Old Tom

Bad day to choose to drive to Bolton. The bikers added their weight to the fuel protests by bringing the westbound M62 to a grinding halt at rush hour. To be honest, I'm not quite sure why. The message seemed to be: "Don't put the 2p tax levy on petrol, put it on general taxation instead." Given that motorbikes tend to use less fuel than cars you'd think that the fuel tax versus PAYE question would be a no-brainer for bikers. Or is the clue in the question.

That is by the by, there was me en route to Bolton along the M60 but as I approached the junction with the M62 (see map above) there was at least half a mile of cars trailing back on to the motorway. Normally I wouldn't have any other choice but to join the queue as it is the only way I knew to get the place I'd been to lots of times. Fortunately I had a smart companion.

His name was Tom, so clever they named him twice. Without SatNav I wouldn't have dreamed of by-passing the queue and headed up the M66, but I had, so I did. He wanted me to pull off at Bury, but I could see from the screen that his plan was to go round the roundabout and back into the traffic. Bad plan and I ploughed on up the hill.

The next junction was Ramsbottom (no sniggering at the back please). Tom wanted me exit, but it was hard to see what he had in mind. This junction doesn't lead to a roundabout, but to the A56. You turn right and half a mile later Tom asked me to do a right to join the stymied southward M60. So I ignored him again.

I appreciate that as my posts go this is on the sadder end of boring, so I'll cut it short. Without SatNav I would never have done this, I would never have seen the sights of Bury and Bolton previously denied me. And I would never have reached a popular (for me) destination from entirely the opposite direction.

Good Old Tom. (That's the other one, best drunk in halves and definitely no driving afterwards.)

Snap Shot

I've added a new facility, namely Snap Shots. Hover your cursor over a link and window opens up to tell you what to expect. Really future stuff? Nowhere near. But it is cute.

Techno Bollocks

Last week I was questioning whether new technology is all it's cracked up to be. It wasn't a luddite whinge. I genuinely do doubt that digital tv or radio is better than analogue. For sure they cram in more channels, but three questions:

1. How many do you really, really want to watch/listen to?
2. Why do you get jerky pictures out 0f synch sound with digital?
3. And why, if it's so crap, do we pay so much for the privilege?

We have had all of the above problems so that in the end I put in a call to Virgin, mainly to stop Mrs P throwing the remote through the tv screen.

The blokes in Virgin t-shirts turned up this morning at 8am on the dot. They plugged a meter thing into the box and a conversation began in the real world, dipped into conspiracy theory, then dropped into techno-babble. It went thus:

"Hiya," (Bloke at door taking his shoes off. "Got a problem with yer box?"

"Yep," I said, slurping tea and explaining the above. "We've had this one for ages and it's rubbish. A friend of ours said we should ask for one of the new silver boxes."

"Nah! They've dumped Samsung. What you've got is a 5300. They're still installing these yer know."

Me: An 8am baffled look.

They connected an impressive looking bit of equipment to to the box, made some teeth-sucking noises and mumbled things like "too low" and "look at that" before asking:

"Does the freezing happen in the evening?"

Me: "Yes it does!" I said, in the same way you do when your doctor tells you to repeat particularly painful movement and then asks you if it hurts.

Them: "That's the street lights," they explained. "Y'see our cable is here and the light cable is there and when they switch 'em on it interferes with our signal."

Me: Baffled.

They disappeared outside (in their boots) to check the mains green box before coming back to say that all was well, but then the real babble followed:

Them: "You've got one of those special thick cables. Can't understand why they put a low tap on it though."

I'm nodding sagely while wondering WTF are they talking about.

It may be sorted, but why do I wonder whether that the next techno-geek will tell me: "You've got one of those thin cables. Can't understand why they put a high tap in. The pictures all bash into each other and get mixed up. That's what's causing the freezing."

As I said, Techno Bollacks.

