It's Dead Jim...

I'm often known for my lack of patience so having the ability to share a recent experience is one I won't miss.

Our old trusty dishwasher gave up the ghost, finally moving to the Ex-Dishwasher part of the universe, in fact making some noises that can't be classified as "machine" but more like you see on movies when the hero emits a last gasp and whimpers out.

So we shop around for a dishwasher and the other half decides she wants one in Silver to match other parts of the kitchen (????), and Currys have the best price plus free delivery (£18 elsewhere) and they take your old one away (recycling rules say you can only take them to certain places which is a pain).

The web site has been revamped and seems much easier to navigate and checkout, a delivery date booked and the chaps even rang an hour before to tell us they were on their way.

Delivery was spot on to the minute at the time they said and everything swimming fine up to there.

Bit of a tight squeeze under the worktop and we fire it up, a nice E1 error which apparently is "no water pressure, solenoid not working etc" and so I check the water pressure (mental note, next time point the hose into a sink, not towards myself).

Now this is the point where life normally gets difficult, you have a DOA product and you know your faced with endless phone calls and end up throwing the toys out in a tantrum.

So we call the customer service line,5 mins later we have an exchange code - unfortunately it's the same number to call the stores so we ring back and ask if we can pick one up from our local store, couple of mins on hold and yes we can.

Pop the dead unit in the boot and off to the local store, 5 mins later exchanged and we now have sparkling dishes, in fact perhaps the best dishwasher we've ever had.

It's worth putting pen to paper (so to speak) to say this is how Currys will survive the challenge of Internet competitors and keep customers, their price was good anyway, delivery was at a time to suit us, they took the old one away and exchanged the faulty unit with no questions or fuss at all, even thanking us for bringing the faulty one back (which they said they would have collected).

In fact it's a model on how service should be, the experience of having a faulty unit is bad enough without anything else so having a smooth ride afterwards and a resolution you expected is spot on.

Top marks to Currys for their perfect service from start to finish and worthy of a mention.

In fact we were so pleased we purchased a new fridge from them so theres proof that good service brings business.

More wrong than Mr. Wrong

Yup I'm Wrong.

I was quite amazed that a follower of the Mr Camping (AKA Mr. Wrong) said he was confused and puzzled why the world didn't end as predicted on 21st May.

Along with his confusion was perhaps the realization that he had spent £140,000 dollars on adverts and given away all his worldly goods.

According to Mr. Wrong (who wrongly predicted the end of the world before) he has now detracted the statement and said that the world won't suffer 5 months of torment as these are the actions of a compassionate God (however the world will still end on Oct 21st).

Perhaps the followers need to realize this chap is simply wrong, he has made a wild and unfounded prediction based on nothing more than his own interpretation of some numbers and perhaps they need to understand it is their own vain and pointless lives that account for them needing to cling onto such an absurd notion that the world would end with earthquakes and 5 months of hell on Earth.

I also notice in his news articles the absence of his other statement, apparently 21st May was supposed to see Jesus appear on Earth - when will people realize this prediction is no more valid than if I had sat here and simply said that Aliens will land and communicate with us, this would put an end to almost all religious beliefs anyway as they regard us as the only life form and it is just as absurd to make such a prediciton.

Take the Mayan calender which is due to run out in 2012, this does not mean the end of the World, the Mayans simply calculated the long run calendar to a logical point i.e 2012 and no more, nothing more and nothing less.

The next date to watch for will be Oct 21st, I'm sure it will be as exciting as every other day.

No doubt the vain and mindless individuals who cling to such stupid beliefs will say the Iceland Volcano is a "sign" and so on, if you look hard enough everything is a sign and you can find pattern in anything.

I seem to recall one person found a deep and meaningful message hidden in a book which predicted the coming of the devil and the end of the world and it was taken from a childrens book, people have even found hidden and secret codes on cereal packets.

However, when you have such gullible and easily influenced people then that's the price they pay for clinging to worthless and foundless beliefs.

