Today I ventured North on an overcrowded train to meet my hostess at Kingussie. (She was on her way back from Torridon and other places in the far west.)

We stopped at Newtonmore to watch the Waltzing Waters.

I wouldn’t recommend going up there just to see it, but if you’re in the area anyway, it’s sufficiently amusing to while away an hour.

Never, never, never let users tell you what to do.

A typo when entering a URL lead me to this.

Did palms have internet connectivity in 1999? Probably not but this is vaguely interesting.

Would you really want to embarrass your friends in an online, public, forum about a pizza-debt?

My hostess and I are currently minding her piano-teacher’s younger two boys while the teacher is on a course and her husband has taken the oldest boy sailing.

The boys we’re minding are happily playing with plastic spiders so I started on the sub-task of trying to sort the older boy’s PC. (It’s in a bad way and beyond my waning powers.) I pulled out my new laptop to look something up and then cursed because I hadn’t asked the piano teacher for her wireless network password.

It turns out that my cursing was premature and un-necessary. The new laptop is two weeks old and has never been to this house before. However, my Pismo laptop and jPhone have been. Also, before I erased Pismo’s hard disk last week, I synchronised it with my dotmac account and then synchronised the new laptop with dotmac so it could learn all my calendars, contacts, etc.

In the process, it also picked up all the passwords I had locked up in my ‘keychain’: this set included the wireless network password and so I’m able to bore you with online inanities as they happen!

I’ve now been summoned to go cycling up and down the boys’ drive…

I’m rather emotional about this and this.

Sorry there’s been a delay in posting this – I’ve been out of the country – but there is good news. On the 15th of April, dad sent me the following text:

Axis have backed down. No severance charge & incorrect charges to be credited to my account.

Huge thanks to folks out there for advice and encouragement.

I’m currently in Worcester, taking a break from working through the following tasks:

Late in February, I visited my parents and sister. Among other things, I completely reinstalled my dad’s PC. When I left, it was working as well as it could and communicating with the internet via a BT broadband connection and a netgear DG834 broadband router. (The PC and my mums old-style iBook were connected to the router by ethernet and my sister’s PC laptop was connected via the router’s wireless network.)

In early march, my dad phoned me to say that he could suddenly no longer contact the internet. After a period of back-seat driving down the phone, we ascertained that the PCs and iBook were talking to the router (at least they were getting IP addresses from the router’s DHCP controller) and so I reckoned the router was probably ok. Of course, there was no way to test whether any of the cabling in the house had suddenly died but I believed not, considering that dad spoke to me via a phone connected into the phone socket of the ADSL micro-filter that connected the router to the house’s phone network. Dad also assured me he hadn’t touched any of the kit. A couple of days of head-scratching and trying various things ensued, all to no avail.

Then dad contacted BT. They told him that someone else had told them to disconnect his broadband service and he recalled that he’d signed up with another telecoms company who had offered phone and broadband services at cheaper rates than BT. However, he couldn’t (yet) connect to their service. Many phonecalls to that company eventually resulted in the arrival of a Zoom-branded modem and the assurance that his line was indeed conducting the internet into the house via this company’s broadband service. Ineed, the system appeared to work, but very patchily. A connection could be made but it would last for two minutes at the most. The only way he found to re-establish this connection was to restart the PC. He again contacted the company to try to get them to help him. As I understand it, this seemed to work.

However, by now my mum and sister had gone on holiday abroad. They tried to phone him to say they’d arrived safely but found that the home number was engaged for along time. This, and the fact that dad told me the Zoom modem was plugged into the modem socket of his PC led us to believe that the telecoms company had supplied a dial-up modem. (I can’t recall if we retried the router but I think we didn’t – we probably thought it best to try with the supplied kit so that the telecoms company’s folk wouldn’t have to deal with things they didn’t know about. Yes, I am kicking myself for not pondering harder about the modem apparently being plugged into the PC’s built-in modem’s socket. With hindsight, I think what dad was seeing was a cable connecting his PC’s modem port to the house’s phone network. We’d left this in place so he could send and receive faxes.)

So dad was incensed – mum had nearly abandoned the holiday because she was worried that something had happened to dad – and wrote to the company, telling them that because they hadn’t given him the connections and/or hardware necessary to provide the broadband service they promised, he was withdrawing from the contract. After all, they had broken it first by not providing what was promised. As soon as Royal Mail showed that his letter had been delivered, he told his bank to cancel the direct debit payments to this company, as he had warned in his letter.

Dad then tried to reactivate his account with BT. He was promised it would all be working on 27th March. Are any of you surprised it wasn’t and that BT took until yesterday to deliver kit that they said would have arrived last week? Even last night, my netgear router couldn’t detect any form of broadband connection. Dad also tried the BT home hub which had arrived during the day. It too implied that no broadband connection was present.

