Rants

Update on Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Problems

by

In my last post I mentioned about problems connecting to my own blog from my home broadband connection with Imagine/Gaelic Telecom. Although it is now fixed I am still having problems accessing my friend Robert’ Sweetnam’s Blog. I am accessing his blog through proxify.com its the only way at the moment – I rang Gaelic Telecom/Imagine support again last Friday night complaining about not been able to view his site.

I was asked if I have “Content Filtering” enabled which I said no and his reply was “Well I really haven’t got a clue why you cannot access http://blog.sweetnam.eu” he went on to say “I will send a ticket up to tech support and see what they say” he also asked me for my mobile number so a “techy” could ring me back within the hour, but as expected I was left still waiting on the call.

Monday morning came and lo and behold I got a call back from Gareth “the techy guy” at Imagine Telecom Support. He said they were still looking into the problem and that he would call me back before the end of working day. He also suggested that they change my IP address as that would surely fix the problem, I said no to the IP change and left them to it but hence to say I got no call back.

Left it stew for Tuesday….

This morning Wednesday I called back support went through the whole “rigga’ ma’ roll” (procedure) again with general support and demanded some answers by today. An hour later Gareth called back with the solution of changing my IP and I quote what he said…

“It appears that you turned off “Content Filtering” back in June 2006 (which I did) but it seems it didn’t go through properly. You were going through a proxy server where your content was been cached, to help speed an stuff.”

So Robert was right as mentioned here  “they” could track my where abouts if they wanted to!

Back to the solution… I caved to the IP change in the end and was supplied with a new IP address over the phone. I went home reset my router, flushed the dns, cleared my cache etc. re-booted and opened up Firefox typed in http://blog.sweetnam.eu and guess what?

No F**king joy!

Back to the idiots again tomorrow to tell ’em to shove their solution up the highest part of their holes.

Vodafone Ireland – Web Site Redesign

by

Vodafone website re-designLogged on to the Vodafone web site a few days ago and met the redesign. At first I was amused with the cleaner more accessible interface but then into the “Web Texts” section which I mostly use, I was purely disappointed.

The old version Vodafone web site you could click an alphabetical letter A-B-C-D and so on… and the contact list would jump to that section of names, also your contact’s number was displayed to the right… well to me it was like a personal phone book.

Now its just your contacts nickname displayed, no number at all, so to retrieve a contacts number you have to open up Vodafone Mail (I cant stand using that) and browse through your contacts clicking here – there and everywhere … just for the sake of a number!

Ok then thumbs up for the new de-cluttered web site and the more accessible approach, but the “Web Text” function for me is a step back and looks like “work in progress”

Anyone else?

The Police – Croke Park – Dublin – My Review

by

The Police - Croke Park - Dublin - ReviewGot back from Dublin today after going to “The Police” at Croke Park. Being a teenager during the whole pre/post “punk” “new wave” age of late 70’s early 80’s The Police was the band I always wished I could go an see. The Police headlined Leixlip Castle at the “Dublin Festival 1980”, which was their first (and became their only) show in Ireland. I remember dreaming of going to that show but was too young at the time. So here I was 27 years on and finally getting to see the band.

The Support:

Support band on the night were “Fiction Plane” with lead singer, Joe Sumner, son of Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting – “Keep it in the family”
I have to admit that I didn’t feel keen on hearing the support band as a few of us preferred having a few scoops at the bar and just to note I did stand patiently in a queue with around 100 people ahead but the bar flew through us at €5 a scoop. Around 8:00pm The Police were on stage.

The Gig:

Kicking off with “Message In A Bottle” a classic and on to a good mix of old and new “Driven To Tears” was a stand out for me with drive and melody as was “Wrapped Around Your Finger” with Stewart Copeland playing bells, chimes, gongs and other percussion. I noticed the crowd looked a fair bit bored at the less popular songs but things swung into spirts again with “De DoDoDo De DaDaDa“.

