Fail of the Day - T-Mobile

Every day comes a new tale of electronic incompetence and this one is awarded to T-Mobile. Going abroad we need to cancel voicemail. It can get expensive having voicemail bounced around the world and T-Mobile helpfully advises to call 150 before leaving.

Sadly this gets you into a maze of automated options of the "press 2 now" type, none of which actually get you where you want to be.

But one of the options is to "leave T-Mobile" and suddenly this seems more tempting.

We gave up and switched off all Call Diverts. I hope that works.

E-Commerce

Is it true that any company with "First" in the name is going to be incompetant? I present First Great Western as empirical evidence. The company in this case is First Assist Insurance who say "Our Web Sites have been designed in order to make transacting business simpler for both you, and ourselves.". They offer travel insurance on behalf of the Halifax.

I should have realised that things weren't going to be so easy when the web form didn't accept my postcode with a space in it. The web server at https://www.firstassistinsurance.com
accused me of having four errors
Error in house number
Error in street name
Error in Town
Error in Post Code
The form didn't even have an entry for town and street name. I removed the space from the middle of the post code and it worked.

But several pages of forms later I get

"An internal server error occurred. Please try again later."

Despite the website I managed to get a policy started after three retries.
Somewhat miffed I tried to send some feedback. The feedback form has two entries for
* Policy Number (if applicable)
but sadly none for comments!
Also the submit button fails to work in Firefox, and in Explorer while the button moves when clicked it it gives absolutely no assurance that anything else happened.
Here is the feedback Form

Then when the actual documents were generated they had to be retrieved by download from PDF but guess what. I entered the details exactly as requested and I got
"You have entered some of your personal details incorrectly"
I know my email address and my date of birth. The only other bit of required information was the password and that was in the email. So I had to phone the company so why bother with the web at all? What went wrong? Although I put my details in for some reason it wanted Tammy's details for the login. Why would it do that?

I hereby grant First Assist Insurance's e-commerce website the coveted "Epic Fail" award.

Banned Books

In these days of YouTube, TV and computer games, how do you make children want to read classic books? The answer is brilliantly devious. All that the school needs to do is to make up a list of banned books and let the kids do the rest. The best way to promote something is to ban it. One particular book list contained a fabulous selection including Catcher in the Rye, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Mort, The Evolution of Man, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, The Picture of Dorian Grey. A stroke of sheer genius made the list look like it was chosen by an extreme right-wing creationist.
Students like to break rules so what happened was that one enterprising student set up their own secret lending library with 62 books so far (are there 451 on the list by any chance?). Students flocked to borrow a banned book.
Sadly, it seems to have been a hoax.
Original story here

Then and Now - Saul Junction

This is Saul Junction looking from Sandfield Bridge in about 1965. Not a car in sight.
The Shell Glassmaker tanker carries fuel oil to the Quedgeley depot or maybe the Cadbury's factory.

From Box-G3

Now the big trees are gone and cars are sneaking in on both sides and the Stables Café and Heritage Centre are new features.

From blogpics

Then and now

This is the water wheel at Owlpen Manor in 1964

From Box-G1

And this is it more recently

From Box-G1

Zooming with Canoscan 8800F

This is what the Canon Canoscan can do at maximum resolution. It also shows how well photographed are Peter Coleman's original photographs of Bristol in 1964.
Here is the original picture

From Box-G1

And this is zoomed in a bit on the car at the left

From Box-G1

Then this is tighter on the car and there is a person on the bridge

From Box-G1

Then really tight in and we see a Robinson's Removals van, and three people on the bridge who are sitting, standing and lying down.

From Box-G1

Another slide scanning comparison

The last picture posted wasn't too bad but if you give it some real dynamic range then it falls apart. You'll also see that it crops edges where the Canon loses nothing at all. For £40 it was worth trying it out and people will pay more for it on eBay so we haven't really lost out. But as you can see in this pair the quality is so poor it should only be used for family snaps. This really is the best that I could get from this image.
Aldi Tevion 35mm scanner

From Box-G1

Canon Canoscan 8800F
This was scanned at 300dpi but it will go up to 4800 optical.

From Box-G1

Battle of the scanners

Aldi Tevion/Ion/Optex 35mm Slide scanner vs Canon Canoscan 8800F.

Which one do you think won?

From Box-G1

The flesh tones are nice, the dynamic range manages highlights and shadows well. Maybe the colours are a bit dull but no nasty vices on display. However, the Canoscan can take 8 minutes to grab an image if you opt for the higher resolutions.

From Box-G1

The Tevion is appalling. Highlights are blown out and anything near peak goes blue. Details in the shadows are also crushed out of existence. High contrast edges have spurious colours on them. Amazingly these 5m pixel units sell for £50 or more on eBay. If you care about quality then don't touch it. However, it takes about a minute to load, scan and capture three images so it is fast. It also needs no external power and it is compact and convenient.

Submarines in the Archers

If you caught The Archers broadcast on Radio 4 on Friday 01 May you'll have heard Eddie's metal detector. All that Eddie found was an empty beer can. Why was Eddie so unsuccessful? What he appeared to be using was a series of beeps just like a submarine sonar. It even echoed like a submarine sonar when the can was in range.