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Moaning about O2 Ireland customer care June 17, 2009

Well, today I just got off a deeply unsatisfying phonecall from O2 Ireland. I was looking to switch on Data Roaming for the weekend away, and I also had a question regards my upgrade status. Their response was less than helpful:

Data Roaming:

First off, Data Roaming at 50 euro for 50MB per month is, apparently, no longer available on request, as had previously been the case. You must sign up for a minimum of 3 months. Before, I’d been able to switch on data roaming on my account before I travelled abroad, and could switch it off when I arrived home. O2.ie only charged me on a pro-rata basis for the portion of the month for which I had it switched on (nice of them at the time). I travel a fair bit, but not so much that I’d have the need to spend e50 a month on data roaming. That said, their default roaming data rates of 1c per kb can mount up at a terrifyingly rapid rate, particularly when you’ve gotten into the habit of dip-browsing on the iPhone (yes, speaking from a painful personal experience).

Phone Upgrade eligibility:

Next up, on the O2 website, I’d noticed that I was eligible for a gold upgrade, so I inquired regarding my upgrade status. In particular with regards getting the new iPhone 3GS (naturally). Turns out it’s 229 euro on the gold upgrade, and 169 euro on the platinum, which is kinda fair enough, given the US model is priced at $299. I asked what the criteria was for upgrade eligibility, in particular with regards getting onto the platinum upgrade, to be informed that they couldn’t tell me this, as it was business-sensitive information (???WTF??? Hello? This customer wants to know about your business? Wot, no full disclosure?). Again, in the past, this information used to be freely available, printed on glossy brochures and the like. I asked if there was any way they could let me know if and when my upgrade status would be changed to platinum. I was informed it would be a few months, obviously a highly precise and accurate calculation process taking place. Helpfully, I was also told that if my next phone bill was really big (of the order of several hundred euro), that I would be bumped up to platinum. 300 euro worth of bills and another 18 month contract with O2 just to get a 60 euro saving on the phone. Nice. Additionally, I was told that I wouldn’t actually be eligible till next month, as it had only been 11 months since the last upgrade (what? so I’m a wannabe early adopter, don’t judge). Also, this was down to the recession, apparently (this got mentioned several times duyring the call, like an mantra, or a chant to ward off the evil eye).

Bearing in mind that I’ve spent 1776.43 in mobile phone bills over the past 12 months (and 2317.95 over the past 14 months), I’d have thought that some small degree of goodwill should be afforded me as a reasonably good customer. Instead, I’ve come away from the whole sorry affair, feeling very hard done by and pretty damn sulky too.

Opera Unite June 16, 2009

Opera Unite is the latest version of the Opera browser, and it looks like it’s got some pretty cool features, including:

There’s even support for browsing using facial gestures, which sounds rather cool indeed. However, there’s a caveat:

Known Issues

As with any beta release there are some known issues with the current version of Face Gestures. Please read below before reporting a bug.

• Adult Web sites

  Users visiting Web sites that contain adult content sometimes make unconscious facial expressions. If Opera keeps opening Speed Dial and Zooming In and Out, please be aware that this not a bug. It may be useful to disable Face Gestures for a better experience. Also remember that wiping your cache is recommend after visiting untrusted websites.

California photos April 1, 2009

www.flickr.com/photos/lmd64/sets/72157615789175836/ 

This is the HDR set I took in California. San Diego Zoo, Death Valley, and more San Diego pics, taken with my Dad’s Canon Powershot Pro 1 using exposure autobracketing +/-2 and merged in Photomatix

California playlist on the road home March 29, 2009

iPhone DEV introduction February 20, 2009

It’s not mine, but here’s a well-written article on how to get started in iPhone development.

http://furbo.org/2009/02/19/bootstrap/

King of the Road January 21, 2009

Road Records, one of the stalwarts of the independent record shops in Dublin, has announced its pending closure over the next few weeks. It’s a sad, sad day, not just for Dave & Julie, but also for the countless local bands and artists selling their home-produced releases there, who, thanks to the generosity of spirit of D&J, have gotten a jump start on the road to fame, glory and riches beyond their wildest dreams. Always friendly, never the types to be the High-Fidelity eletist style of record-store owners, they and their ilk be missed in a big way.

Here’s the official response from the shop. It’s an good read, but also a big disheartening, to see how downloads & CD-Wows have taken their toll. It’ll be a depressing future, to see shops like this replaced by point-&-clicking. We tend to forget there’s a social aspect to actually stepping out your door and meeting people face to face. No amount of free downloads can replace that.

Lads and Lassies

First of all, thank you all for your kind words about our store and us personally, we really do appreciate it as Road has always been about a personal approach from day one.

