Last Saturday I phoned BT to cancel my phone line at the end of February. It seemed to go remarkably well – I couldn’t cancel in on the Sunday I’m moving out but since I’ll be away for a few days before that I wasn’t too bothered. I left it with them that it would be disconnected on 26th Feb. I have a reference number proving that and everything.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I get home on Monday evening to have no broadband, no phone line. I phone up the faults line this morning and they tell me it’s not a fault and pass me on to Customer Services. The chap there tried to be helpful but clearly wasn’t going to be able to fix it for me. He blamed Openreach for actioning the disconnect early and offered to place an order for a new line. No guarantee when it would be done or if I’d have broadband again when it does come through.
I’ve also heard that the @BTCare Twitter account are quite helpful so I’ve emailed them to see if they can help. When I worked for Bluesock, BT were a constant source of problems for pretty much every client – I thought I was past that but no, just when you think something is going well they manage to fsck it up.
I’ve seen adverts on quite a few bus stops around and about asking “have you thought about Coco Pops after school?”. I even noticed a TV advert for it on some obscure channel late at night – hardly going to catch many school kids. But that’s not the point, is it?
… unfortunately it’s not for their club!
So Ormskirk’s getting a new nightclub. Some of the residents of Ormskirk aren’t impressed that it’s applied for a 3am licence. I’m glad that the Arriba of old is gone – it’s years since I’d been in because the sticky floors put me off so much!
But as I passed by on my lunch break today, one thing instantly struck me – they are advertising an email address – alpineormskirk@googlemail.com – on the side of the building with no mention of a website. This is a badly missed opportunity, poorly executed. Who is seriously just going to email a nightclub, and why would they? A domain name costs ten quid for two years so why advertise a Gmail address? Even if it’s just a holding page with dates of upcoming club nights it would offer something to those searching for more information online. Heck it could even redirect to a Facebook fan page!
If by any chance this happens to rank higher on Google than anything else about the Alpine Club, you can hire me for online marketing advice – my rates are reasonable 
Update: it took about an hour for this post to get top Google ranking for “Alpine Club Ormskirk”.
The cover of yesterday’s Daily Express featured an article designed to cause panic across the UK by putting the idea that the country is going to run out of petrol into the minds of the Daily Express reading masses. Alongside the PANIC STATIONS headline was a photograph of a Shell petrol station and some cars queueing to fill up.
But as is often the case with the Express, things aren’t always as they seem. The picture is of the Shell garage on the A59 in Maghull. It’s the cheapest garage in Merseyside and is always busy. I’ve seen 10-15 cars queueing up on the road to get petrol, but the Express didn’t show this, because it simply wasn’t that busy. When I drove past on the way home from work today at 8pm there was one car waiting for a free pump.
So Daily Express Editor, if you happen to be reading, how about you publish a front page story saying PANIC OVER. No? Of course not – you’re a bunch of dirty hacks.
If you hate the Daily Express and Mail as much as I do then check out Mail Watch and rant to your heart’s content!
Surely it’s not just me that is getting really, really pissed off with the adverts for The IT Room that seem to be at the bottom of every single item in many of the feeds I read. Stop it. Now.
My life outside work is managed by Google Calendar. In fact, I’d prefer if my life in work was managed by Google Calendar as well because GroupWise calendar sucks. I have several different calendars to manage different types of event – Explorers, Birthdays, General etc – but only your primary calendar gets notifications. Until today that is. So imagine my excitement when an announcement came through in Google Reader saying that they’ve introduced SMS and email notifications on secondary and subscribed calendars!
So I logged on to take a look and couldn’t find anything. Went to the Google Calendar Group and started reading some threads but the instructions didn’t seem to work for me. Then I read this. I know I’ve been banging on about “Release Early, Release Often“, but come on, sort it out Google! And while you’re at it, please stop sending me day SMS notifications at 4:30am, and sort out synchronisation with mobile phones, and add to do lists, and…
Published on
2007/03/22 in
Rants and Web.
So I’ve had a bit of a ‘mare with Acrobat 8 recently. The plan was to collect data via an online form but to allow it to be viewable on the original form layout by merging it with a PDF file. I investigated various solutions, mostly commercial products which allowed you to programatically manipulate PDF files until I found this very cool PHP script. It basically creates FDF or XFDF files which can be loaded into a PDF form.
I tried it out a couple of months back before getting side tracked by the Edge Hill Hi site but came back to the code recently. In order for the form data to merge back into the PDF you need to create matching form fields in the PDF and there comes the first problem. At work I have a copy of Acrobat writer but it wasn’t the full version – you could create PDFs not not add forms to them. Rubish. But all is not lost – just in time we got an upgrade to the all-singing, all-dancing Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional! So earlier this week I set about trying to load the FDF (or XFDF) files into my newly created PDF forms.
Could I get it to work? Could I heck! The FDF seemed to be valid, the PDF was valid, the forms seemed fine but try as I might every time I loaded the FDF the PDF would appear with no data in. I tried taking it back to basics and attempting to load the FDF into the PDF while in Acrobat rather than the browser and strangely the import data dialog didn’t have FDF or XFDF listed! After much digging I found a couple of references to why this might be.
It seems that FDF and XFDF are now “old” technology. Forms created with LiveCycle Designer – part of Acrobat Professional – won’t load (X)FDF files. This is anoying for two reasons. Firstly, LiveCycle is actually pretty cool – it automatically detected all my fields when converting from a Word document making creating a form a 5 minute job. Secondly, and considerably more dumb is they’re trying to force users to buy more software! To achieve the same effect as loading an FDF into a PDF you either need:
- Adobe Reader Extensions which costs a lot of money
- Forms Server which costs a lot of money
This is really stupid but kind of what I’d expect from Adobe. The solution is to not use LiveCycle and instead painfully create your form fields manually (which is still a lot easier than the last time I had to do this with Acrobat 4). Anyway, just thought I’d rant about this in case it helps anyone else who’s searching for the solution.