By the way, I predict (by reading secret codes from a hidden source) Aliens will land on Earth at the Pyramids on September 9th and declare their intentions peaceful.

Book it in your calender, I've checked my figures and I'm certain it's right.

He's here !

It appears the USA spent 10 years searching for someone, if they had used the internet it only took a couple of seconds.

Some kind person has marked a certain compound on Google Maps !

Good things come to those who .... Incoming email from ADY Finance PTY

So my Brother got a job offer out the blue just when he needed it. The offer was for an Australian Finance company ADY Finance Group PTY - for a "funds transfer administrator" - looks perfect, just receive funds into a bank account then transfer them on to another and keep some commission..

Kindly they provided an address 87 Llewellyn St. Merewether, NSW, 2291.

The miracle of Google maps etc furnishes us with their location...

87 Llewellyn St. Merewether, NSW

Now You may need to look around the Shell garage for the actual office .... actually no you don't this is the correct address.

So we do a little digging and find ADY FInance Group PTY has a registered address (on www.financialplanners.com.au) of 38-40 Conway Road, Bankstown, NSW 2200.

This is a lot more meaningful as the image will show.

 

Possibly the Interview room ?

Now to be honest this image is about 20 feet away from the actual location but that's just a block of flats and clearly this is their main office as you can see the seating arrangements, the parking and of course the rest room facilities.

No self respecting Internet geek would sit there without following all this up with a quick "Whois" - this shows the registered address of 3492 Scheuvront Drive, Denver, CO, 80211 and the email address of info@adyfinance.com.
The address does not exist, there is a Scheuvront drive but in WM so not even close.

The registered name does not seem to exist either so the alarm bells start ringing.

Even better than all of the above, the registration date of the web site is 11th April 2011 @20:16 so the web site has been registered for 14 days !

Forgive me for saying but I did suggest that this might be a scam ?

On the plus side though the reception are on reception@adyfinance.com
If your filling up at Shell you might be able to email them and ask for pump 4 to be turned on?

My brother, not to be taken in by such things is currently selling everything except a pair of shorts and is flying to Australia as I type, he's going to offer to either have his interview in the Shell shop, on the plush sofa (just near the rubbish) or he's more than happy to fly to Denver, CO for an interview with a non existent entity.


All of this is based on the fact they cover his travel costs and a burger.

Update:- My brother plans to fly out, locate the sofa and update the blog with a picture of him at his new desk - he's trying to find out if the phone cable is long enough from the nearby flats to the sofa.
Hopefully the tramp piss and puke stains won't be too bad but I'm sure it's the place of dreams where financial wizards rock the world with their dealings.

This web site should help explain, just look and see Mr Kenneth Redmond has moved around a lot recently, perhaps good Group hiring managers move quickly in these roles?

http://www.worldlawdirect.com/forum/labor-law-matters/31932-payment-protection-agents-uk-laws-11.html

p.s here's the scam mail (almost identical to the one sent to my brother).....
These people are scamming anyone registered with Job sites such as Total Jobs so be on your guard.

Hello,
my name is Kenneth Redmond and I am ADY Finance Group hiring manager. Thank you for your reply and interest in our company. We would like to consider you for the position of Funds Transfer Administrator within Ady Finance Group Pty Ltd.

Key responsibilities
1. Route and input all payment instructions received by mail, fax or electronically in a timely and accurate manner.
2. Control workflow on a daily basis to ensure deadlines are adhered.
3. Monitor and control of required reports.
4. Basic knowledge of online payment systems.
5. Excellent communication skills.

Salary & Benefits
1. You will be paid a basic salary of 2500 USD per month.
2. You will benefit from the commissions, which are 5-7% of each transaction.
Normally the amounts that we process vary from 2,000 USD to 10,000 USD, but can go higher on special occasions.