I am very sad to say that we will in fact be closing down the store in the next 2 – 3 weeks as things have just become too difficult for us to proceed, we basically have no money left and as it is just a small shop run by Julie and myself we can longer afford to fund it. Belive me if we were at least breaking even each week then we would continue on in hope but as we are continually losing money, and have been for at least six months, we cannot carry on as any losses incurred will have to be personally paid for by us. We have put enough of our own money into the store in the last year just to keep it afloat but I am sad to say we really don’t have anything left at this stage, if we continue to trade we will just continue to lose money that we honestly do not have any more and thus we will end up paying off bank loans for the rest of our lives. I know a lot of people think if you have your own store that you have money behind you but believe me that is just a myth.

Its been an absolutely amazing eleven years for us and neither of us regret one single second of it, when we close I will not be looking back on wasted time in any way.
We have made some amazing friends through the shop and have had the pleasure of dealing with some truly fantastic bands [and their members].
Without blowing my own trumpet I do think Dublin will be a worse place without us as I think from day one we were always the most approachable store for Irish bands and their independent releases, it was one of the main reasons for setting up the store [some of you may remember the fact that I spent most of my youth plugging away in bands with nowhere to sell our music] and we have always tried to be as supportive to local music as possible, mainly because people in this country make music as good as if not better than anywhere else but have never had a proper outlet to sell it. We have always had a policy to make sure to play Irish music in the store so people in here can hear it and understand the quality and diversity of music being made in Ireland. If we heard something that excited us then we would always go out of our way to promote it as much as possible both in the store and on the site.

The reasons for the downturn are many and varied and if there was just one then we could try overcome that in some way but its no longer possible to pinpoint just one.
I will try list some of the reasons I see for the death of the small shop and I really do hope I am not right in thinking that many more will go the same way, I have always been optimistic that this city can sustain a couple of smaller indie shops but I no longer believe that to be true, again, I really hope I am wrong with this opinion but the way people go about buying their music these days does not instill me with too much confidence.

1. Regardless of what I have thought over the years downloading has effected our business, probably more so the illegal side of things, filesharhing and the likes. I speak as a shop on this one but god knows how much small bands suffer because of this aswell.

2. Below cost sellers online, everybody wants a bargain and its hard to take the moral highground on this one, but everytime a purchase is made to the likes of Play etc is a nail in the coffin to the indie store, these online sellers don’t care one hoot about indie bands and music, they just need to sell in bulk and as quickly as possible. They will never put any money or effort back into indigenous music, try asking them to sell 50 copies of a beautiful hand made cdr release.

3. The city centre just does not have the same volume of people walking around it anymore, its a simple fact, less people means less sales. We have noticed a massive downturn in the amount of people visiting the store in the last year.

4. Kids don’t buy music anymore. That sounds like a fairly broad statement to make, I know there are still some out there but we don’t see any young people in the shop anymore so as we lose older customers we don’t gain any new ones.

5. Obviously this country is going through a recession at the moment so it would be stupid of me to claim that this wasn’t having an effect on our business but having said that things were already beginning to change long before that.

6. The deal with selling independent local releases always had to be a two way exchange for us, we never made much money from local releases [and that was never the idea] but we always sought the support of bands. By that I mean if we were selling your music then we would always appreciate the bands making a purchase in the store in return, sadly that did not always happen, and before you jump at me for making this statement I do accept that plenty of you out there were very supportive of us but take if from me we did have quite a lot of bands coming in to us with their own release to sell whilst also carrying a hmv bag with a purchase they had just made, simply because it was cheaper there.

7. The cost of running a store in this city has increased dramatically in the past 4 / 5 years, rents have gone up so much, insurance increased, bank costs and so many other things that over the years it has become increasingly more difficult just to meet our costs on a week to week basis.

8. Whilst this one may not seem so obvious the cost of an average cd or record in the store is now less than it was 5 / 6 years ago and that is a good thing to the consumer but it has also seriously dented our chances of making a living in any way, it just means we have to sell more to cover our costs but as I mentioned with less customers coming through the door that has not been possible.

As you may gather from this piece we are both very very sad about the prospects of closing down our shop, this is our only way of making a living and now we are both back to square one with pretty much no money [and a brand new baby to support], I don’t know what either of us are going to do from now on but I’m sure we will survive.

I say this from my heart that I really hope the last few remaining indie stores will survive in the city and I hope you can take time out to visit them and make a purchase, otherwise these stores will not make it through these times either, and don’t leave it for a couple of weeks, do it today as they really do need your support and its only when they are all gone that you will then miss them.

Again, thank you all for your kind words and to anybody out there that has supported us in any way thank you also, we have had so much pleasure over the last eleven years doing what we do.

