I seem to spend a lot of time on A Mind Lost complaining, but sometimes things just annoy me! The latest is Barclaycard who recently took over the credit card business of Goldfish which included Morgan Stanley, of whom I have been a credit card customer for years without a single problem.
The run-up to the changover was quite smooth, except that I had to be issued with a new card number (the old one was memorized years ago) and a new PIN number. What hasn’t gone smoothly however, is the online account management. Instead of transferring over the users from Morgan Stanley to Barclaycard’s system, everyone has to re-register with Barclaycard instead. The old facility was switched off last Monday, yet Barclaycard’s system only went live at the end of last week and has given me nothing but error messages or “sorry, too busy” messages since then.
There’s really no excuse for this. Barclayard knew how many customers they were taking on and they knew how many of those customers managed their account online. Where was their capacity planning? Only now does their registration error page make any mention of increasing capacity to cope with the extra load.
It’s not a good start for the new customers is it?
Update 01/10/08: On day 10, I’ve finally managed to register after four attempts today. It even let me log in once but I haven’t been able to repeat the feat. There’s also no sign of any record of cashback on the site.
One of the companies I am a Director of buys products from China and it is a constant battle to stop them short-cutting the manufacturing and quality processes to make more money. They will buy sub-standard steel, skip inspection checks and lie through their teeth to feed their greed.
It therefore comes as no surprise to me that, as reported today, there are 22 brands of Baby milk in China responsible for using the banned chemical melamine to artificially enhance the appearance of Protein in the milk. At the time of writing, 6250 babies are reported ill, 158 have acute kidney failure and 3 have died.
China has grown in recent years at a ridiculous rate. They are having to learn the lessons learned in other advanced economies much faster than anyone else had to and this is causing an enormous amount of greed. They clearly haven’t yet learned the lessons from last year’s lead-painted toy fiasco that if they short-cut the specifications for a product, it will go wrong and they will get caught out.
Any company which buys from China, and that’s a significant portion of all companies in the western world, has to make sure that it is on top of it’s inspection and quality procedures. Trust me, those procedures will be tested!
I use computers at several locations and often require data and login details to do my work at those sites. Whenever I can I use my EeePC for these tasks but sometimes that’s not possible so I was looking for another way to keep secure data and key applications available to me at all times.
I use TrueCrypt for all my data encryption. It’s fast, easy to use and rock solid. I’ve also used a USB flash drive in the past loaded with Portable Applications. Since USB flash drives are now smaller, I got hold of a Lexar JumpDrive FireFly 8Gb which has a secure but removable cap which can be attached as a keyring to my keys. I loaded it up with PortableApps and installed Truecrypt in traveler mode. I now have encrypted files and useful applications all ready for use wherever I have my keys with me.
I have access to:
- Open Office
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Sunbird
- TrueCrypt
- GIMP
- Notepad++
- 7-Zip (Archive Tool)
- ClamWin (Antivirus)
- Eraser (Secure File Deletion)
- Filezilla (FTP Client)
- Putty (SSH Client)
- WinSCP (SCP client)
- Pidgin (IM Client)
- KeePass (Password Manager)
- InfraRecorder (CD/DVD Recording)
- Nvu+Komposer (Web Authoring)
- LightScreen (Screen Capture)
- PDFTK Builder (PDF Tool)
- Sumatra PDF (PDF Tool)
- CoolPlayer+ (Media Player)
- VLC Media Player
and I still have 6.9Gb free out of the 8Gb!
Read on for more details on how to get things running.
Continue reading ‘Portable TrueCrypt’
Following my recent problems with my home broadband, I decided to look around for a new provider. It wasn’t particularly that Plusnet had performed badly, I’ve been with them since 1 19.6k dialup connection was considered luxury, it was just that every time I called them to complain that my connection had dropped for another day or two, I had to convince them that my equipment wasn’t at fault and that there was a problem at the exchange. My problem only appeared to get resolved when somone else complained in the same area and I’d been complaining for three weeks! I was also less than impressed with the traffic shaping that BT was carrying out on its broadband customers and since BT acquired Plusnet I assume that Plusnet were or would be doing the same.