Why we need Funds Transfer Administrators

When buying-selling operations via the Internet are concerned, the buyer and the seller don’t know each other and are placed in different corners of the world. Therefore, it is important both to the buyer and the seller for their transaction to be made safely. Payment security means receiving money concerning the transaction by a reliable, experienced, impartial person - our Funds Transfer Administrator. He will hold all the money until all the terms of the deal are satisfied and only then release them to the intended receiver. Please, visit our web-site for more information.

Having a Funds Transfer Administrator in every country we can quickly transfer funds inside a country without wasting time on the international bank transfers, and continue our rapid growth rather than overwhelming our own bank account with inbound and outbound transactions leading to severe hold times and possible service interruption. It is time that is of significant importance to our clients.

The main task of the Funds Transfer Administrator will be receiving money transactions to any bank account he would like to use for the purposes of this job; and then forwarding these transactions to the next party of the process according to our instructions. Funds Transfer Administrator will be processing approximately 1-2 transactions per week.

If you are ready to proceed, please reply to this e-mail and I will contact you shortly.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need more information.

--
Yours Sincerely,
Kenneth Redmond,
ADY Finance Group. 

Let me regail you with a story

Normally when things start with those words I'm reminded of things such as the opening titles of Robin Hood films or similar so load up some snappy middle ages music sit back and let's begin.

Our tale starts with the innocent purchase of a new phone for our daughter.
T-Mobile had an offer for the Palm Mini at £19.99 which for an Android phone was perfect, we also wanted a PAYG phone as she does not use a phone much but also needed some internet access so when she's out and about she can use Messenger etc. This came with 6 months Internet free so was perfect.

So we parted with our pennies, the phone was despatched promptly and arrived the next day (so far so good).
In fact despite being part of her Birthday treats we let her have it a few weeks early so she could use it.
The box simply had a receipt in and a "Welcome to T-Mobile" A5 sheet in.

The receipt itemized the phone and the 6 month free internet.

We also purchased £10 air time with the phone which it said was pre-loaded.

Fire the phone up, set wireless up and Gmail etc and we're all sorted.
A few days later my wife goes to register the phone so we can top up on line etc. Now the fun begins.

1) It appears your not allowed to register more than one phone per person.
2) You can't register a phone to anyone under 16 *our daughter is 10.
3) Pay attention to points 1 and 2.

So my wife has to select that our daughter is 16 or above to register the phone, there is simply no other way to register it - T-mobile take note, this is really shit, I would have preferred to have our Daughters phone registered to her but obviously with parents/guardians as the overall owner for legal reasons.

We then check the balance and .... her phone (which started with £10 credit) now has only £4 left on it.
Something is clearly wrong so we check the on line balance, apparently it's being charged £1 a day for calling "1000" which by logic must be the internet?

So we call up T-Mobile from the phone (it says "call free on 150"), you get a recorded voice that you will be charged 20p per minute, we also get cut off while trying to navigate the endless menus.
After a few more tries we call from our landline, we then realize there is no option to speak to a human, the web site has no obvious option to send them an email or similar so it appears your stuck in a loop of either ending the call or pressing buttons until a prompt tells you something.

In the end we realize if we select the "I would like to leave T-Mobile" option then we actually get through to a concerned human who will obviously want us to stay.

My wife explains our situation and we are told this department cannot help and they will transfer us, "click" the line goes dead.
We call again and do the same, this time we get a human "hoorraaaaahhh", or perhaps not ! This lady then insists she speak to our daughter, we advise her she is 10 and she cannot speak to her, she insists and says she will not help unless she speaks to her.

We advise her that she cannot speak to our daughter as she is a minor and it is a breach of European law to speak to her, she still insists and says without speaking to our daughter she will not help.

I'm pretty disgusted at this stage, there is my 10 year old daughter now expected to have a chat with someone about something she does not fully understand so I tell my daughter to say "I authorize my father to speak on my behalf" - this is still not good enough, T-Mobile want my daughter to put a password on her account, we give them one but this is not acceptable, they insist on speaking to her and refuse to help.
I take the phone and explain clearly that they cannot speak to my daughter as this breaches LAW but T-Mobile still refuse, we ask our daughter to simply state the same password as we have given them - T-Mobile are now satisfied !

