Dominic Sayers

Another good experience

Following hard on the heels of my good experience cancelling my Sky subscription (i.e. only 2 years after) comes another successful conversation with a "retention team", this time at Orange. You don't hear much good about Orange, and certainly my user experience of their services has been pretty ordinary in the 10 years or more I have been a customer of theirs. But credit where it's due - I just got a Porting Authorisation Code (PAC) from them in exactly 10 minutes. The gentleman asked me why I was leaving Orange. I said because of generally high prices and because if I joined the same network as my wife we could get free calls to each other. He asked me if an offer of reduced prices would tempt me to stay. I said no, it would make me angry because it would imply they had been abusing my loyalty for 10 years or more. He had obviously heard the same comments before and completely accepted what I said. I think its only fair to write about good customer service when it happens. Twice in two years, eh? Now if I can just get Tower Hamlets to empty my waste food recycling bin I will be happy.

Initial thoughts on my new social data flow

Firstly, apologies to anybody who couldn't see the social data flow diagram in my earlier post - I've now hosted it on my own server so it shouldn't disappear quite so often.

(Click on the image for a bigger version)

The new data flow, using ping.fm to syndicate my status updates and micro-blogs and FriendFeed to aggregate my other activity and consolidate everything into a coherent set of feeds, is working quite well. I would like to be able to have more control over the format of what both ping.fm and FriendFeed do for each target system, but the defaults are adequate for now. Here are the issues I'm experiencing: 1. Using Twitterfeed to take my FriendFeed RSS and pipe it into Twitter introduces a degree of latency that's a bit inappropriate for Twitter. Twitter should be near real-time and conversational (whilst not being an instant messaging system), but Twitterfeed only reads my FriendFeed every half an hour. If I get ping.fm to update Twitter directly then I'm going to get some updates twice, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. 2. Some of the connected systems (identi.ca for example) are Twitter-like, and I'd like to treat them the same way as Twitter: as an output device for all my activity. But Twitterfeed is Twitter-specific and I haven't found an equivalent for identi.ca etc. yet. In any case I don't want a different Social ETL tool for each output system; I want Twitterfeed (or something) to do this for a number of target systems. 3. There's no class solution for location-based systems yet. Obviously I'd like to be able to update my location and travel plans in one place and have it propagate to TripIt, Dopplr, BrightKite etc. I think FireEagle may be trying to do this but it's short of two things at the moment: co-operation from the other systems and an invitation for me. If anybody has access to FireEagle I would appreciate a way in. 4. Now I need to do the other thing - deduplicate my profligate friends' updates. When Myrto uploads a picture to Flickr, for instance, I get notified about it four times. I can rationalise this a bit but I can't ignore her FriendFeed or Twitter because I would miss some of her updates, so I'm condemned to hearing about her new pictures multiple times unless (a) she adopts a version of my social data flow or (b) I find a solution to deduplicating the same update coming through multiple channels. This duplicate filter is necessary until everybody adopts my architecture, i.e. for ever. Does anybody know of a solution out there? This all seems quite difficult to manage and well beyond anybody who is either busy or technically challenged. There's no real way of developing a packaged solution until all the social systems adopt a single sign-on technology like OpenID, and many of them have sound technical reasons for not doing so (OpenIDs can be created by anybody anywhere so it's a bit like expecting system owners to trust a digital certificate that has no trusted root certification authority). Anyway, that's the state of play at the moment. More to come I'm sure.

Trying to recover my compromised Hotmail account

[Edited to add: Microsoft Live support resolved this issue very swiftly and professionally. I now have control of my Hotmail account back.] Somebody, let us call him Anthony Ikpe, has hijacked my Hotmail account and sent a begging letter to everybody in my address book. A transparent ruse but apologies to everybody who got this message. Needless to say I am not stuck in West Africa nor do I need an urgent transfer of funds to help get me home. If you would like to send me money then please do so, but don't send it to an address in Nigeria. I don't know how Anthony Ikpe was able to get access to my account, but he has managed to change the password, change the alternate email address and change the challenge-response questions so I cannot get back control of the account by the usual means. My old password was not a strong one, but nor was it an easily-guessable one. I suspect he has somehow spoofed the password reset system, which would be a security issue for Microsoft if it is true. My Hotmail address is the one I publish publicly - the Hotmail account is designed to be the one that gets attacked. My friends, family and colleagues know that it's not the address I normally use. I also use it for buying things online so that the resulting marketing messages don't bother me. However, if I'm in the middle of a buying something it assumes a temporary importance. And I am indeed using my Hotmail account quite heavily at the moment. Or not, as it turns out. Inconvenient then, and I'd like to get it back if possible. And I'd certainly like to stop Mr Ikpe from reading the messages I'm currently getting on that account. So I am trying to contact Microsoft to let them know what has happened and see if anything can be done. Attempt 1 I click on the Help link on the Hotmail home page. Yay! there's a link for "What do I do if I think someone is using my Windows Live ID? ". I click it. It gives me another link to "Report to Microsoft" any suspicious activity. I click it. It leads to a Technet page with another link telling me to fill in a form on this page: Helpful Information for Microsoft Passport Network I click the link. It takes me back to the Hotmail help page. Presumably Microsoft think their customers are so stupid they will continue round this loop for ever without noticing they aren't getting anywhere. Attempt 2 I call Microsoft UK. After patiently navigating their call centre menus, I arrive at the Hotmail options. For billing enquiries please press 1. For all other enquiries please go to http://uk.msn.com My first reaction is Gaaah! But surprisingly there is a form on the MSN site that allows you to report Hotmail security issues. I filled in the form and submitted it. The waiting begins.