Things got a little messy around us about a half hour into the gig with 2 fights breaking out to the right and left, we were sitting on the Hogan Stand, Upper Tier – 1 guy totally acting the dickhead and escorted away by The Police sorry the Gardai (pardon the pun) and another guy fuelled up on booze to the point that he wanted to take on the stadium… there was shouting and abuse but it sorted itself out eventually. tg!

Then there was Sting’s dragging out the songs with singing “Roxanne OH!” for a more than a bareable few minutes +  crowd reaction. Sting was’nt going for the high notes on any of the setlist tonight and there was a drop in key for many of their hit songs. Well I am musician aswell – ” Oh sorry a drummer really” 🙂 does that count!??? Enevitably “Every Breath You Take” was the big crowd pleaser of the night.

Recap:

I suppose thinking about it now it was nice being there with some “living legend” musicians and I’ve gotta give thumbs up to Stewart Copeland for the inspiration in rhythm, but the whole Croke Park thing (82,000 approx) was just too much for comfort. I would have preferred to see them at the Point.
The stage design was a bit bland but the side video screens helped in capturing the atmosphere of just 3 guys on stage. This was a no-nonsense, no fireworks, no bells or whistles – straight on gig. I was glad to have gone but wouldnt return or “been there, done that,  but would’nt buy the T-shirt”.

Heres the setlist below. It’s about 90% accurate …

the police tour 2007 set list

 

The Aftermath:

After the gig we headed to “Barrys Hotel” bar for a drink and one of the lads mentioned that a pint of Guiness was only €3.40! and that was in Dublin. The bar was old and the toilets were stinking but we chatted away regardless about the gig. After an hour or so we parted and headed for the dreaded “Waiting on O’ Connell Street for a Taxi syndrome” this was a nightmare!

We waited for over an hour and a half for a taxi to come along with a huge crowd and witnessed fighting, verbal abuse and racist remarks and that was just coming from the taxi queue. We all agreed that Dublin must be a shithole to live in and we’d never complain about waiting for a local taxi ever again.

Well thats me done with Dublin and stadium rock for a while…!

Leaving MySpace

by

Finally deleted all the posted comments and friend contacts I had built up over the past year and a half on my MySpace page. The feeling was great! I no longer have to accept, respond or comment to people inside that heap of **** anymore.

After hearing about MySpace from a musician friend of mine I went about signing up to see what all the fuss was about, at first I thought it would be a nice to keep in contact with all the muso’s (Musicians).

When at gig’s I’d get the “Whats your MySpace page?” and if you didn’t have one you would get that kind of “Whaaaaat! ..look .. it’s simple just go to so and so and put in your name and email and so on etc. etc..”

After a few weeks of setting up my account and adding friends and the like, I guess curiosity got the better of me and I had to have a look under the hood to see how this monster is coded and try to ultimately customise (laugh!) it.

From the tasteful div overlay method of Hyaline Skies to the “Try not Make My Page Look Like a Tripod Hosted Website Please” I have tried them all by changing bits of CSS here and there and trying to be a little clever about it…. This became hard work so I gave up trying to re-invent the wheel and pulled out, clearly out of frustration with the whole thing. The only MySpace page to get it somehow right in my opinion is by this guy Mike Davidson using clean html/css to what is allowed by MySpace guides and rules.

I don’t want to come down on many of my friends that use MySpace (100 million can’t be wrong) as a tool to try and promote their music as it is just that a “Tool” but the whole model is a cheap tacky mess and that’s just an opinion but its’s “my opinion”.

To finish, do you think Rupert Murdoch’s empire could spare a little change of the $30 million per month they earn on Google Adsense alone (and thats old news) to do a little house cleaning on that MySpace monster? I don’t think so….. Here’s to all their 100 million + users who feed them with content, music and videos.

“IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT ” Any attempt to improve on a system that already works is pointless and may even prove detrimental.

>> Click here for farewell picture <<

+ More