Today, the other telecomms company phoned him. They asked him if he knew that withdrawing from the contract would cost him £300 (£150 for the phone contract and £150 for the broadband contract). He said he didn’t, that he hadn’t seen any contract wording and that as far as he was concerned he was speaking to them over a BT line. They told him that he wasn’t and that if he didn’t pay up within 7 days, they would send bailiffs to extract the payment from him, especially because the broadband connection was in place as far as they were concerned. Of course, Dad won’t risk this, not least because of how Dad asked me if there was a telephone ombudsman and I found contact details for Ofcom and Otelo for him. He also told me that he’d found the contract wording on the back of his ‘welcome – here’s your kit’ letter, in type so small and grey he needed a magnifying glass to read it.

I still thought that because the telecomms company hadn’t provided the necessary kit to connect to the connection this company was claiming to have provided and so dad would have a reasonable chance of proving they’d dishonoured the contract. So I asked him to tell me the Zoom modem’s model number: I intended to look it up and so ‘prove’ it was a dial-up modem. Dad then told me ‘it says Zoom ADSL modem‘. His current plan is to contact Ofcom and Otelo first thing tomorrow but he is fairly resigned to paying the £300 just to get shot of them, and then persevering with BT.

I suppose caveat emptor may well apply but the irony of this telecomms company having promised to save my dad some money is almost chewable. More than that, it sickens me to hear my dad sounding beaten. If anyone has any constructive advice, please comment, email or phone me.

UPDATE: lunchtime, Thursday 3rd April
Dad has spoken with Otelo: based on what they’ve told him, he’s written again to Axis. (I don’t know what he’s said to them.) He’s curently trying to sort out where his is with BT.

You may recall that in 2006 I spent quite a while staying with a family in Kerala, South India. I’ve been in contact with them (admittedly far too infrequently) ever since and I’ve been racking my braincell for ways to help their financial status. Ajeesh is adamant that he doesn’t want charity/donations: instead he wants the chance to earn a living for himself and his family. He frequently asks about getting a job over here.

Researching visa and work-permit regulations isn’t very heartening: it seems the only way to get a work permit is for a company to apply for one on behalf of someone they’d like to employ. They’d then need to prove that they need to hire someone from outside of the EU, rather than use ‘home-grown’ skills and labour. (Of course I understand this – there’s enough unemployment here already!) However, if anyone out there in cyberland knows a legal way Ajeesh can come here and earn enough to make it worthwhile, please let me know.

On a more realistic note, I brought back some coffee from Nedumkandam, Ajeesh’s home village. I’m not normally a coffee-fan but this seemed very palatable. (OK, I know I should never try for a career in marketing!) So if I can import some and pay Ajeesh something for the effort of getting it in the post, then this might be a baby step forward.

So roll up all you coffee-drinkers and let me know if you want any genuine south-indian coffee. It’s currently about 200 rupees (£2·51) per kilogram, so I’d be looking for about 225 rupees per kilo – all of the extra Rs25 would go to Ajeesh. I don’t know yet what postage would cost. (Currently, Tesco sells Fairtrade-labelled ground coffee for at least £7·80 per kilogram.)

Similarly, Ajeesh can get top-quality cardomom for around Rs900 (£11·32) per kilogram. Tesco charge £42·33 per kilogram. So do yourself a favour, get some direct from Kerala and treat yourself to a lassi!

To make a lassi,

• Put the contents of about 5 fresh cardomom pods in a blender.
• Add in about 500 to 750 ml of soya milk. (I can’t see this not working with normal milk but I’ve never tried it.)
• Add fruit and sweeteners to taste. (I like a wee bit of cherry soya yoghurt or some maple syrup.)
• Add the juice of half a lemon.
• Optionally, add some ice-cubes.
• Blend until the drink begins to thicken.
• Pour and serve. (You’ll need to start soaking the blender straight away because the dregs get very sticky.)
• ENJOY!

Currently, I’m on the (Virgin?) Cross-country service 11:05 service from Edinburgh to Birmingham New Street. Marianne the Cuddly Pig is safely in my big rucsac, with a packed lunch featuring tidbits from last night’s feast from the Indian Cavalry Club.

I bought my tickets online – total cost £43. At no point in this process was I offered a chance to book passage for my bicycle. (I intend to start cycling around Edinburgh.) Later I phoned Virgin’s telesales line to see if a human could offer me a booking. After a number of attempts to tell the customer-service-bot my booking reference, we got to my real question: could I add a bike to my return booking? The flatly-delivered answer was ‘no’. I asked why I couldn’t amend this booking and was told ‘You had the opportunity when you phoned to make your booking.’

I explained that I had booked online and that no such opportunity had arisen. This was met with nothing positive.

I asked the CS-bot to convey to his company my dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunity to make or add on cycle bookings. This was met with apparent incomprehension.

At the end of the conversation, the CS-bot asked if it could ‘help me further’. Pointing out that the CS-bot hadn’t yet provided any help and so was logically incapable of providing **more** help would not have benefitted my blood pressure of its comprehension of simple logic so I ended the call.

This morning I turned up at Edinburgh Waverley, hoping to talk face-to-face with a human. I was served in the main advanced-booking office by Mr James Davidson. He booked my bike’s travel very quickly and was polite, decent and understanding. I’d like to commend him and his colleagues to all out in cyber-land.