I am then told the reason we are charged £1 a day is because we have to activate the Internet by texting something like "AL" or "6 month free web" to a number, nowhere in the box or sheet of paper that came with it are these instructions !
All it had to say on the receipt was "NOTE - you must activate your internet before use etc etc etc" and all of this would have been avoided.

So I turn the phone off and on, send texts here and there and finally after 18 minutes (and £6 phone charge) get her free internet sorted.

T-Mobile refunded the £6 and £5 "gesture" for my phone costs but they have to accept that all of this effort and time wasted could easily have been avoided.

1) Let people register phones for their children i.e I am Parent, this phone belongs to xxxx.
2) Realize that they cannot speak to minors, this is a breach of law in every known country I can think of - what's next ? Banks calling and speaking to them to ask if they want a loan?
3) Put something, even on the printed receipt that simply says "you must activate the internet" - I am a computer engineer by trade and found this whole episode confusing, imagine what non technical people will do ?

Thankfully the charges have stopped and it's all working, the irony is that the phone is fine and the offer was very good, it was let down by incredible lack of control or process behind the scenes.
If you buy a PAYG phone with any freebies then take note of this story and check before you start using it !

Googley Earth - tip "could not write to the current cache"

Google Earth runs great on ubuntu as do many applications, in fact many are developed on open source or linux environments and ported to Windows rather than the other way around.

Anyway, I noticed when I put Ver 5 and Ver 6 in that I had an obvious permissions error when starting, it would say "Google Earth could not write to the current cache or myplaces file location. The values will be set as follows:

My Places Path: "/home/username/.googleearth"
Cache Path: "/home/username/.googleearth/Cache"

Clearly the program has a default path which is not in the permissions route, normally you would expect to see this if for example you installed a program under your own user ID and not as root, if the default directory for storing files was under the ownership of root then clearly you cannot write here.

A simple fix though, the configuration file is held in this location:
/home/your_username/.config/Google
This is a hidden directory, the directory is case sensitive so Google is capital G.

The default for the two store locations are /root so this is obviously the issue as we're running the program as ourselves.

A quick check also shows we have the Google Earth cache in a subdirectory of our home in this case my home directory is "kevin" so the directory is:

/home/kevin/.googleearth
In there is the KML files and the Cache subdirectory.

To get everything going nicely just edit the config file (as sudo)

To save typing let's assume I've changed into the /home/kevin/.config/Google directory ?

sudo gedit GoogleEarthPlus.conf

right near the start edit the two lines below to show the path to your cache and main folder i.e the ones you have permissions for as in my example.

[Original]
KMLPath=/root/.googleearth
CachePath=/root/.googleearth/Cache

[Edited]
KMLPath=/home/kevin/.googleearth
CachePath=/home/kevin/.googleearth/Cache

Save the file and start Google Earth and the error is gone

It's clear to see here the original location is /root, if your running the program as yourself then you have no user rights in the /root folder unless the folder is chmod to 777 (or whatever permissions you would need) or your user is in the permissions group, this is not a clean way of doing things and you may as well mess about in the low security environment of Windows if your going down that route.
All that's been done here is to point Google Earth to your folder settings, in this case the cache files in /home/kevin i.e my files, I have permissions on my own files so when I launch the program by simply double clicking the desktop icon I am launching it with permissions "kevin", this all matches up and it means no one has messed about with security to open any holes etc.

In fairness I don't think I would expect the installer to make this change, in fact I would prefer to make it myself and define the KML and Cache paths for these exact reasons and that way I ensure I know where they are and the permissions they will need etc.

Still trucking

It's been a short week with the Passat since the Astra went back to hopefully a watery grave.

