The other day I got a dodgy looking email from Paypal, which told me that on {nothing} my bank account {nothing} did {nothing}. Now, I’m fully aware of phishing and all the assorted scams, but this one looked legit. A quick review of the message headers revealed it looked good, and nothing in the email suggested that it was an attempt at scamming me out of my login details. So I figured, what the heck, I’ll report it to Paypal, and see what happens.
I was a long time user of the Blockbuster mail order DVD service. For me, in Guernsey, it worked well enough, DVDs arrived promptly and I was pretty happy. Around the same time, I trialled the Lovefilm service (mainly, I think, due to a friend of mine doing one of those “Free iPod” style things, where you get friends to sign up for stuff, and you get a free, erm, iPod). And whilst the service was fine, I was perfectly happy with Blockbuster, so at the end of the trial I cancelled. But ever since, I have been plagued by emails from Lovefilm, begging me to rejoin the service, and chucking all sorts of carrots in my direction as incentive to do it. I never caved and simply deleted them all as they came in.
But I’ve recently been looking for a new mail order service. I’ve got a spangly new LCD tv, an a Blu-Ray capable PS3 and being a bit of videophile, I like real, actual DVDs rather than downloaded ones with people’s heads popping halfway through the important scenes, and Lovefilm does have a far superior selection than Blockbuster. So I figure fine, next time an email from Lovefilm turns up, I’ll go for it.
But, of course, after waiting a couple of weeks, no emails have arrived from Lovefilm, I had no copies of old emails from them, so I thought I’d try my luck.
What follows is a tale of woe and despair, highlights the problems of outsourcing your call / customer care center to non-English-speaking countries, but ultimately, through a little (sarcastic) persistence, has a happy ending. Kind of.
A recent post on HackADay on what to do with an old laptop got me thinking. I have an old laptop (a Sony VAIO FX804) which was pretty much sat on a shelf doing nothing and turning it into a digital picture frame to display some of my photos seemed like a good use for it. I’m by no means an electronics whiz, but this seemed like something I was capable. The steps involved are pretty straightforward – get the laptop set up to function as you would like (some sort of slideshow, configured to either run off a hard drive or via an Internet connection) and nothing much else. Then dismantle the laptop so that the screen is frontmost and then somehow jig the rest of the machine behind it, perhaps in some sort of softbox. I’m good at dismantling stuff, although perhaps not so great at undismantling stuff, but what the heck – I had nothing to lose.
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