Boxing Not So Clever

I sometimes wonder if 'new technology' is often less helpful than the 'old' one. We had a new phone system installed at work this week which involves pressing more buttons than we ever had to do before:

• You can't just pick up the phone. You have to press an 'accept call' button.
• When you pick up to make a call there is no ring tone. You have to press a 'make call' button for that to happen or wait several seconds for the ringtone to kick in.
• And when you have keyed in the number it takes around 15 seconds to connect.
  

It's meant to give me access to to an onscreen internal directory, which it does, except that you have to use the keys in the same way as texting without the predictive, so using the intranet Word document is the easier option. Better still, printed off and pinned on the wall.

Then there's digital radio. We have three in the house and three analogue and they're out of synch. The latter beat the former by several seconds. I know that digital is meant to be crystal clear (though not always in my experience) and yet analogue gets the news through by a nose.

The same is true of telly. We have HD-tv (when's that going to happen?) and a Virgin Media box. Despite all that we get screen stutters and freezes and programme information that won't go away without re-booting the box.

But what sort of IT is that involves pulling out the plug and counting twenty seconds before making it work?As opposed to getting off your arse (as we once did) and banging the side of the set.

Too many channels as well and you have to imprint the numbers of a great many them on your mindbank. BBCs One to however many channels they've got up to now, Sky Sports , Setanta etc. My home and work phone number I can just about recall but the above isn't easy and I need a crib. Which is always lost when you need it.

I'm a prime candidate for Mrs P's TROGs party. The Reactionary Old Gits. We can be strong, we can have influence. I'm reminded of the words of a colleague who warned: "Beware the recently retired because they have time on their hands to complain. "Not that I'm quite there yet.

Credit where it's due though. After the technology failures listed above I did get in touch with a Scottish call centre (via India) and a very helpful operator who has arranged for upgraded box to be installed next week.

How PC Am I?

Not very it seems. And not the politically-correct variety either.

I switched on the home PC as usual this morning to find that the mouse didn't work. Not a flicker of the red optical morning rising mouse sunshine that normally accompanies my first cup of Twinings Breakfast Tea of the day. A reboot didn't solve the problem, so I thought the worn and wasted rodent was deceased.

On my way to work, I stopped off at PC World to buy a new one. (How can they flog a Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse for just £9.97? There must be slave labour involved somewhere in the supply chain surely?)

Having got my nod towards ethical manufacturing out of the way, I trekked home thinking that my cardboard and plastic wrapped parcel would solve the problem. It didn't.

Somehow -- and I don't know how it had done this -- my switched off PC had switched itself on again and there was a black screen informing me that a file was either missing or corrupt, namely WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/CONFIG/SYSTEM or some such.

Why do MS have to shout so much? As in the way we're not supposed to do when we email? Even in uper and lower case I would have had that sick feeling in the stomach. Written large, it definitely: OH SHIT!

As ever in these situations, I turned to the instructions on screen which told me to place the original install disk and hit 'r' for repair. Except I don't have one. Apparently the providers of new PCs don't supply one. Unless you ask. Except that no-one tells you to.

So I switched to the manual. This tells you to insert the Recovery DVD that you're supposed to make yourself when you buy the thing, which I had and did. Except it did sod all other than to waste 20 minutes of my time only to bring up the same error message.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. After all, I hadn't been able to load the latest Archers Omnibus onto CD for me and Mrs P to listen to in the car. (Can anyone tell me why the sound quality is so crap on BBC Listen Again at the moment, by the way?)

And so I turned to Master P and MSN. A staccato conversation ensued with our computer expert who eventually turned up, spending an hour or so sorting things out that involved dashes to our Macs to Google solutions, and the ghost is back in the machine.

To stretch the Mastercard ad, PCs are mostly bobbins; priceless are the folk who can make them work right even when they have gone so spectacularly and catastrophically wrong.

And in this instance, he was aged 16. Blub, blub.