I'm sick of 'Doom and Gloom'

If you listen to the media it's all bad news. The stock market is dropping, the banks are failing, we all need to take swimming lessons because of global warming, petrol (gas) costs a fortune, we are all afraid of pandemics, terrorists will kill us and 6:00am December 22nd 2012 (GMT) is rapidly approaching.

Geez. Hasn't the media ever thought of telling us the good news? I for one am sick of 'doom and gloom'. Lets take a look at some of the things they are not telling us about.

• If the stock market falls - that's a great time to buy! The real reason it's bouncing around is because some people are making a fortune!
• All those bankers getting into a panic. Can you think of a better bunch of people to wish a bit of strife on? (Well - maybe lawyers and politicians?). Lets face it our money is safe provided we all don't listen to the doom and gloom media.
  
• Global warming? Somehow I don't think it will be quite the disaster that some predict. You see there is some great technology rapidly approaching which will turn everything around - more about that later. You just need to be aware that back in 1894 an expert predicted that in fifty years the streets of London would be buried beneath nine feet of horse sh*t.
  Not only can technology come to our rescue but are we actually being told the truth? At the moment it's 'fashionable' to talk about global warming but did you know these indisputable facts?
• Sea level is rising - at the same rate as it has been for the last 60,000 years.
• Ice cores do not show a link between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and temperature
• Some glaciers are melting - others, just as many, are advancing
• No matter how big an area of sea ice is which breaks off and melts - it won't affect sea level at all.
  
• London and Venice are sinking - that's why they have problems with flooding
• The vast majority of temperature measuring stations are in cities which are getting warmer because the cities are growing
• The first global warming predictions for the future were out by an overestimate of 300% - that's not even a good guess! Anyone who supports using a computer model this inaccurate is crazy!
  
  Don't believe this? Try watching the video below or reading Michael Crichton's book 'State of Fear
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• Gas prices? In the US they were complaining about $4.00 a gallon. Here in the UK we pay more than twice that. The good news is that we don't live in Sierra Leone where gas rapidly approached $20.00 per gallon. More good news is that the price of oil has dropped 40% in the last 3 months. If you are still furious about it then move to Venezuela where you can buy it for just $0.17 per gallon.
• Health? Have you been watching the astonishing developments in medicine? Looks like we may soon prevent cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart attacks and lots of others including the common cold.
• Terrorists? Guess what - the problem is being blown out of all proportion. You are more likely to be killed by a bolt of lightning than by a terrorist. Far more sensible things to worry about are heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, flu and pneumonia, kidney disease, septicemia, suicide, liver disease, hypertension, Parkinson's disease and drowning in that order. According to the statistics I found the risk of terrorists killing you appears at number 80 on the list of possible deaths at a 1 in 9,300,000 chance. Just to put it in perspective you have a 1 in 4,297,630 chance of being killed by legal execution.
• That 6:00am GMT time on 21st Dec 2012 marks the end of the Mayan Calender. (the Mayans were on Central time, 6 hours behind us Brits). Hey - the calendar hanging on my wall ends on 4th Jan 2009 but that doesn't mean there won't be a 5th Jan!

Now what about those technology advancements I mentioned?

• The Large Hadron Collider, is complete and though there are a few technical problems to iron out (and a few repairs to do), looks to give us lots of advancements in physics. It might be possible to produce mini black holes (singularities) which any Trekkie will tell you are used in the power source of Romulan spaceships. Now I know that's science fiction but in theory a mini black hole could be a tremendous source of energy. Its not a matter of 'will' it happen - its a matter of 'when'.
  
• It begins to look like nuclear fusion experiments will soon produce more energy than they put in. When that happens - and it will - then cheap almost unlimited power will be available. It won't produce huge quantities of deadly radioactive by-products and will wipe out at a stroke much of our carbon emissions.
• Cheap electricity will offer car manufactures an incentive to produce electric vehicles.
• New technology such as the free piston engine which could out perform fuel cells, offers a better, simpler and cheaper way of producing power for vehicles. Couple that with a car like the Extended-Range Electric Vehicle (or EREV), Chevy Volt and you'll have a vehicle which can run on any fuel including pollution free hydrogen, ethanol and gasoline but most of the time will run on stored cheap electricity. Again wiping out much of our carbon emissions.
  
