It Never Rains But It Pours

The saga of the Freezone internet finally came to an end yesterday and the Instanta broadband was back online after almost three weeks of being down. During the three weeks, the lads from MCS (our local computer company) have been regular faces here in the office in their attempts to reconnect us to the outside world and when they were not waiting for Freezone to answer the phone they made a few suggestions for improvements to the current network. A new shelf in the computer tower would make sense and take strain off some wires that were a bit overstretched. So Tony arranged for said shelf to be fabricated this morning and when Kevin put it into place he managed to do something to one of the wires which resulted not only in us no longer having any broadband but no computer network. So, having gone from being without email and internet we went to having no computers at all. As I write (on my own laptop) one of the MCS lads is taking our server back for inspection and I can only hope that the problem isn’t fatal. I sometimes think that we are reliving a Charlie Chaplin, Norman Wisdom or M Hulot film here.

Speaking of Norman Wisdom, Marion and I returned to Preston on the train from Euston on Sunday evening. After running over Marion’s toes with his wheeled suitcase, a young man settled into a seat at the adjacent table. It was soon clear that he had consumed rather a lot of alcohol before boarding as he sat down beaming inanely from ear to ear. He proceeded to unpack a large rucksack. The first item to come out was a small electric kettle which he plugged into the computer point. He then knocked the kettle over and soaked the table. Changing his mind about a nice cup of tea he delved back into the rucksack, belched heartily and opened a can of beer. A laptop came out of the bag next quickly followed by a pile of sandwiches and a DVD which he started to play on the laptop. He put headphones on to listen but then asked everyone in the loudest voice imaginable if it was too loud. It wasn’t, he was. Apart from his constant chuckling at his film the rest of the journey was uneventful but the announcement of his stop was pretty late and the scene as he repacked the rucksack with soaking kettle, laptop, soggy sandwiches a couple of hats and his DVD taking each out at least twice and putting them in another section was memorable. As he left he dropped one of his hats and another passenger had to chase after him. Fortunately he was a harmless drunk but if he had been an aggressive one the journey would have been extremely uncomfortable.

So that’s put an end to today’s blog. It’s my birthday today. We’re going to see The Town at the cinema tonight but before then I am going to have to go and work on some accounts at home. Maybe I’ll get a chance to get back to normal when the server is back.

Tesco Cards? You'll Be Rolling In The Aisle

Buying a birthday card used to be a pleasurable experience. A visit to the card shop would present the customer with a wide range of cards for all occasions - birthdays, marriages, deaths and anything else that one might consider worthy of celebrations or condolences. Cards would be funny, sometimes clever, sometimes corny. Sincere thoughts might be found alongside more dubious messages. There are fewer card shops around today as the big supermarkets continue their inexorable rise to retail denomination. So,yesterday, in search of a birthday card for my daughter's partner Duncan I found myself in Tesco. The card aisle should be given an x rating. Rows of cards offered me the opportunity to insult poor Duncan by suggesting he was old,flatulent,balding or alcoholic (or often a combination of all four) or to amuse him with jokes that Roy Chubby Brown might consider too near the knuckle. Duncan is a scuba diver so my eyes were drawn to a card depicting a diver in full diving gear only to find a crude joke about cunnilingus no less. Another depicted an old man hiding his genitals in a popcorn bucket he was about to share with an old woman(so original - a joke made in Diner in 1982) and one hilariously made a connection between a girl and a crab.I don't want to sound like disgusted of Tunbridge Wells - I can laugh at any joke if it's funny - but sorry Tesco, your (huge) card selection stinks. And if you are reading this Duncan, don't worry I left the superstore empty handed - you aren't old, flatulent balding or alcoholic.

As the saga of the lack of internet rumbles on for yet another day, yesterday turned out not to be "today" as Freezone had hoped and I finally gave up and on 29th September we should be back up and running with Be There who have been recommended to us by our friendly IT Crowd at Mainframe Computer Services. We have managed with a dial up connection for the past week but it's painfully slow and means that we haven't been able to send emails with attachments of any size and downloading orders from web based ordering systems has been extremely difficult. If you run a business you might learn from our experience. Imagine how you would manage without broadband for a day. Now think about three weeks. Doesn't bear thinking about does it? If it happened to us it could happen to you so maybe the insurance of a second broadband line and provider would make business sense. That's what we're going to do and a few hundred pounds a year is not much for peace of mind.

We're off down to London tomorrow to celebrate my birthday. We've got a busy weekend ahead of us and are going to a matinee performance of The Railway Children at Waterloo Station theatre and then a dinner with Paul and Josephine at the Dorchester Grill. We're staying at the County Hall Park Plaza (above). I mention all of this as each of these bookings was made after following recommendations on the internet. Trip Advisor members rank the Park Plaza 44 out of 1058 London Hotels, 1654 Top Table members have given the Dorchester Grill a massive average score of 8.6 out of ten and The Railway Children has glowing reviews on many websites. So when it's working like it is here at home (thanks BT), broadband is now perhaps life's most important and most useful tool.

As we are travelling by train I'll have plenty of time for the Saturday papers. I've started buying the Times on Saturday as well as the Guardian as the Times has a superb quick crossword that will guarantee to keep me quiet for the journey. I've never been into cryptic crosswords but these puzzles are really entertaining with the challenge not being whether or not you can finish them but how long it takes to do so. This is one area where the internet can't beat printed media.


