us their number, all email addresses trace back to the customer etc etc) and sent it to them.

Today we received a nice letter back from our bank saying that we were right and we could keep the money!

Ha! Don’t try and screw the company I work for – we fight back and win! 😀

Techy: Noooo!

Just spent the last 20 minutes rebooting all our servers after upgrading their kernels (the “main brain” of the Linux OS). Then updating corresponding software and making sure they were all nice and stable.

Made the final tick on my checklist and, lo and behold, the DataCenter team decide “30 minutes late, let’s reboot all the servers to activate the new kernel”…

Grrr! Now I’ve got to wait until they all come back up and are stablised before I can go beddy byes. As if 14hours at working isn’t long enough, I’ve now got to…..

Fha!