TheMorningFlight.com

I was telephoned a few months ago by BT asking me if I would be willing to switch to them as my ISP. I said I would not. When asked why not I said it was because they are well known for their terrible customer service.

The following is an example of a skirmish with BT hell. Bear in mind that to speak to someone at BT you first have to play the game of ‘find the phone number’ on the BT web site. Next is the hateful experience of choosing options on the phone “If you wish to … please press button 2″. You would think a company whose business was telephony would try to avoid anything that would make using telephony an unpleasant experience. You would think they would want to be an example of excellence in the telephone experience.

I have two telephone lines at my house from the days of dial-up internet when my main office was there. I recently decided I only need one line so I would like to switch my broadband ISP from one line to the other. I have used Freedom2surf for a few years now and have found their customer service very good.

Freedom2surf told me I must cancel my ISP on the one line and order a new one for the other line. Sounds simple. I made the order and awaited developments.

19 February 2010 - From Freedom2surf, email
After conducting a further investigation in to the post code discrepancy with your order, we have deemed the difference to be too great between the post code you have supplied for 01904XXXXXX and what BT say the post code is.

You have given us: YO32 XXX. BT say the post code is: YO3 8TJ

If you are positive the details you have supplied are correct, then please contact BT and have them fix their records. Once this has been done please let us know by reply to this email or by calling.

19 February 2010 - Me, email
Dear Freedom2surf

I checked my postcode on the Royal Mail postcode searcher and the post code I gave you is correct for my address:

XXX XXXX XXXXXXX
YORK
YO32 XXX

I have just spoken to BT customer services (a lady in India called Rashmi) and she insisted that the postcode I have given to you is the correct one for my BT account, YO32 XXX. She was unable to explain where YO3 8TJ could have come from.

Is there anything else I can do?

Regards

Graham

22/02/2010 - Freedom2surf, email
Dear graham,

Thank you for contacting the freedom2surf Provisioning Team.
We are unable to process your order as BT hold the post code YO3 8TJ for this line. You will need to contact BT again to get them to update their systems. If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us.

Many Thanks and Kind Regards

22/02/2010 - Me, email
Dear Freedom2surf

I have just spoken to BT (1:50pm, spoke to Lisa XXXX) and they say they have no authority over BT Wholesale. They admit that BT Wholesale has the incorrect postcode for my address but say that my new ISP are the ones that must have it corrected as I am not a customer of BT Wholesale.

22/02/2010 - Me, telephone
I telephoned Freedom2surf and they said they were not yet the customer and had no more authority over my telephone line that I did. They said BT had simply not updated the tags on my line and should update them. They said the postcode discrepancy was too great to ignore (YO3 instead of YO32). They said they would try BT again]

22/02/2010 - Me, telephone
I telephoned BT and after waiting, spoke to a very pleasant man in India who eventually said he could not help me and said I must speak to a different department. He put me through to someone else, an English voice, and I started to tell my story again.

As I told my story, sitting in front of the computer, an email came it:

22/02/2010 - Freedom2surf
Dear graham,

Thank you for contacting the freedom2surf Provisioning Team.

We have been in contact with BT and they have now updated your postcode to YOXX XXX in their systems. We have therefore resubmitted your order for processing.

If you have any further queries please do not hesitate to contact us.

Many Thanks and Kind Regards

22/02/2010 - Me
I am currently skipping with delight. Relief? I hope so, it has not been connected yet.

The York Press phoned me and asked me about Lent and they asked would I be giving anything up for Lent. I think the reporter was a bit surprised by my replies. See the York Press article by clicking here.

Lent observance is not an important part of Pentecostal expression of faith and spirituality. I am not sure why that is so. I have been thinking it over. If anyone thinks they have an answer I would be interested to hear it.

It may be because Pentecostalism is, in part, an attempt to rediscover a very early type of Christianity. Pentecostals tend to try and recapture the sort of primitive New Testament style of Christianity, before Lent was observed. I say ‘attempt’ as I realise that it is not something that is possible to accomplish completely. These are different times, with a very different culture from those ancient places. However, people are much the same.

Some Christians are suspicious of Lent as they see it to be too similar to an ancient Babylonian tradition of celebration using baked cakes like we do with hot-cross buns.

I do not want to knock anything to do with Lent but I do think that commitment and dedication should not be confined to a particular moment in the calendar, I aim for it all year round. There is also the fact that Christians go through spiritual seasons that have nothing to do with the seasons of the calender. Some Christians will be going through a ‘winter’ time of the soul when others around them are experiencing the exuberance of a spiritual ’spring’. We must not envy the experience of another but learn from our own ’season’ and find contentment and fulfilment in it.

One value of the celebration of Lent of course is that it is something a group or community all do together. Like a community pilgrimage. Perhaps in our age of individualism such corporate acts of spirituality as Lent may take on new expressions to fit our time.

I still cannot get on with the keyboard (with the space bar in the wrong place). Due, probably, to years of using a compact keyboard of the sort on the Palm Treo, Nokia E71 and E72.

Apart from the keyboard though, the N97 is a good phone.

The operating system is Symbian and until recently I would have thought that OS had a short life expectancy. Now Symbian has gone Open Source I think it will rise again. It is after all an OS that works, can run more than one application at the same time, is stable and is easy on the eye.

