Freelance editor and proofreader
It’s one thing to claim disability benefit because you’ve got asthma. It’s obviously wrong to keep claiming it if it goes away. But it’s another thing altogether to keep on claiming it while building up your boxing career. He even got to use a Motability car.
On the other hand, he did lose 91 out of 107 bouts.
So first there was the singular problem of getting Orange to actually accept I wanted to leave. Then there was the problem of having to pay Orange £20 to use my phone on another network.
I’ve overcome those two issues. Last week, I got an email with the unlock code for my phone. I typed it in and my Virgin SIM card now works just fine in my phone. Hooray.
The next step was to change all the settings on the phone so that it can use Virgin’s 3G/GPRS and MMS access points rather than Orange’s. Turns out Virgin has a handy little web page for doing just that: just select your phone model, type in your number and if it’s sufficiently modern, the phone gets a text message that will add the correct settings to your list – no fiddling with menus required.
Of course, Virgin’s MMS services are a bit pants, it turns out – certainly, messages from Virgin to Orange take two days for the message to arrive and when it does, it’s just a text telling you to view the picture online. I’ll have to wait to see if what Virgin to Virgin and Virgin to networks other than Orange are like.
But I’m nearly free of Orange. I’m a bit worried by this bill I’ve just received saying I’m paying for services until the 21st July, when I actually gave them notice on the 14th, but hopefully that’ll be the last thing I have to sort out. In about a week, I’ll ring up Virgin, give them my PAC code and get my mobile number switched over – if I’m going to be paying Orange anyway, I might as well use up as much of my allowance as possible before the contract expires. Once the five to ten days necessary to migrate the number have elapsed, I’ll swap the SIMs, delete the Orange settings and that should be that.
How do I know it’s not going to be that simple? Again.
The BBC is reporting the results of a study that say that people around the world would pay more a greener PC. Personally, I don’t believe any of them. However, there is an urgent need for some way to recycle electronics, judging from the number of TVs and PCs dumped on the roads around recycling banks in my local neighbourhood. At the moment, it’s the tip or nothing for most people, until the EU-mandated buy-back schemes come into force.
I note, however, that ‘green PC’ here only means a PC that contains fewer hazardous chemicals, rather than a fully green PC that uses far less electricity for instance. Would you buy a PC advertised as costing “£100 less per year to run than other PCs”? I’d certainly think about it, particularly after seeing our last scary electricity bill…
You can read more about Green IT in what looks increasingly like a visionary article of mine for Information Age, “Green economics?”.
I’ve a new beta script that’s an add-on for Friendlier Claris It! It’ll be available to anyone who’s registered once the final version is released, but if you’ve already registered and would like to give it a try, email me and let me know.
In case you’d like to know what it actually does first, it allows you to modify the attachment links at the top of messages so that if you’ve moved the attachments, the links will point to the right path again.
Went flat-hunting at the weekend. Took a train all the way down to Orpington, which turns out to be very nice indeed, with good transport links, loads of buses, shops, etc. Sarah had spotted an ad in the Metro for the alto apartments from Fairview: two bedroom flats to buy for £156k – not too bad for London.
Suffice it to say, you get what you pay for. There were two things in the ad that should have warned us in advance. “This exciting restyled development…” and “many of the apartments on the upper levels enjoying panoramic views across open fields…”
What the ad actually meant was “former council tower block, stuck in the middle of an estate with the remnants of burned out cars nearby, given a patchy paint job and tarted up with some nice furniture but not much else”. It was indeed a spacious flat with a lovely view of some trees – in fact, all you could see was road and trees, not sky or fields or anything else – but you know some expenses have been spared when the show home’s doors have been propped open with bits of cardboard.
Plus what was it with councils in the 70s? Separate toilets without their own basins? What’s going on there? Would this not have been a good opportunity to fix this oversight?
Anyway, Orpington looks good. And more to the point, it looks like there are better, cheaper flats around than the alto apartments, so if you’re tempted, spread your net and you should see something more interesting.
A nice little animation, showing how the alphabet evolved from the Phoenician alphabet of 900BC to the modern day form.
CDI-MDM is suddenly hot in the IT world – why is that? Will this translate into big corporate CDI projects? Is it happening already?
Continue reading “Database Marketing: Customer data integration”
It is now more important than ever that businesses understand the status of their multiple software licences: what they have installed, who is using it, how much they are paying and how much of it is legal.
Continue reading “S Magazine: The importance of software licence currency”
Have you seen the Society of Professional Journalists’ new code of ethics? Probably a bit scary to most UK journalists, but there’s a definitely a lot to think about there. In particular, there are various bits on giving the voiceless voices. Which put me in mind of a cunning idea: why not let people provide input into my articles using this blog?
So I’ve set up a new category on the blog, Current Commissions, into which I’ll be posting details of my current commissions, including deadlines. If there’s an article you’d like to comment on, you can either email me or add a comment to the entry. There’s also an RSS feed so you’ll always know when I get a new commission. Hopefully, it’ll be useful.
What are the pros and cons of UTM and how it may be applied to the corporate workspace.