• In the last few weeks we have heard of cures for cancer using carbon nano tubes, drugs such as Abiraterone and radioactive scorpion venom, treatment for Alzheimer's disease using anti-inflammatory drugs, Parkinson's disease being slowed by the use of vitamins and flu vaccines being more effective and quicker by inhalation.
• Even more dramatic is the effect genetic research will have on us. Its a matter of time before the death gene is figured out and a virus is used to fix it. How about living a productive life for 200 years! Now I know that that will cause population problems but it will also give us the incentive to move outwards from our planet and secure the future of the human race. I for one don't want to sit and be a target waiting for the next comet to wipe out humanity.
  
• Have you noticed how the power requirement of electrical equipment is dropping? It's not just things like computers and TVs; its even heavy duty items like heaters and air conditioners. The trick is to make them more efficient and better insulated. Technology is doing just that.
• We all moan about the price of oil and that's inevitable as this limited resource is used up for heating and as a fuel for transport. Unfortunately that's the last thing we should be using it for. In the future it will be needed as a feedstock for making plastics and other chemicals. Burning oil, natural gas and coal as a fuel makes the price of plastics and chemicals higher than it should be. In the future we can look forward to cheaper products because our energy will come from cheap, pollution free power sources leaving the oil and natural gas to be used for chemical feedstocks. Think what that will do to the world economy!
  

So there we have it. Doom and gloom? Not in my future.

BT Anywhere Broadband?

A catalogue of delivery failures.

Since I moved house to an area without cable broadband I've been using Virgin Media 'Up to 8 MB' adsl broadband - or in this case it was 'broadbad'. Despite repeated calls to their technical support my connection speed steadily dropped. It started at 1.7MB in April but when it finally sunk to just 107 bytes per second (yes that's right not even kilobytes) I had had enough. I finally got through to a tech support guy who admitted that they couldn't provide me with the 2MB download speed they had first offered me and that although they had plans to improve things at my local exchange - Hexham, they wouldn't be able to do so for several months.

Part of the problem was my distance from the exchange - 4.7 kilometres; part of the problem is obviously my line which hisses, crackles and is very quiet. The rest of the problem was Virgin's contention ratio and their reluctance to get anything done about my line. Although I was just six months into a one year contract I negotiated a penalty free MAC code from Virgin and contacted BT to join their Anywhere broadband service.

Now why BT Anywhere? Well I had several reasons:

• I wanted an 'unlimited' service
• I liked the idea of being able to connect anywhere without further charges
• I liked the idea of a second Internet phone with it's own number which allowed my family to make up to three simultaneous phone calls at the same time
  
• I wanted a faster wireless N router with a better range that would go through the three foot thick stone walls of my house
  
• I needed a new mobile phone to replace my aging Motorola V3 and O2 XDA Exec brick
• I liked BT's mobile price structure. The total cost would be less than my Virgin broadband and T-mobile contract
• I reasoned I would have a better chance of a BT Broadband engineer doing something about my awful line quality if I was a BT customer

Although not rated as the 'best' ISP (That honour belongs to Zen Internet), BT offered the most in my particular area.

I contacted BT by phone to order BT Anywhere Broadband and quickly got through to a very helpful lady called Virginia and discussed my requirements.

• Yes I could get BT Anywhere in my area and would be able to get 512KB download speed
• Yes a new smartphone was included in the price and I could upgrade it to an even better one the HTCs710 for an extra charge of £29.99
• The smartphone included 50 minutes talk time and 50 texts, unlimited GSM Internet access or it could be used unlimited on the wireless network, unlimited BT FON system or 500 minutes on the BT Openzone network
• A wireless N modem/router was included which 'could give up to twice the range of my existing wireless G router
  
• An Internet phone was included, the BT Hub phone, which would have it's own number and offer Skype style calling to the USA (1.25p/min to both landlines and cell phones) etc
• For the first three months it would be £23.99 then £29.99 thereafter, an 18 month contract.

I decided to go ahead and ordered the HTCs710 phone. I was told the broadband would be activated on 7th October and the equipment would be with me by 6th October. (Delivery promise 1)

I was very impressed when at 2:00pm the next day a large box was delivered by a BT courier!
great service I thought and sat down to open it.