While checking out alternative providers, I discovered that my exchange had been enabled for ADSL/2+ via Be, a subsidiary of O2. This would give a potential connection speed of 24Mb and since I was getting a reliable 4.7Mb connection from a potential 8Mb on ADSL, I thought I might get a 12-15Mb connection through Be and all for the same price as I was paying Plusnet
Having signed up with Be for their Pro service and obtained a MAC code from Plusnet, I was very impressed with the migration process operated by Be. I received text messages at each key point including when my welcome pack and free BeBox had been despatched and I was activated after 8 days. I get a reliable sync at 12.5 Mb and my connection speed seems to max out at just over 10Mb, less than I expected but still a respectable improvement and I’m not done tweaking things yet.
My only disappointment is with the BeBox supplied which is a rebadged Thomson 585v7 wireless modem. The setup and configuration interface is awful, the worst I’ve ever seen. Just getting it to get it’s fixed IP address setup was a task in itself, the Be welcome letter referring to a DIY installation guide which wasn’t in the box! Since I operate my home network behind a Netgear FVX538 firewall, I really needed to get the modem into bridge mode so that it just passed it’s IP address to the netgear and didn’t get in the way with it’s own NAT firewall. This, it turns out can’t be done from the standard web interface, it has to be enabled via a config upload. The process can be found on the Be support forum, but I’ve detailed it here in case you need it.
Continue reading ‘Broadband Upgrade – ADSL/2+’
Am I the only one to not care about apple products? I don’t doubt that they’re stylish and attractive but the hype around every product launch just leaves me cold. Every time Apple launches a product there is a fever among the tech and mainstream press just to here the messiah Jobs announce an iPod that’s got 16Gb instead of 8Gb and an iPhone 3G that’s actually not very good at 3G.
Apple’s business model is about packaging, interface and hype. They take existing technology, package it behind a slick package and interface and then hype the hell out of it, all at a very profitable price. If they can tie their own services and restrictions into the products at the same time then all the better.
I’m obviously not the target market since I don’t value style over everything else, actively rebel against anything that’s hyped and just want my gadgets to do their job. I don’t care if my mobile is 1mm thicker than an Apple. I don’t care if my laptop is 200g heavier than an Apple and I can happily survive without ever using iTunes. What I can certainly do without is the iHype!
Rant over!
Work is busy at the moment, but unfortunately business isn’t. My staff are busy chasing money from customers who are taking longer and longer to pay each month. There is a real tightening of cashflow in the UK at the moment and I don’t see it easing in the near future. Every customer is waiting for cash from their customer before they can pay us and we’re having to do the same with our suppliers. It’s a tightening circle.
I also have a new website project just starting for one of my companies, a full e-commerce packaging store. We’re only at the quote stage so far and the first quote in was over £55k just for coding without the design and branding which seems significantly over the top. Surely most back office e-commerce website scripting is boilerplate by now?
My assistant is settling in well and my routine accounting workload is slowly diminishing with the backlog of management accounting reporting now almost caught up.
As we head into the autumn and winter, business is going to get tougher as it always does in our business sector and the usually more profitable months in the run up to the slowdown haven’t happened this year for obvious reasons. Unless the financial sector, government and media start being a bit more ambitious, it could be a lean winter. Mistakes have been made, losses have been written off, it’s time to move forward!
I haven’t been in any rush to install Service Pack 3 on my Xp Pro machines even though it’s been around for a while. However, it popped back onto the radar this weekend via the Automatic Update system so I allowed it to install on my home machines and then on my main work PC in the office on Monday morning. The home machines were fine but the office PC locked up about 25-30% of the way through and had to be powered down. When rebooting, it flagged up that SP3 had failed to install and started to roll back the configuration. Unfortunately, the rollback also locked up and the machine had to be rebooted again.
I’m not sure wher my office machine is at now! It seems to be stable but I neither have SP3 installed or fully removed so I’m guessing I have a bit of a hybrid. That could get interesting for future updates!
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