And where would the internet be without YouTube? Here's a little film for the weekend.

Samsung have done it yet again.
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We need a MAC and it's not even raining

The saga of the failed broadband will be into its third week tomorrow and, whilst we have been promised that it will be back on Thursday, we aren't exactly confident. This sorry situation has highlighted a number of serious problems in the broadband system. Somewhere down the supply chain a company called Aspire Internet had a "contractual dispute" which resulted in their broadband supply being switched off.You can't run a business today without broadband so we contracted with a new supplier. But you can't move to a new supplier without a code known as a MAC from your current supplier. But as the current supplier Freeezone can't get a MAC from Aspire, the new supplier BE can't switch the broadband. I have spoken to OFCOM, Freezone and the new suppliers and nobody can get around this problem. Short of getting BT to install a new line there's not much we can do other than accept Freezone's assurance that it will all be back on Thursday at which point we will be off like a shot to the new company. We also need to get a back up supplier as it is intended that all our accounting system will be run on broadband via our Australian group offices one day in the future and this episode would have left us with no book-keeping for two weeks. Time for OFCOM to sort this MAC situation out as hundreds of Aspire customers have been without broadband for a fortnight.



I'm following Kirsty Allsop on Twitter.I've always enjoyed her property shows with co-presenter Phil and it seems that they are working on a new travel programme at the moment.She's currently campaigning on Twitter against homework for young school kids and I have to say that I totally agree with her.Our children had no homework other than reading until they were into secondary school and it didn't do them any harm.They were encouraged to enjoy themselves after school and given as many books to read as they wanted and allowed to watch telly too although they tended to enjoy playing and reading more and only tended to watch the programmes they loved.It was before computers really took of so I don't know how different it would be today but who can forget the enjoyable times we had with books and audio books to quote "The Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark" - "That was nice - what's next?"



We went to see Tamara Drewe at Vue last night. A break from the usual Wednesday night routine as Liverpool are playing at Anfield then and I somehow subscribed to buy tickets for League Cup games. The film is based on Posy Simmonds graphic novel in The Guardian and it was a very Guardian sort of comedy based around a literary retreat full of middle class aspiring writers. It was a bit of a rom(p) com and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Posy Simmonds observes the British middle classes with uncanny accuracy and of course,as always with her,there is much more to it than just straightforward comedy with an underlying Thomas Hardy theme (echoes of Far from The Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbevilles)running throughout.The cast is very strong and there is a brilliant performance from young Jessica Barden playing tearaway teenager Jody.Do catch it if you can.

A dog plays a big part in Tamara Drewe. I've never been a dog owner and people sometimes think I am a dog hater although that is not true. I like other people's dogs very much as long as I don't have responsibility for them for 365 days of the year. Who could resist a dog like this who gets a little bit confused about a trip down an escalator?



Taking the dogs theme one step (ok fifty steps) further are the wonderful OK Go. You will all know OK Go as the group who made the famous treadmill video on YouTube and then the paint video last year. Here's their latest. I hope that one day they will record a song that gets played on its musical merits alone but until then let's all marvel in the wonder of their videos. Thanks to Glinner on Twitter for pointing me in the direction of both of these little canine wonders.

Beyond A Joke

I'll start by saying that I am not blaming our broadband service provider Freezone Internet for the mess that we currently find ourselves in. They have been victims of problems upstream of themselves but unfortunately, as they are the people who supply our service, it is up to them to sort things out and yesterday, after four business days in which normal service has failed to return, they have been unable to do so and we lost patience and have switched to a new provider. But before we can get the new service we have to get a MAC code from our current provider and at the time of writing they have been unable to provide us with one. So if you have been emailing Instanta without response please accept our apologies. We know that there are almost 1,000 emails stashed away somewhere in Cyberspace and our IT people have been working flat out to retrieve them. I am hopeful that they will be on our PC's when we get into work this morning but please don't email us if at all possible until we report that normal service has resumed - best guess at the moment is that it will be some time next week before the broadband is back up and running.





Taking a break from the mayhem that is a business without email and internet running properly, Marion and I had a great weekend at the Bell in Skenfrith down on the Welsh Borders. We were joining old friends in celebrating their wedding anniversary and fortunately the weather was kind although, as you can see, it was extremely windy. Our friends are very keen ramblers and, not wishing to spoil things, I joined them on a three mile walk. Fortunately they chose an easy path and my hip held out although I am glad that it was three miles and not four or five.



Last night we went to see Stephen Fry's show at the Royal Festival Hall. But we didn't go to the Festival Hall. Instead we watched as it was relayed live by satellite to the FACT cinema in Liverpool. It was an interesting event. There were a couple of glitches in the transmission but only for a matter of seconds and watching the event in a packed cinema was somehow more like being there than watching on TV at home. It was a fascinating show and we could only marvel at Fry's ability with words. His nostalgic take on a sixties childhood rang very true with us as we are just a couple of years older than him and we could empathise with everything he said.



Another (convoluted) Instanta brush with fame last week as Laurence Llewellyn Bowen breezed into Southport to record a TV programme. Our store keeper Peter Barlow's wife Angela and daughter Heidi bumped into Laurence and he was happy to have his photo taken with them. Nice one Laurence - true celebrities always have time for the public who have made their celebrity.

I'll finish now. Got to get to the office. No more contact with the cyber world until we get home tonight.