So what is good on the N97? I watched the already installed Shrek trailer and it looked great on the small screen. I could see this phone making a good travelling companion as it is also a good reader for ebooks. If you are reading Nokia, I think a good ebook reading programme would be good. There are ebooks ready to download that are combined with the reader, but what about a reader that can cope with various ebook formats? I installed MobiReader but it lacked the style that a good reader programme could make of the quality N97 screen.

Something that makes excellent use of the N97 screen is ViewRanger a GPS programme that uses Ordinance Survey maps.

Some phone applications are just toys, not so with the scanner app that comes pre-installed on the Nokia E72.

I am continuing my trial of the N97 Mini and was surprised to see this fantastic application missing. I would have thought it would have worked well with the quality camera of the N97

The scanner is an amazing tool for study or business. By holding the E72 over a page of text the text can be converted by the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software into text that can be saved and inserted into documents or emails.

This is how to do it:

Open the scanner programme in the ‘office’ folder. It will then look as though the phone has gone into camera mode but there will be a small two choice menu on the right. Choose the bottom one which is the OCR. Now hold the phone over a piece of text (you can fit in about 30% of an A4 sheet of paper) and click.

Wait until the software has finished processing and you will see a screen full of text. Now what to do with it? First I choose edit from the menu at the bottom left of the screen. I then select exit from the bottom right option. When I am asked if I would like it to be saved as a note I say yes. I could have edited before saving as a note but I prefer to get it saved first. I can then edit the note making it ready to insert into a document or for emailing.

At first I tried to email the scan result directly as that is one of the options, but I found that not all of the text was getting in to the emails so I reverted to the above method.

I had the same app on my E71 but the results were not as reliable, perhaps due to the E71 only having a 3.2MP camera compared to the 5MP of the E72.

If you have an E72 and you have not yet tried this, give it a go. More useful than some of the toys out there.

It arrived, the trial Nokia N97 Mini. Though it came charged, I was sitting working at my computer at the time so could use the USB charger. A plug-in charger came with it but as it only has a two-pin shaver plug I can not use it until I get my hands on an adapter.

It is small enough to be a handy phone but is a bit heavier than I was expecting as my E71 and E72 are both lean and light. The build quality is what I would expect from a Nokia, excellent.

I had thought it was the sort of phone I would like to own but quickly realised that it is not. I still prefer my Nokia E72.

Odd Keyboard

Before I had the E72 and the E71, I had a Palm Treo. So I have got used to a small querty keyboard with that standard layout. The slide out keyboard of the N97 Mini is not as as easy to use for me. I keep making mistakes, and it is slow going. The BIG problem is that the space key is in the wrong place. Who thought of that!? It is not in the centre but at the right hand side. It is just not where it should be. I do not find it quick or intuitive. It must be even worse for a left-handed person!

Wifi? I shoved in my SIM, which has a Vodafone Blackberry contract, so I can go online. So far though I can not get on to the wifi router in the office. I kept entering the WEP key but it didn’t get there.

First download was the free Nokia satnav navigation software. It is high quality and easy to use.

There are three of us in the office today so I handed it over to John to play with. But John uses such a bog standard phone anything would impress him. He went on Facebook before passing it over to Matt. But John hadn’t signed out so Matt was able to make a rude comment about John on his own Facebook.

John ready for Facebook

Success, Matt has just got it to log on to the office wifi router. Wonder why so temperamental?

There are many flavours of Linux, these flavours are known as distributions or ‘distros’. My favourite distro is Ubuntu although I have tried a few over the last ten years.

I have put Ubuntu on a few netbooks, but for those who are new to this sort of thing there are some distros especially for netbooks. For the EeePc you might like to try EasyPeasy (get it? Eeesy Pc) which has been made to be very easy to install. Jolicloud is really easy to install too butg it has some quirks. Linux Netbooks is a site especially to help netbook user with Linux and you will find an introduction to even more distros there.

For most netbooks my preference would be to use the normal desktop/laptop distro of Ubuntu, even though Ubuntu do a special netbook remix. If the netbook has very little power or memory the OpenOffice suite (like Microsoft Word) can be replaced with Abiword, an excellent, lightweight word processor.

But could the new kid on the block be a future winner? MeeGo is the result of Intel and Nokia working together to produce a lightweight Linux distro that will work not only on netbooks but on small smart phones too. With these two giant companies behind MeeGo, it is likely to make a big splash.

Now this is a really cool free mobile phone application. It turns your mobile into a bluetooth remote control for your laptop.

This only works if your computer runs on Linux. If you machine is a Mac you will have your own solution. If your machine runs on Windows you have enough problems already but you could try this. My advice to Windows users is to install Linux so you can choose, whenever your machine starts up, whether to run it with Windows or Linux. See previous post here and here about about how to do it.

Back to Anyremote. For Ubuntu users the programme for your laptop is already in the Ubuntu Software Centre ready for free download. If you use Kubuntu use the one beginning with ‘k’ and if you use Ubuntu use the one beginning with ‘g’ (for the Gnome desktop environment).

When installing, it should have downloaded the phone .jar file too, but if not you can download it separately from here. Then you simply transfer it to your phone and install it.

To you keep up to date with latest versions you can add the following to your software sources: ppa.launchpad.net/anyremote/ppa/ubuntu

On my E72 it did not seen to work to begin with and every time I pressed the centre button the app disconnected from the laptop. Then I discovered the trick. The up, down, left and right action is as normal but to active any selection it is the phone call button that has to be pressed. Don’t know if this is only the E72 or not.

Now I can do presentations remotely or changed tracks on the music player or…

Try it and enjoy.