Inside was a large packing list telling me what I should have and there my problems started.
I got:

1. The BT home hub
2. A sim chip for the mobile phone
3. an HTCs620 mobile phone
4. No Hub phone

'Great, they've sent me the wrong phone and not sent me the Hub phone' I thought and rang them up.

The person I got through to was very apologetic and said the wrong phone had been ordered and for some unexplainable reason the Hub phone had not been put on the order list. She would have the wrong phone picked up by the person who delivered the missing bits and it would be with me by the 6th October. (Delivery promise 2)

I waited in all that week, expecting a fast delivery as before but nothing arrived. On 6th October I checked my order progress and had it confirmed by their website that my equipment would be delivered by 7:00pm

7:00pm came and went with no delivery so I got back on the phone. They were very sorry but my order did not show on the system. They said they had corrected this and my missing phones would be with me tomorrow. (Delivery promise 3)

On 7th October at 2:00pm my Virgin Media connection stopped working and I connected up the BT Hub and followed the instructions to install it. The installation CD didn't work, telling me my password was wrong, but I was able to manually enter the information provided to set the new connection up. The connection was a bit flaky at first but the documentation warned me that this would be the case for the first 24 hours and that connection speed would gradually improve over the first 10 days.

7:00pm again came with no delivery of phones although I did get an e-mail telling me it would be with me by 7:00pm. I got back on the phone and after waiting in a call queue for 45 minutes was told their system was down and could I call back the next day?

8th October 9:00am I called again and after queueing for 30 minutes was told that there was no delivery scheduled for my address. Would I like to speak to the BT Anywhere team? I did and after explaining the problem yet again I was told that there was a delivery scheduled and it would be with me by 7:00pm today. (Delivery promise 4). On the positive side my adsl speed rose from an average of 233KB/s to almost the 512KB/s promised. (I really miss the 20MB Cable connection I had in Essex)

7:00pm came and went with no phones delivered. I got back on the phone thanking my lucky stars that unlike Virgin, BT don't charge for calling them. This time I spoke to Robert Wilson who told me for some reason the order had not gone through and that he had re-ordered it for delivery/collection on Friday 10th Oct. (Delivery promise 5).

Friday morning I contacted the BT delivery section and checked that they had indeed a delivery scheduled for my address; 'Yes it will be with you by 7:00pm today'.

7:00pm - still no phones! I called BT yet again and after being on hold 15 min and cut off twice I spoke to Kelsey in Dundee who told me there was now a message on the system that if I called back I should be told that the delivery would not be today. I asked Kelsey if BT had not thought of using the phone to tell me that instead of having me waiting around all day to find it out the hard way! Perhaps BT had the name wrong and it should be called 'BT Nowhere'? Again Kelsey was very apologetic and assured me that the order was in the pipeline and would definitely be with me on Saturday - yes the courier did work weekends. (Delivery promise 6)

You guessed it - 7:00pm came and went on Saturday and still no phones.

So that's six broken promises BT. Guess who's going to get a flea in their ear come Monday? I suspect the saga will continue.

Update 13th Oct
I rang BT (0800 0322 111) and spoke to 'Jan'. She checked and found no order was showing on their system - again. She was very apologetic and told me she would get the Hub phone sent to me. This time she gave me an order number and a delivery date of 16th Oct. (Delivery promise 7) She then passed me on to Chris of the BT Anywhere sales team who looked into the problem. It seems the last order had a delivery date of 10th September rather than October and this confused their system. Chris ordered the correct mobile phone for me and promised I would receive it tomorrow, 14th Oct. (Delivery promise 8) He also arranged a bag for the return of the wrong mobile and gave me order references for both. He checked and confirmed the order number that Jan had given me was on the system and confirmed the delivery date. Best of all he told me there would be no extra charge of £29.99 for the upgrade to the HTCs710 phone.

Full marks to BT for polite sales team and promises but I'll reserve judgement as to whether they are capable of keeping them. I wonder if anyone else has had 8 or more delivery promises from BT?