Dave and Julie

from http://thrillpier.blogspot.com/2009/01/road-records-to-close.html

A techy non-sequitur post January 20, 2009

It irks me that my Macbook DVD drive isn’t region-free. I’ve a rake-load of DVDs purchased on assorted trips abroad, and I can’t play the damn things. So some stage, I have to try this out (and hope to hell it doesn’t brick the drive):

The Region Free MacBook

I’ve posted these instructions elsewhere but wanted to bring them here. The topic is how to play DVDs from anywhere in the world on your MacBook. The reason you might want to perform this hack is that DVD players are manufactured to only be able to play DVDs manufactured for the local region. That sucks. I buy the MacBook and the DVD andthey won’t let me play the darn thing. I could download the video illegally but I like to collect DVDs (I know, I’m already in the 12-step program). I could rant about this for hours but Wikipedia does a good job of describing the issues.

This is how I performed the hack and links to the software I used. Special thanks to the guys at RPC1.org for making this possible, especially Ben11 who did all the hard work.

Copy this at your own risk but it worked for me.

1. Go to Apple -> About This Mac -> More Info -> Disk Burning to check what firmware version you’re running.

2. Download the software you need. A list of the MATSHITA drives (the appropriately named company whose drives Apple uses in their MacBook and other lines) that can be currently upgraded by this method is available.

3. Apply the flash AT YOUR OWN RISK. Do not interrupt the installation. Restart the computer after the installation has been complted. FYI, my installation paused a couple of times; if yours does too, don’t be tempted to restart the computer or stop the installation before the installation is complete.

4. Use DVDInfoX to confirm that you’re flash worked.

When I did the check, this is what it showed:

DVD Info X v1.0.1, by xvi (xvi@rpc1.org)

WARNING — DVD Info X will only list DVD drives that have some WRITE
capabilities, like combos, DVD-R, DVD-RW, etc…
DVD-ROM-only drives will NOT be listed.
WARNING — You also must eject any inserted medium to list the drive.

Vendor: MATSHITA
Model: DVD-R UJ-857
Firmware: HBEA
RPC-1 (region free)

5. Set and change the region using (the Intel updated) Region X 1.3.

6. Use DVD Player to watch your region free movies and reset the region as need be (using Region X) or use VLC and don’t worry about changing the region (as it doesn’t set a region).

from http://hackthemac.blogspot.com/2008/06/region-free-macbook.html

Edit: took me 3 goes to figure out how to spell “non-sequitur” properly, servers me right for trying to be a smartarse.

Mancini hated by Jazz Purist shocker! January 6, 2009

An interesting article with more than just the usual amount of vituperative ire than you’d expect on the internet for a music review of an easy-listening composer. Unsurprisingly though, it comes from a jazz blog, of the sort which despises the type of popular/populist jazz at which Henry Mancini excelled.

http://www.jazz.com/jazz-blog/2008/9/10/peter-gunn-at-50

One amusing thing about the article is that the author bitches about how Mancini ’stole’ his ideas from various other artists of the era. Eh, hello, anyone producing music for TV/film over the past 50 years has always appropriated musical ideas from popular culture, no big surprise there. By its very nature, soundtracks are cobbled together from the popular music of the day (or at least, from the type of music that we generally associate with the subject matter’s era).

Personally, I think Mancini was superb at what he did, composing genre-defining soundtracks that are still to this day recognisable, from Pink Panther’s cat burglar tiptoeing across the piano, to Thornbirds’ Irish tin whistling in the Outback, to, yes, Peter Gunn’s Private Eye sleazy brass section and mean streets guitar.

5 Stylophone Videos November 6, 2008

As a taster, here’s a selection of tracks with some degree of involvement from the Stylophone…

The rare original video to David Bowie’s Space Oddity
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D67kmFzSh_o]

And for the purists, the album version (easier to hear the stylophone in it)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhSYbRiYwTY]

Kraftwerk’s Pocket Calculator, live in 1981, doing the funky robot.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZt64_XOflk]
 
And the original version
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MobpPTVobOk]

…and my personal favourite, Orbital’s Style (from The Middle Of Nowhere). Love the Kafkaesque video…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1qjdrgVOF8]

DEAF2008 this weekend October 23, 2008

Also, (last post today (probably)), I’m playing at Synth Eastwood’s Laptop Battle in Twisted Pepper (used to be Traffic on Middle Abbey St) this Saturday (Oct 24th) at 10pm (free in before 12pm). Join me, and a host of others, as we bang the shit out of our laptops, live, totally unscripted, and for your enjoyment*.

And I am fully aware that I have used an excessive amount of brackets (parentheses) in this post.

* You, apparently, are a masochist.

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