Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Land Registry - WTF!

I don't know what it is about my flat but nobody seems to be able to manage the accounts correctly. After the saga a couple of years ago about a missing payment which I had paid, I could prove I had paid and the management company didn't believe me for the best part of two years.

Now for some reason my parents names have been registered on my flat as the owners!
The management company, and its a different lot from last time, say they did a land registry search on the flat and it came back with my parents names as the owners.

Huh!

So they closed my account opened one in my parents names and sent them a demand for payments because no one was paying into the new account. This is because I was still paying in to the closed account by standing order and they were letting me! So they sent a arrears demand for non payment which when we found out about this and I rang them up.

'Hello, what are you doing?'
'We did a search on the property and your parents are the legal owners.'
'No they are not and have never been connected with my flat in any way.'

The one exception being I used their address as a billing address while I was letting the flat out

'Well you will have to talk to the land registry and get it fix, We need a correct land registry form to change our accounts'
'OK can I have a copy of the land registry found you have then'
'Certainly I'll email it over'
'Cool'
.
.
.
.
'Er this is a search done on my parents property and not my flat!'
'Oh'

Honestly this is just one of the reasons why I want to sell my flat because I think its been cursed by the daemon of poor administration.

The Temple of Smug and the Blue Smarties

OK so going to Apple store was a strange experience and not a little annoying.

So I'll admit with 'brand new broken headphones', I wasn't in the best mood to sample the 'Apple Experience'.

You walk into the place, which is bright and full of lots of stands on which you can try out all there lovely tech, trying to work out where to go to get help. The are absolutely no signs to point you in the right direction.

I guess the idea is to talk to one of the assistants wearing the bright t-shirts (all the colours you get in smarties but the looks of it) but they were all already talking to customers. So I headed to the tills figuring that was the best place.

This was a mistake, after a lot of waiting I got to talk to someone at the till wearing blue and this 'Blue Smartie' said I had to go upstairs and talk to someone wearing an orange t-shirt.

OK so upstairs I go...Excuse ME! I say to the first Orange Smartie and explain about the headphones. 'Sorry Sir you want the orange shirts over there' he says point across the room. 'OK', breath deeply. across to a group of Orange Smarties behind a counter who are doing there best to ignore the customers about them. I explain again to one of the girls and the others disappear quickly.
She has a listen to the headphones and my phone and it is at this point I start thinking she might have some sort of hearing problem. She turns the sound right up to max so I can hear the music clearly from two foot away!

'I don't hear it' She says
I think I may have gone momentarily cross eyed at this point.

'OK turn it down a bit and try 'All you need is love'' I say taking the phone back and trying to find the Beatles track (Beatles to the rescue as they have lots of stuff happening in one speaker or the other). Except of course itunes made a right hash of it when importing the songs and it takes me an age to find it listed under 'Various Artist'.

So now she sort of agrees with me and asks me what I want to do.

'Can I have some working headphones? or get them fixed?'

'Er I'll see' and off she goes to look in the draws behind the counter. It's at this point I start to take in the rest of the things on this floor. I'm stood by a stand of accessories for the iPhone including about 500 pairs of headphones. Surreally down the far end of the floor there appears to be a lecture going on and about 50 people are listening to the Author/Comedian Charlie Higson talk about, I think, James Bond.

So Orange Smartie comes back and says 'Sorry we don't seem to have any headphones in stock".

I look at her, She looks at me. I look at the 500 headphones, She looks at the 500 headphones.

'oh'

Taking a pack we walk back to the till and she tries to ring it up on the till. I thinking this is now sorted and I'll soon be out of here.

No, she's not allowed to put the transaction through and we have to go downstairs and find a Blue Smartie. This takes some time as Orange Smartie won't interrupt any of the Blue Smarties that are talking to customers, ie all of them. When we finally get a Blue Smartie but he's not senior enough either and they both disappear out the back of the shop.

After a bit Orange Smartie comes back with a Black Smartie (and I thought they were a myth!) and Black Smartie has the special secret wrist movement or possibly key card to complete the transaction.

Done it! Orange gives me the headphones and as I head for the door says to be careful with them. Fortunately I've been in the store for half and hour at this stage, I'm too tired to get angry and just leave.

In their defence they didn't argue about the headphone and did just replace them but there is a little invention called a customer service desk that they might find useful.

Time to circle the wagons

For the first time last night with the collapse of B&B and the failure of the wall st rescue fund I detected the first real note of panic in the coverage. Up till now the BBC has been quite calm about the whole thing but last night they started to say that it was going to all get alot worse.

So how am I effected? well, the flat isn't selling, one person viewed it last week but no news from that. I starting to think maybe giving up on the selling front and do some major DIY on it instead. Maybe looks at putting it back on the market next year. As for any shares I had, well they where worth buttons at the end so there wasn't much to lose out on. I had both HBOS and B&B shares, I'm quite surprised I didn't have Lehman Bros as well!