Update 14th Oct 2008
Finally, after all this time BT delivered my missing mobile phone. Full marks to Chris for being the first to keep a promise.
Update 16th Oct 2008
Jan delivered too. Finally I have the complete package. I'm happy with it and my download speed has improved greatly. It's just a shame it took so many phone calls to get everything in place. At least, however, the phone calls are to an 0800 phone number and free, unlike those made to Virgin Media.
Update March 10 2009
Well I'm still happy with BT Anywhere broadband BUT BT dropped yet another one!
I gave them a PAC code to transfer my old phone number from T-Mobile. I know they used it because I started getting mobile phone bills with the number on them. After a while however the number changed and T-Mobile reclaimed the number. That meant they started billing me for it again and since I'd cancelled the direct debit for it, I built up a £30 bill before they bothered to write to me and complain it hadn't been paid. Naturally I pointed out that the service had been cancelled back in September 2008 and the number transferred to BT.
"Oh - so you did" said the guy from T-Mobile. "But BT never confirmed they had taken the number over so it went back to us. Now if you just pay..."
"Not a chance" said I "Take it up with BT."

On My Cat

OK - I admit it. The picture is a fake.

The anvil is made of papier mache.

Now if I just wait here - maybe...

Now I know you guys are moving but you won't forget me will you?

...or me!

"Internet Explorer has stopped working" - again!

A while ago I was getting this message "Internet Explorer has stopped working" whenever I used Internet Explorer. It often happened when I was using the program but always happened whenever I closed the program - something I found irritating since it made closing IE a two click operation. Firefox 3 is my default browser but since I check web pages in several different browsers to make sure they work properly and this was beginning to annoy me.

At first I thought it was merely a bug in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 which I was testing. I researched the problem on Internet looking for a cure but nothing I did seemed to stop the problem.

'Oh well' I thought. 'Time to un-install IE8 Beta 1'. I did and fired up IE7 to test it. It seemed fine until I closed it and got ... "Internet Explorer has stopped working" A little more research was needed.

I disabled all plugins. A number of them have been pointed at as the cause of the problem including Omnipage (which I don't have), Yahoo and Skype (which I did have). I still got "Internet Explorer has stopped working" every time I closed IE (version 7 now).

I reset IE using the 'Advanced' options - Open Control Panel > Internet Options > Advanced (tab) > under " Reset Internet Explorer settings, click "Reset". I opened IE, closed it and got ... "Internet Explorer has stopped working".

I cleared all cookies, opened IE, closed it and got ... "Internet Explorer has stopped working".

I deleted the cache, browser history and cookies again, opened IE, closed it and got ... "Internet Explorer has stopped working".

On one site I found the suggestion that I make IE the default browser and then go through the install and uninstall routine for IE8 beta 1 again before reseting Firefox as the default again. I tried it and got ... "Internet Explorer has stopped working"

Then Internet Explorer beta 2 came out. I installed it and for a while success! I could open and close IE without seeing "Internet Explorer has stopped working". The success was short lived however I soon got "Internet Explorer has stopped working" not only when I closed IE but also at times when IE was not even loaded - probably the latter being caused by EditPlus, the text editor I use often which uses the IE engine to display web pages being worked on.

I'm still looking for a reliable cure. At the moment I've disabled IE's 'Protected Mode' - Thats done in Control panel > Internet Options > Security tab > uncheck 'Enable Protected Mode'. It causes IE to display a warning when using it, but there's an option when you click it to not repeat the warning. It's also something I wouldn't want to do unless you have an up-to-date anti-malware program. I use Kaspersky Internet Security which gets updated hourly.

For the moment I get no "Internet Explorer has stopped working" error messages but then I've been here before. I'll let you know what happens.

My war against the rabbits

This morning at 5:00am I was out in the garden, dressed only in a bathrobe, wielding a large stick and for half an hour I chased a rabbit with murder in my heart!

The little B*##~% got away!

It all started when we moved to a new house out in the country. There was a lot to do in the house but outside - the garden could only be described as a disaster area. It was a wilderness of weeds, grass, stone, wire a ramshackle shed/greenhouse and a mound of bricks. There were rabbits everywhere.

I suppose that's what comes of living on a hill between a derelict railway line(at the left of the picture) and a main road (on the right) with a forest on the other side of the rail bed. The soil contains a lot of ash from the steam trains which used to run here and in the trees surrounding us on both sides there are rabbit warrens.

