What’s IT all about?

…to arrange broadband in a new house before I’m actually living there ?

You may be aware that I will be moving house soon. If not don’t worry, it’s not that important to anyone but me and my family Being a brand new house, it doesn’t even have a physical phone line installed yet so the day after we move in BT will attend to run a wire across to the house and set up our new number.

(I must admit that arranging the new line with BT was a pretty painless process, and I even know what our new phone number will be before anything else has happened. A far cry from some of the business dealings I’ve had with them. Anyway, well done BT…so far.)

So, thinking that having exchanged contracts on the new house and committed to having a phone line installed, I called up my ISP of choice to ask for broadband, pretty please. I was a little shocked to hear that I can’t even place an order until the phone line is active, and once it is active I will have to wait 6 days for broadband to be activated. In a way I can understand why, after all it’s still possible that the house move will fall through or there will be a problem with the phone line installation. However, looking at it from a business point of view, wouldn’t it be better for them to sign me up rather than tell me to call back. After all, I may find a different supplier in the interim and take my custom there instead ! Additionally, I’m sure that some of the ‘paperwork’ could be sorted while we’re waiting for the phone line. And if a problem did occur, then simply cancel the order. How difficult can that be ?

The thought has occurred to me that BT would probably sign me up and enable broadband at least as quickly as the other supplier, but I have an issue with being tied into a 12- or even 18-month contract.

As mentioned a while ago, Four Lakes is moving from the Surrey/Hants border to Kent, now confirmed for 24th May. As part of the whole operation I will be moving house, which has been described as one of the three most stressful activities that can be undertaken. This particular move, so far, has been probably one of the smoother one, and yet there have been negotiations over work needed on part of the roof, and pressure from our vendor to move in a certain timeframe. Still, we have managed to exchange contracts successfully, and the moving date is set.

One of the painful aspects of moving house, I have found, is sending out change of address notices to all and sundry. Email has eased that problem somewhat, and online services like Plaxo have the potential to help too, but notifying the myriad of companies we deal with in our personal lives has always been a chore. Whether it’s the utilities, banks, credit cards or whatever, finding the right address to send your ‘Please update your records with our new address’ letter is most definitely a chore.

However, I came across a service the other day that has given me some significant help with this particular problem. Iammoving.com asks you a few pertinient questions (old and new addresses, moving date, etc.) and then asks you to choose from a list of companies to inform, categorised by type. Once you’ve built your list and, if necessary, added company-specific information (such as your bank account number) to some of the selections, you can press the button and electronic notifications are sent to your list. Or, at least, electronic notifications are sent to some of the companies on your list. The others produce a pdf which you can print and stuff into an envelope.

So it’s not as easy as it might be, due no doubt to the reluctance of certain companies to accept electronic change of address notifications, but still a useful service. If you’re moving house then it’s worth a look.

The Ferris Research blog carries a story about a woman in Denver (Colorado) who had a visit from the local Sheriff’s office to forcibly remove her PC. Why? Because Ms Winkler’s PC had been infected and been used to make fradulent purchases online.

This got me thinking. Should we require people to have a licence to own a PC? After all, in the wrong hands it can be used to cause a lot of damage to businesses and reputations, and inflict a lot of inconvenience on the general public if used to distribute spam. Licencing puts PC’s in the same category as cars and guns (in those countries where you can still buy one) which may be overstating it’s capacity to cause actual physical harm, although I’m sure it would hurt a bit if dropped on your head! But requiring a licence may cause people to think twice about leaving it wide open for use as a spam relay or bot.

In reality it isn’t going to happen. For a start it would need to happen world-wide to be effective. But it was an interesting thought

If you’re of a certain age then you will probably have seen, and may even have owned, one of these calculators…a Sharp EL-508A. Back in my schooldays in Ireland, they were very popular. And after I met my wife and we moved in together I was pleasantly surprised to see she not only had been the owner of the calculator pictured above, but still had it and used it pretty frequently. In fact, she originally got the calculator in Year 4, so she would probably have been 9 years old, and at the time we met the calculator would have been about 13 year old. Well, that was about 15 years ago, and in the intervening years the calculator has been used pretty regularly.

Until, that is, a couple of months ago when the gradually fading display refused to fire up any more. The general consensus was that it had given up the ghost, it was an ex-calculator. It isn’t the only calculator in the house so there was no overriding need to replace it immediately, and so since then we have left it lying around, loathe to discard it after 28 years of sterling service. Today I picked it up and, being the curious soul that I am, decided to have a peek inside. A bit of a post-mortem, I guess. So I opened it and saw that it was powered by two AA batteries. “Hmmm, I wonder” said a little voice, and so I put a couple of new batteries in, closed the cover, and lo and behold it started working again. Amazing!

I wonder if we’ll get another 28 years out of it? It might become a family heirloom at this rate.