Picture Perfect Morning

I've downloaded a blogging app for the iPhone called Blogpress. I figured with more mobility I might be able to post more regularly, especially as I was going away on business for a few days last week and would have copious hours to fill.

This turned out to be a false hope, only surpassed in its naivety by the fact that myself and two colleagues packed our golf clubs - these remained locked in the cars for five days.

So we had a pretty scary rollout - but it was the biggest hardware and software release we'd ever attempted. In amongst the 60+ hours spent getting the platform stable I did manage to visit my hotel room for an occasional sleep and snapped this picture from my window of the Shropshire Union Canal and the mountains of North Wales beyond.



Shame. It looked like a lovely day for a round of golf.




-- Post From My iPhone

Oh To Be In Love

I've got to say I'm very impressed with O2 now (see what I did there?). After the initial iPhone debacle, I've had no problems with them since, so I've taken the plunge and changed my ISP from Demon to them aswell.

Having been with Demon for yonks (probably 15 years or so), it was surprisingly unemotional leaving them - after all I was paying £23 a month for download speeds under 1Mb, suffering customer support from Bangalore (seldom needed thank goodness), and to cap it all they've just been bought by Cable & Wireless, our principle competitor for the product I've helped develop during the past seven years.

Having taken the plunge, migrating to O2 was very easy; Demon issued the MAC code without any fuss, and from then on I was kept updated on the progress of my order by text and email on a regular basis. The wireless router was delivered a few days in advance and connected to my existing network without any problems, then last Monday, as promised, the connection was transferred to O2 - a simple case of moving the phone line from my wired router to the new wireless one. A few tweaks on the PCs and everything was back up and running - including browsing the net on the iPhone while I'm sat on the loo.

Despite the fact that Demon ask for a month's notice, and invoiced accordingly, they cancelled my account that evening, so I've been unable to check the old rhayader mail, and it is now bouncing. I think the only mail that went there was spam and a few mailing lists that I don't care about, but pretty poor of Demon nevertheless.

During the course of last week, the connection to O2 "trained" itself to establish the best bandwidth available. By this weekend it had settled on up and download speeds over twice as fast as on Demon - given that we live two miles from the exchange I guess that's pretty good. Best of all, as an O2 mobile customer, I get a £5 per month discount, bringing the fee down to £7.50. And customer support is a freephone number to UK based staff.

Now that I've finally adopted wireless networking I've reconfigured the Roberts Internet Radio to connect that way too. I've shied away from wireless until the security improved, something that the WPA2 protocol seems to address well, but unfortunately I discovered that the Roberts only supported the rather weak WEP standard. Happily, selecting the update firmware option on the radio downloaded the latest updates that includes WPA2 support.

Long Time Coming

Five weeks on from the iPhone debacle, I finally have one. So this
will be brief - I want to see if I can send an email straight to
Blogger.

Communication Breakdown

Like thousands of others I received a text message from O2 yesterday morning to let me know that the online upgrade shop was now open for those of us eager to upgrade to the Apple iPhone 3G. Since my Sony Ericsson K750i was starting to show its age, and I'd never got around to getting an iPod, I thought this was an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Needless to say the O2 website was a little slugish as I navigated through the screens; typing in my current mobile number, waiting for an upgrade code to arrive via text (which for some reason I didn't have to enter onto the web page), and finally providing my credit card details before pressing the "Send" button. Well at least I think I pressed it, as there was no immediate feedback, just the same screen staring back at me. After a couple of minutes it jumped into life with the message "There has been a problem, blah, blah, blah, please try again". So I did; several times.

After a few similar outcomes I decided to do something useful with my life for an hour or so, before returning to find a page saying the upgrade shop was currently unavailable. Mmmm, surely O2 knew there was going to be a huge demand for this launch and could have taken steps to prevent the meltdown.

I checked back a few times during the day to find the same message, before finally being presented with a page saying that the entire stock of iPhones had sold out. Well, obviously I was unlucky; I'm sure that we all had an even chance. At least that's what I thought until I asked around colleagues and friends this morning; I know it's not a major controlled survey, but of the five people I know who tried to order yesterday, two were successful and three were not. Those two are currently customers of other networks, while the three losers are already with O2.

Obviously a coincidence.