Even in the short time I've had it the work run on a mixture of urban roads and winding country roads is giving me 7mpg more than the Astra and almost 5mpg more than the Avensis.

There are a couple of things I've noticed  on the Passat, the windscreen is strangely flat and actually smaller than the Avensis and perhaps the Astra but you only notice this if your hunting around the car looking for obvious things, in reality you will notice the roof struts and doors are pretty substantial, you get the feeling that in a crash this is the place to be.

Cruise control is a little different to the ones I'm used to, every one I've used so far takes the speed up or down about 1 or 1.5mph per click ,this takes it 5mph so I was taken by surprise when I engaged it and clicked it 4 times.

Engine is literally silent when idling, none of the normal tractor noises or body shaking that accompanies most diesels and apart from some noise when gunning it (might check the exhaust as I've no idea what the previous owner did to it) you would not know it's not a petrol car.

Quite a lively character, if you use the throttle gently then it obeys and whisks you along with a purr and a sense of purpose, if you stab it all the way then something is unleashed under the bonnet and you notice several warnings from the traction control if your not lucky.

Lots and lots of torque at low rev's considerably different engine mapping to any diesel I've driven before, you always had to give them some revs to get the power out and get the turbo kicking in or if you had a low pressure turbo you would get power low down then have to rely on the engine revs to deliver the rest.
With this you get a huge surge of power very low in the rev range, encouraging you to change up far earlier than you normally would, in fact you can pop into 4th gear at 40mph or less and accellerate quite comfortably, no engine banging or complaints.
If you resist changing gear and thrust the throttle forwards then it obliges with a force that makes you think somethings just ran into the back of you.
Although not the higest horsepower engine by far the torque is delivered where you want it and I find it's getting me to change gear like I used to 30 odd years ago when I had driving lessons (i.e correctly) and it has enough power to get up steep hills etc without dropping gear, in fact there is a very steep hill on the way to work and i've noticed yound lads in their pimped up Corsa's tear off at the traffice lights, as they hit the hill they start to sag and the Passat just whisps by with hardly a murmor.

It's certainly not as nippy as the Astra but that was perhaps the only thing in the Astra's favor and to be fair there are plenty of cars that will leave the Astra standing so that was a poor mans go kart.

Little touches like the quick warm up in the morning (4 mins to defrost this morning) and you see the difference to the 15 minutes the Vauxhall took, nice instruments and a nice cockpit to be in, you feel relaxed and in fact don't feel the need to drive around gunning the engine, you enjoy the drive and relax more - I've noticed already I woudl rather cruise along now and let everyone else race for pole position rather than drive like fury and get to work feeling i've done 5 laps.

Surprisingly VW now have a 1.6 td engine that delivers exactly the same HP and torque so this would be interesting to drive, I would estimate it's a little lighter so would enchance the feel but the tax bracket is considerably lower so a tempting engine to look at. Most modern diesels are bullet proof anyway you can mess about with throttle mappings and fuel injections etc and put as much power down as you like i've seen shoguns mapped to deliver more than you would feel safe with so I suspect the Germans have simply applied this and proven the engine won't self destruct.
Much like the old F1 days were BMW were building a new F1 engine on a budget, at the rear of a building (so the story goes) was a jumbled mess of engine bodies sitting exposed to the weather and covered in grass etc, in fact the story says the engineers there used to go for a wee wee over them as well.
On a budget they looked at these engine blocks and were surprised that they had no defects, the weathering had toughened up the blocks and effectively removed stress from them, they went on to build the first 1000hp turbo charged engine from these.

Anyone who takes rusty scrap and makes a F1 winner or puts touches like an umbrella slot in the drivers door has only one thing on their mind, a dedication to what they do.
My short time in Germany showed me the people are proud to be German and proud to do things to the best of their ability, the difference sitting in a "cheaper" Passat to the poorly conceived Astra says the Astra had few influences from across the water.

I'm pretty pleased with myself there, I went all the way through an article and never once mentioned the war ... oops