Dan Rooke’s Blog

It’s been a fairly quiet news couple of weeks. Here’s a few noteworthies.

Becca’s graduation
This was a big occassion for all, except Becca. It was great to finally see all the hard work which she has put in over the last three years being recognised officially.

A rather shaky photo of Rebecca Elizabeth Parnaby BMus (Hons) shaking Patrick Stewart’s hand.

The University’s chancellor, Patrick Stewart, was in attendance awarding the graduates along with some cheap jokes about X-Men III and his one man stand up show in London!

Work
This week I finished my first project working for the University’s School of Education and Professional Development. A simple PHP web application to list and manage notices for students of the summer school held by the department. I used some new features to PHP5 such as the try catch structure as well as experimenting with PEAR DB_DataObject package.

Honeymoon
Becca has now booked the honeymoon! We’re off to Patterdale in the lake district. Next weekend we shall be visitng the Registry Office as well as our Vicar.

Christmas
It’s that time of year again! Well that’s what the retailers would have us believe anyway. Preperations are well under way here, we have even bought our very first tree together. Don’t worry though, it’s not up…yet!

Well maybe it hasn’t been such a quiet couple of weeks. It’s certainly kept me busy enough to not be able to post on this here blog! Hopefully the next post will be sooner, see you next time!

It appears our attempts to escape from Pipex were futile.

Pipex announced today that they were buying out Freedom 2 Surf, our new ISP of one month, for the sum of £10M. Apparently there will be very few changes to the service. The products offered by both companies will be ‘integrated’ and customer will be switched to these new products when their contracts run out.

Having migrated to F2S, we are on a monthly contract. As such it looks like anything could happen and F2S are likely to inherit features of the ‘excellent’ service provided by Pipex. I’d better start looking for an alternative ISP right away…

Uni
I have now started my second week back at University. All has gone well sofar and I’ve even managed to get a final year project proposal down onpaper, all I need to do now is polish it up and submit it.

Job
I’ve applied for several part-time jobs in the search for money. I tookpart in a traffic survey on Saturday in Huddersfield town centre. Thiswas a couple of hours standing in a very windy and cold street markingdown registration numbers and the type of vehicle. Not overly exciting,but money none the less. I will also be joining Black Cat FireworksLtd. in Crossland Moor in the run up bonfire night. This should be abit more enjoyable and will also keep me busy for three weeks.

ISPs
We are now connected to the W3 via Freedom 2 Surf’s services. Thetransition went smoothly, however I am having a little trouble gettinga refund off Pipex for services not rendered - no surprises here. Ihave found that Mozilla Thunderbird’s read receipt notification to beparticularly handy as it reports back exactly who has read an email andwhen, lots of lovely evidence to throw at Pipex which may hurry them up.

Cheaper Calls
And finally, the prospect of phoning Pipex up again on an 0845 numberwas not too enticing. Luckily, I came across a great website whichessentially provides geographical alternatives to these more expensivenumbers. The website is SayNoTo0870.com and comes highly recommended.

I have just received confirmation that my move to Freedom 2 Surf from Pipex has been approved and will take place on 26/09.

We had problems with Pipex/BT when we moved house a couple of months ago now. The actual moving related problems weren’t too bad, but getting hold of customer services and their ’service’ was a different matter!Phoning up to request my MAC code on Monday morning was a good example- I was on hold for an hour and didn’t get through so I gave up. Iphoned back that evening before they closed and got through, howevertheir systems were down! I managed to request my MAC code on Tuesdaymorning after 20 minutes of discussing why I wanted to leave Pipex.

I waited the 72 hours to receive my code, no sign of it. I phoned back asking what was happening, it just hadn’t been processed by Pipex’s staff yet. Ten minutes later I had my MAC code and was signing up with Freedom 2 Surf. All went smoothly having received confirmation of migration by 16:30 yesterday.

I chose Freedom 2 Surf due to their consitently higher rating for Speed, Reliability and Customer Service (the most important!) than that of Pipex as reported by the excellent ADSL Guide. This combined with a better overall package and lower costs equating to a £9 per month saving clinched it for me.

Hopefully the rest of the migration process will proceed smoothly and I won’t have so much trouble with Freedom 2 Surf. If I do, at least I will be on a monthly contract and so free to move on again when I wish.

My very own Red Dwarf family has recently been joined by Holly, an Acer Aspire 5024WLMi. This machine will be used for development, and maybe a bit of gaming, through my final year of my Computer Science degree.

The Dwarf family now comprise of:

• Lister - Main Workstation
• Holly - Laptop
• Kochanski - Becca’s Workstation
• Kryten - File/Print/Web Server
• Cat - Fedora Core 4 Web Server (sand box)

Kryten has recently been rebuilt with a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 for it’s memory bank.