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Ambushed by the Estate agent

OK they got me!

I've dodged the decision for weeks but they got me on the phone today and ask about dropping the price.

The market is dead and all the business with free stamp duty and the other government breaks don't seem to have any effect at all on the London market. To be fair there aren't many places under the 175K in London so it never was going to help much.

Basically the market is falling and so my original price now isn't getting anybody around for a viewing. I sorta plan to hang around until the market bottoms out as a percent down turn in all prices will end up in my favour as I plan on getting a bigger place in the same sort of area.

I agreed we would try it on the market for 10k less than is currently is on to see what happens. I'm not sure I would want it to go much lower yet as there is a smaller flat in my block on for 10k less than that.

Perhaps I'll do some more to fix it up and try and justify the price different a bit more.

Knee Update

Well I've been ticking along nicely for awhile now with my knee. It has recovered from going around the alps and all that climbing.

I works fine with a bit of creaking when I try and crouch down, I still can't quite bend it all the way back so my heel touch my backside but then again I don't think most normal people can do that any way. It makes a noise like crunching cellophane and still needs a bit of a push to unbend. I can do the standing on the bad leg and then doing a bit of a crunch down (an old exercise from my physio back at the start of the year) but not as good as the other leg. I just have to keep exercising it everyday.

As far a pain goes sometimes it will have a dull ache for days at a time but not much else. I think that's cause by the way I sleep, on my side with that leg resting on the other one.

Gym is now mostly concentrated on core muscles again with v sits on a core board and now with twisting and holding the positions for a count (5 normal) which REALLY causes the muscles to burn! We have upped the weights quiet a bit and the press ups he tries to make me clap my hands between each one now, which is well hard!

iPhone Update

Apple release a new firmware the other day to fix a heap of bugs. the iPhone is a bit better now and hasn't crashed on me for a while.

However I've been hit by the legendary poor apple build quality and the headphones only go up to about 10% volume in one ear (yes I did try some other earphones and the iPhone itself is fine). So after talking to a selection of the brain trust at Carphonewarehouse (where I bought it), they couldn't help (Apple won't give them any spare bits) and I now have to go to an iStore.

Joy!

Friday, September 19, 2008

Google Search All

Maybe this could be classified as a thought on modern philosophy.

I tried putting *.* (the find any file term) into Google and got back

Your search - *.* - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:

Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.

googlezero

Now I know I won't get the whole Internet back but surely I should get some matches!

Vodafone Music Awards

Party with Lewis Hamilton and Neil Walker!

After years of working in IT I've finally worked on something that resulted in a good freebie. We been working on various vodafone campaign websites and to say thank you they gave us some free tickets to the Awards show. There was a good little line up of different bands, each playing 1-3 tracks.
They included
The Ting Tings (great stuff starting the show and the second time I've seen them this year)
James Morison (a bit quite)
The Pussy Cat Dolls (quite literally bonkers and I guess one of the reasons Lewis Hamilton was there (the other being the amount of wonga vodafone sponsor him)
Estelle (good LOTS of confetti)
Will Young (I think I went to the bar then)
Primal Scream (I was jumping around like a right nutter and can't really believe I've now actually seen them live!)
and some others that you couldn't really hear over all the media types (and us) talking.

We spent the evening by the VIP section and about 5 meters from Lewis Hamilton and Family. He's smaller that I imagined but then again he has to fit in the car doesn't he.

The other 'interesting' person there was Neil Walker, a friend from many years ago at Uni. Completely random chance meeting, except for the fact he is an executive at Vodafone, so may not that surprising. We had a quick catch up and he brought me a beer which was nice.

I've decided I quite like freebies...

Friday, September 12, 2008

iPhone

What a fashion victim I am.

I got a new phone and yes this will come as a shock to people that work with me it's an iPhone.

Yeap I've bought an apple product after work with Microsoft products for so long.
I'm not really anti Apple or pro Microsoft not like the religious fanatics you get on the subject (mainly in the Apple camp in my experience).

So what's it like? well it looks nice the shinny blackness and the touch screen goodness. It's definitely the future the GPS function is cool watching yourself move around on the map is very 'Spooks' also the 16GB ipod with videos is good.

On the downside it's not really a finished technology I guess they rushed it
to market as it crashes, locks up, drops phone connections alot. I've crashed it completely about 4 or 5 times in a week.

The main culprit seems to be the itunes software that it has to connect to in order to get the music off a PC. Something to do with the applications you can install on the phone and the security checks that the software does. Most of the time this kills all the installed applications and clears the all the music off the iphone.

So I got it more or less working and stuff installed and as long as I don't try connecting it to itunes I should be OK until a patch comes out for the phone.