Andrew Speakman

I have written about Maplin and its internet presence before - how they have an affiliate scheme where people can sell Maplin products on their personal web site. This is an acceptable way of trading, albeit not something I would do if I was a large established company and wanted to build my online sales and reputation. But I’m not a large company, so maybe I don’t know best, it just strikes me as short-termism - a way to generate some quick sales and raise its search engine profile.

Back to the headline question, which I won’t answer, instead, I’ll just explain what I’ve noticed. I’m always searching for products on Google, and more and more I see Maplin cropping up in the matches, with products I wouldn’t necessarily expect them to sell. When these matches are clicked, they take you to a Maplin search page with no results for the product in question. Just today, I did a search for the now, finally released, almost 2 years late Behringer BCD2000 and got Maplin as a match only to find that they don’t sell it.

Pirate DVD factory in Leyton closed:
http://lifestyle.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=5276

Looks like I won’t be bugged by DVD sellers in Stratford for a while.

Yet another rant about services / products that I pay for.

First the good. I bought a new camera from a web shop called cameras2u.com. It was a good price and it came the next day, and delivery was free. Plus when I called them to confirm that next day delivery was offered I didn’t have to wait long on the phone, and they had a very useful message when I was waiting telling me what number I was in the queue (I started at number 2). More companies should use this system on their phones, then you can get an idea of low long a wait you face from what number you are in the queue and how quickly it is going down.

 Now the bad. E&L pet insurance. Pleasant people when you get to speak to them, which is more of a challenge than you might think, see my previous post for an intro. I have now figured out that the best way to get to speak to someone at E & L pet insurance is to call, and if you don’t get to speak to someone within about 20 seconds, hang up and try again, eventually you’ll get someone answering almost as soon as it starts ringing.

Anyway, back to the story, I received a letter from E&L about my claim, asking for medical history. It’s been  more than three months since I placed a claim and they still haven’t sorted it out! I’d already provided E&L with medical history, as requested, over a month ago, with a covering letter explaining that our cat was a rescue cat. I had also called to check they’d recieved the information and it was OK. So I was angry. After the usual E&L phone frustration, I got through and explained what was happening, I was told to send a letter explaining that my cat was a rescue cat. I told them I had already done so, and the man put a note on the ’system’. We’ll see what happens, but I am starting to wonder if my claim will ever see the light of day.

 It looks like I’m not the only one unhappy with E&L:

 http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews-all-57547.html

Plus see my review of E&L at
http://www.reviewcentre.com/review193365.html

 http://www.bullyonline.com/insurance.htm 

I  did this review of the AirZound in January 2006 

During the winter months it goes without saying that a decent set of bike lights in good working order are essential. Check your batteries, go LED if you are sick of keeping Duracell in the money. Reflective clothing is also an important addition.

Even when a cyclist is equipped with blazing arrays of lights and reflectors, some road users aren’t cyclist aware and will only see larger vehicles. What is needed is the ability to trigger off another of their senses - if they can see and hear you they’ve got no excuse. The traditional and polite way to do this is with a bell, but bells just can’t cut through the crack of a 100 watt snare drum, pumping out of a blacked out Honda Civic.

In comes the 115 decibel AirZound 3, a novel Canadian invention that in keeping with cycling uses human power alone. Just use a normal bike pump to squeeze 80 PSI into an air reservoir that fits into a standard bottle holder and you’ll get over 30 air horn blasts. The trouble is you’ll have so much fun 30 blasts won’t last long and you’ll have to top up. I bought mine from http://www.cyclesense.co.uk/ for £17.95 plus £2.50 postage.

In follow up to this review I have a few more comments based on three months’ use:

• For £20, the horn feels very flimsy. You are probably paying for the design, and small-scale production.
• I don’t know if the mount for the horn is supposed to be quick release, but I’ve been detaching the horn when parking in public places. The horn detaches so easily that and it has fallen off once whilst riding. I’m not sure how many releases it will take before it becomes too loose to stay in place.
• The air reservoir is quite small, I need to top it up once a week. When it loses pressure, it rapidly goes from blisteringly loud to to no-so-loud.
• It is high pitched compared with car horns, so even though it is loud, it doesn’t always have the impact expected.
• The AirZound gives me extra confidence, I have ridden with the horn out of gas, and felt exposed and at risk
• Pedestrians leap out of the way if hooted.
• Cars hoot back after recovering from the shock.

In early November a piano fell on my toe, last week my toe nail finally fell off.

