Matthew1471's ASP BlogX

Ok I was going to blog about personal matters but it's kinda hard to considering my Internet has been up and down every 5 minutes for the past 2 evenings (completely baffling the NTL engineer as the signal levels, SNR and signal powers have been fine)

Now I know a hell of a lot of people moan about NTL, there's even a forum "NTHELL" devoted to slagging them off... Well I’m going to be different and post that they actually are not as bad as people claim, infact I wish more customer service departments were like there’s...

It wouldn't surprise me at all if NTL's customers who have ever winged about them are just plain rude or arrogant. Whenever I have had to ring NTL (Not that often surprisingly) I have shown them respect and been patient and they have always resolved the matter quickly and effectively.

NTL's support staff also have the skill (unlike BT's who I recently had to ring on someone else's behalf) to switch out of "The caller is an idiot, lets tell him "see that little icon on your desktop"" despite me telling the BT Support guy that I'd checked the event log using MMC and the Network connection service was disabled and reporting access denied when I tried restarting the service which could have been the reason for the BT Open World software refusing to acknowledge the modem was connected. With NTL all I had to do was drop in a few words like "Internal Modem Diagnostics", "UBR", "TRACERT" and "Domain Controller" and we were soon on friendly terms "Sorry a lot of people claim to have a spyware PC I guess?" "Oh you'd be surprised, even my mate swears blind he has no spyware, we ran it on his machine and found 30 infected processes obviously you'd know all about how well it can hide".. "absolutely" I say.. all this at UK Local rate, NTL are even good enough to provide a 24 hour support line (Yes that's right, you can even ring at 2am if you so desire to report your net outage)

I firmly believe NTL have invested in the right technology, not only does my modem support proper Ethernet connections (needing no software or drivers) but it also (once the drivers are installed) can run on USB without any "helper apps" that are dependent on any extra services... it just plain works... and if the lights aren’t flashing in quite the right sequence, I ring them up, explain the signal levels might be low again and they run a few diagnostic pings and then book an NTL engineer for the next day... what could go wrong with that?

After reading two interesting posts which I accidentally got onto by running a google search on "Colin Matthew1471" and returned http://blog.apple66.co.uk (A fellow ASP BlogX user) I couldn’t resist laughing to these 2 sites here and here

This entry should have gone on Friday 22nd October 2004, but I kept it stored up on my Palm and forgot about it

Today surprised me, this girl in lower sixth said hello to me and smiled, as I was walking to lesson and I like didnt even know her, first time I tried talking to her she was quite abrupt and then there she is today saying hello and smiling. Then later when I was in the sixth form library she tried involving herself into my conversations.

Jen was in a much happier mood

I rather than helping nick give up smoking encouraged him to go to the shop to buy "fags" because I had an hour to kill and fancied a walk, he seemed happy I didnt lecture him on the badness of smoking and a little shocked I encouraged him instead. Debra came along, rather funnily she stuck to my left the whole time, away from Nick and addressed me and Nick stuck to my right and had conversations with me, I found that kind of funny and I guess Nick did too because he asked me after what made Debra want to come because usually she hated going anywhere with him, heh I didn't get all bigheaded and suggest maybe she likes my company but I was thinking it.

When I was sat in the empty sixth form library miss winslade noticed I had my Palm portable keyboard out and was typing away, "Your enjoying yourself there arn't you"... I smirked, I thought about saying "Yes i'm *enjoying myself* a lot" but thought better of it, I mean she's a teacher! she wouldnt pickup my dirty comment anyway (let alone appreciate it) she then went on to say "36 computers in this room you know and you just have to be different" I laughed and replied "Your making me out to sound so stubborn!"

I went on a business field trip to the library, got back 2ish, went home, did odds and ends.

You just gotta love RP4, (Bolded for maximum effect)

[21:54:22] ! Matthew147: I will use your site I promise
[21:54:24] RadicalPuppy: Please
[21:54:30] ! Matthew147: I've got it on my 2do list
[21:54:36] ! Matthew147: along with everything else im being harassed
over
[21:54:41] ! Matthew147: like *HINT HINT* Mike
[21:55:05] Mike - www.l: ?
[21:55:10] Mike - www.l: *didn't get the hint
[21:55:15] Mike - www.l: oh
[21:55:19] RadicalPuppy: (you bug him)
[21:55:19] Mike - www.l: *me just got it
[21:55:26] RadicalPuppy: hang on..
[21:55:38] ! Matthew147: lol
[21:55:42] ! Matthew147: thanks RP4
[21:55:49] RadicalPuppy: Heh
[21:55:51] ! Matthew147: (for pointing that out subtly )

Now praise is few and far between, but critisizm is rife...

"While I didn't experience the horror of my machine not firing up properly as has been the sad fate of some people, the number of applications that are broken by this patch are amazing. "

http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/091304backspin.html

So the topic for today of todays comments are how many of you can praise SP2? and how many of you actually do think it sucks? Did it really break any of your applications?

I've been using SP2 for well over a month now and can largely conclude it's a good thing, but we did have the odd trouble of graphics redraw glitches in Word 2000, but that could be because i'm too stubborn to upgrade to Office XP and it's difficult to tell, but I think recently installing something (Maybe updating Graphics card drivers or something) has fixed that bug as far as I know, fingers crossed

Fire away!...

I'm at Hannah's house and we're both exchanging webcams, by the way RP4 says Hi


and so does Adam