At first we thought they were cute. They had been undisturbed for a while and didn't seem too concerned by our presence. They just kept about 10 yards away and kept on nibbling. When we came home in the car there were usually four or five running along the drive (the old rail bed) in front of us.

For a while they didn't annoy us. We were too busy working on fixing up the house inside to bother with the garden. It was April - warm and wet this year - the grass was growing fast but I didn't have to mow the lawn, the rabbits did that for us. Eventually we just had to do something about that garden. It was obvious that with so many rabbits around vegetables were out of the question so we mowed the lawn, used some of the bricks to make a path and planted a few flowers. The flowers were promptly eaten.

"Oh well" we thought, "once we can let the cats out they'll chase the rabbits off and we can just plant stuff the rabbits won't eat for now." A little research on Internet soon told us however that rabbits are a gardeners WORST enemy but that they wouldn't eat daffodils, forget-me-nots or roses. Daffodils and forget-me-nots abounded in the garden already so we bought some roses and planted those. By morning there were just the stems left. Rabbits WILL eat roses!

"Oh there are lots of things they won't eat" said a guy in our local garden centre. "Its just that no one is quite sure just what they don't like. We have chicken wire that keeps them out though."
"They won't eat marigolds" said a customer at the checkout. We bought chicken wire, marigolds and some begonias which we thought we could protect.

Back home we planted the marigolds and started work on surrounding the garden with a 'rabbit proof' fence. It was obvious that this would take some time so we built a cage with some old wire we found to surround the begonias. The next morning we discovered that rabbits do not like marigolds - in fact they hate them so much they bite the flowers off and drop them so that they don't produce seed and spread further.

I used more of the bricks to build a section of wall on the side next to the road and used corrugated iron sheets too. On the railway line side we repaired the fence already there and used more bricks dug down into the ground to stop the rabbits digging under it. Next to the house and at the far end of the garden we completed a new fence and two gates across the paths. "That should do it." we thought after we blocked up the rabbit holes with bricks and finally let our two cats loose.

It was at this point that we discovered that rabbits can get through 50mm chicken wire!
Three of them got in; one escaped through the wire and two were caught alive when they chose to hide behind our garden table stacked on edge at the side of the fence. We used our cat box as a cage for them and started experimenting to see just what they would eat.

We bought 20mm rabbit wire, split the rolls down the middle and put it on top of our existing fence near the ground to keep out those young ones which could get through the 50mm wire. We reasoned that we didn't need the full height wire since the little ones couldn't reach the 50mm section at the top and the bigger ones which could would be too big to get through it. This time we thought we had done it.

Next morning the garden was still full of rabbits which disappeared under the garden shed when we chased them. They had dug a tunnel under it from the warren by the side of the road. I surrounded the shed base with a brick wall sealing them off.

Next morning at 5:00am our son woke me up to tell me there was squealing downstairs. It turned out that one of our cats had caught a rabbit and brought it into the house to play with. It was still alive but only just. I cleaned up the blood from the living room carpet and gave it the coupe de grasse.

The rabbit population started to drop. Our cats killed at least three that we know of, a family of weasels moved into our neighbourhood and a fox can be heard barking at night (much to the annoyance of the local gamekeeper who is rearing pheasants in our wood).

For a few days we thought we had them beaten. The grass on our lawn started to grow and dandelions started to appear. It seems dandelions are a rabbit favourite. Our experiments with the ones we captured seemed to show that they will eat just about anything if they are hungry enough unless the plant is poisonous e.g. foxgloves. Some plants they obviously don't like but will nibble at and drop. Some plants - like marigolds, they won't eat but do their best to destroy. We found a booklet 'Gardening With The Enemy' by Janet Thompson which was some help which has a list of rabbit resistant plants. It's list isn't perfect though since we found some plants they rate as 'rabbit safe' get eaten by ours and others they bite and spit out. We felt confident enough to buy over a hundred pounds worth of plants and plant out the sweet peas we knew they love above all other plants.

And that brings me to this morning when I got up to go to the bathroom and looked out of the window to see a rabbit eating the sweet peas ...aaaggghhh! The worst of it is that I can't find where it got in and it couldn't get out easily until it escaped over the remains of the brick pile.

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