Free Stuff 4 Free

The worst thing about working from home is that there is no one else there, well unless you count cats & they DO tend to make their presence felt.



So it was great to get out on Tuesday & attend "Free Stuff for Free". Not only were there interesting presentations, great food & coffee, but best of all — people. They were ex-officemates, people from the printers I use often (Printstop), colleagues and clients. A great and stimulating mix!

Thanks to the event sponsors:

The Week That Time Forgot

Monday: Home office assembled. I need only to install the ‘easy install’ modem package in order to get productive.

Faithfully follow all steps as outlined on the PDF file I had wrested from the PC only installation disc.

Connect to internet. No luck. Bugger. Call Helpdesk. On this occasion they were, in fact, helpful. After a lot of dicking round with the existing patch panel and new modem, finally get online. Excellent. Do some work.

Tuesday: Start working. Get phone call from husband to say cops have been called to evict HIM from family office also! The thin blue line couldn’t have been very stretched that day as they managed to spare 4, count ‘em, 4 of the city’s finest to deal. Had to drop everything, call movers and go to office to help move furniture in order to avoid having to post bail for husband.

Come home shattered to find gale-force wind has blown telephone cable from house, so totally isolated vis-à-vis landline and internet . . .


(Weather pic from Netvibes)

Wednesday: All assurances from Telecom fault people come to naught as connection still not restored.

Thursday: Go for restorative and therapeutic morning golf game, after having lain awake a significant amount of night wondering how I was going to get all work done under circumstances.

Return home looking forward to getting back to work, as had been assured that fault was now marked as critical (live wire on road) and would be fixed between 9 and 1, if not sooner.

All assurances from Telecom fault people come to naught as connection still not restored.

Ring them again (on expensive cellphone) to be told that fault has been escalated to supervisor and he will be in contact soon.

Not.

All assurances from Telecom fault people come to naught as connection still not restored.

Friday: Six of those lovely Telecom fault people come and fix connection. Yay! We have lift-off.

When user experiences go BAD

Having being evicted from the family office (don’t even ask — this story makes ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas’ look like ‘Little House on the Prairie’) I needed to relocate to home to work. (Home being a relative term as it’s in a seemingly permanent state of renovation; so isn’t, at present, a particularly salubrious place to live, let alone work).

Anyway, I needed to get reconnected to Broadband so I called Telecom and signed up for their “Broadband Unleashed”.

So the idea is they connect you at the exchange, and they send you out a modem and an installation CD and you install it all, and Bob’s your uncle!

The modem arrived. The package said “PC ONLY”.

Great! I phoned the Helpdesk and asked what happens if you have a Mac? They said that the modem will work with a mac, but the installation CD wouldn’t! But, not to worry, there was a PDF on the CD that tells you how to set it all up on a Mac.

Excellent! A CD I can’t open has the installation instructions on it. I asked if they could cut to the chase and just email me the PDF file, but no, not possible. “It’s on the CD”, they said.

‘Luckily’ I still had access to a PC at the soon-to-be-ex-office, so after a creaky half hour or so, I managed to extract the file, and print it out to bring home for when I got my computer here. . . more of which, anon.

Two questions for Telecom:
1. Why assume everyone uses Windows?
2. What part of making a CD-Rom cross-platform is too difficult for a multi-million $ monopoly (or anyone, for that matter)?

Cool Thing: 2

The Little Friends of Printmaking.
Groovy silkscreened posters and t-shirts & stuff.

Cool Thing: 1

Steve Keene


Photo from SK site

Let's get him here for the Arts Festival!

Gahh! Am I turning into a Fitness Freak??

Sunday: Run, Monday: Gym, Tuesday: Yoga, Wednesday: Corp Challenge, Thursday: Golf, Friday: Gym, Sat: Chill, Sunday: Girly golf day, Martinborough.

Scary. . .

Cool patterns

Ray Fenwick has cool patterns (vector) on sale here at YouWorkForThem.

I love the smell of hot fat in the morning!

Having been roped into entering the 5km Push Play Corporate Challenge on Friday, I thought I'd better do at least ONE training run of equivalent distance before the event (this Wednesday). So after measuring the distance down our street in the car, I set off early on Sunday morning. (The Eastbourne Carnival started at 10am so I wanted to avoid the crowds).

However, they were setting it up as I passed the village, and the Hot Dog van was hotting up.

After the run and on our way into the city later in the morning we had to test their products, thus undoing all my earlier good work!