 

Enhance photo  in my picture editing software has really brought out the grimness.

I also saw this intaresting [sic] business card last week

Just over a week ago a photo I took of a cycle obstructed by a bin, bollard, and internet access booth (see separate photo) in Stratford got onto news.bbc.co.uk (photo 7).

I passed the same place on Friday 24th, and, to my surprise the bin and bollard that had featured in the photo on BBC News had gone. Unsurprisingly the much more difficult to (re)move internet access booth was still there.

It just shows the power of a bit of publicity. Since the internet access booth wasn’t featured on the photos on news.bbc.co.uk, I wonder if it will stay?

Here’s my before and after photos for the bin and bollard:

I recently received a call to my Vodafone mobile from their customer services team. I was told they were ‘checking up on whether I was happy with the service’. As a matter of fact I did have some valuable feedback for Vodafone.

I was having trouble stopping them sending me regular text messages advertising expensive multimedia services. I pay for the service, I should have choice whether I get adverts for extras. I’d spoken to customer services twice, once I was told to go to their website and change an option, this option didn’t exist, the second time I was told I should no longer get the adverts, they kept on coming. I also never received a receipt for a replacement phone, I asked to be sent one, and was told it was in the post… It never arrived.

I gave Vodafone my feedback, they seemed pretty disinterested and told me I would have to speak to customer services about the receipt. The annoying adverts, well they were part of Vodafone live, I couldn’t do anything about them! So why were Vodafone calling if they weren’t interested in my feedback? To make a bit of extra money of course. I would get a whole £25 credit to my account if I agreed to extend my contract from 12 months to 18 months. A good deal? I think not! If I agreed to this, I wouldn’t get a free handset upgrade for an additional six months. If I terminated my contract after 12 months I could get a new handset and a reduced line rental.

OK, my experiences with Vodafone are nowhere near as bad as those with Three, but I’m making no commitment to staying with them longer than necessary. Maybe next time I’ll try Easy Mobile or Orange.

It happens to me regularly. I send someone an email containing either meeting minutes with actions, or important information that they need to act upon. They get the email and don’t read it, or at least not properly, no matter how much emphasis or explanation, they won’t read it.

I’m guilty of this, I’ll read the first few lines of an email, interpret them, and leap to action, only to realize that I’ve mis-interpreted. I don’t bother to read full reviews, I skip to the conclusion. If I read executive papers, I’d go straight to the executive summary. To read things and actually understand them requires concentration and thought, but with so many distractions, this can be difficult.

At university I remember getting frustrated going through my notes because I’d have to go over the same page lots of times to fully understand it. Everyone else was flying over their notes and getting out books containing more information, because the lecturers always said that the notes only contained the bare minimum to scrape through. This wasn’t true the notes were comprehensive as long as you actually read and took time to understand them.

 Maybe in my effort to make others understand I am over-explaining things. Perhaps leaving things hanging and open to interpretation will provide better results, but I doubt it.

 In a world where we think we need to do more, more, more, perhaps what we actually need to do is less - less action and more thought. Then we’d only need to do things once instead of three or four times.

 The boss is coming… Look busy.

Pete used to live in the same flat as me at uni, and he could really knock out a nice tune. To my surprise I just got a message from him on myspace. He’s still at the tunes and they are better than ever. He currently has a couple of fresh cuts up on myspace for your personal gratification. Check ’em out, they’re gonna be big: www.myspace.com/petebeat2

I was searching google for a UK address I was interested in, and got one match. It was a file on a large UK educational institution’s website. My concern was aroused. The file had the extension .dat, I clicked the link in google, but found that the file wasn’t available on the website. I googled the path to the file and found that there were more .dat files indexed in google, one of which contained what appeared to be personal information and was still available via the institution’s website.

At this point, I e-mailed three members of the institution’s web team as well as their general e-mail address to inform them of my concerns. I asked them to reply to confirm they had received my e-mail, I got an out of office reply from one of the team, but nothing else. It has been three working days since I e-mailed them, I am disappointed that my e-mail was not acknowledged. According to my website stats, someone at the institution in question googled me and viewed my sites, so they definitely read my e-mail.

UPDATE: My e-mail was acknowledged on 22nd March, according to the e-mail’s footer, I can’t disclose it without asking the permission of the sender, so I’ll be careful. The e-mail might say that they removed the confidential data from their site several months ago, but are having trouble getting google to remove it from their cache, and that the directory in question is now secure.