Things I don't understand about wireless

I can't get decent 802.11x wireless reception in my house, even with base stations on each floor. Nor can Malcolm. Nor can David Pescovitz. I can't get a baby monitor to work reliably unless I position it outside the baby's room in which case it's kind of redundant. But my DECT phone handsets work fine anywhere in the house from a single base station. They work in the garden and half way down the street (not that I walk down the street talking on the phone very often but I sometimes take a handset round to a neighbour's house and it works fine). Looks like the Philips DECT baby monitor is available in the UK, so I'm quite excited about that although it is quite pricey. Can somebody please explain why DECT works so well compared to other technologies? And if there is a technical reason why DECT is better, why can't somebody produce an 802.11x over DECT network?

A surprisingly pleasant user experience

I thought I'd pass on to you a totally unexpected experience. I just called Sky to cancel my subscription with them, and managed to get it done in seven minutes talking to a cheerful Scottish lady. She asked whether I was cross with them or anything and I said no, I just didn't watch their subscription channels enough. She applied no further pressure except to mention that there were lower-cost packages than my current one, which is fair enough. This positive experience makes it much more likely that I will choose Sky as a digital service provider in future.

User experience hall of shame, part 3: ba.com

Top of the list of things that make me angry is persistent unnecessary stupidity. Clever people repeatedly doing things wrong. People doing things the hard way when the easy way is actually better. The classic example for me is the National Rail timetable website that stops you enquiring about trains that have already departed. Somebody has written this code into the form. So now you can't look for the train your wife is on so you can pick her up from the station. Why? I mean why not? Why would you expend the effort of writing that code to stop people doing something they want to do? It would have been easier to do it right, but some sub-genius has gone to the trouble of putting a barrier right where you want to go. Fool. Anyway, today's teeth-gnashing site is ba.com. For BA, updating your account details is a privilege not a right. All your account details are on one big form and if you enter something that fails their labyrinthine error checking it resets all the changes you have made in every field and lets you type it all in again (after you have tried to guess from the illiterate error message what it was you did wrong in the first place). Thank you for the honour of correcting me in my mistaken impression that I KNOW WHERE I LIVE. In a spirit of humility I have tried to suggest a small change to the account details page:

"I just tried to amend my account details using your website. Twice. The first time it told me my company name was invalid even though I had just told it this were PERSONAL details. Of course it also RESET all the other information I had changed SO I HAD TO TYPE IT ALL IN AGAIN! Great job, web people! So I typed it all in again and clicked on Submit. This time it just said Invalid Request. No other information to help me. And of course it had RESET all the other information I had typed in. Have a guess whether I bothered typing it all in again. It is in your interest for my details to be correct. So WHY DO YOU MAKE IT SO DIFFICULT?"

Perhaps a little of my inner frustration might have come across. BA, I apologise for my intemperance. You are probably right and I am probably wrong.

Follow up to my poor user experience

I documented my problems with an Acer Media Center box. For the record, I found somebody on eBay selling the particular wire I needed, ordered it, installed it and was able to complete the setup with no problem. I am still angry that I had to do this merely to get Sky working with Media Center, but now I have a back catalog of West Wing, Green Wing, the Daily Show and Sports Night episodes that I can watch to console myself.

A user experience

WARNING: Acer Aspire L200 Media Center running Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 can't be connected to a Sky set-top box These Media Center PCs are supposed to connect to your aerial or set-top box and show you live TV through the PC. Why would you want to do that? Well because it is a computer you can combine this with other features in the same box: you can listen to music from your hard disk or CDs, watch videos from your hard disk or DVD player, listen to the radio and look at your family photographs. All this is combined into an easy-to-use interface for non-technical people. So it should just work, right? Not if you are connecting a Sky set-top box to your Acer Aspire L200 it doesn't. To set this up you need a particular wire that Acer do not include with the PC. The kind of wire doesn't matter: if you're interested it's an infra-red emitter that you stick over the magic eye on your Sky set-top box so the Media Center remote control can change the channels. This is important so that the PC can record a particular channel when you're out or asleep. I cannot, simply cannot, believe I am the only person in the UK who has tried to do this. I called Acer Technical Support. The young man reading his script said he couldn't help. I asked him to talk to his supervisor. He came back on the line. Oh yes, he said, you need an infra-red emitter cable. You can get them from our Parts Sales department on this number. Yeah right. He had successfully got rid of me and of course Parts Sales had never heard of this and certainly had no such cable in stock. But why sell the PC in the first place without a 50p cable that enables a very common setup? Let me be clear: it's not just that I cannot change the channel with the Media Center remote, it's that the Media Center setup fails if this cable isn't plugged in. That's right, Windows XP Media Center setup depends on this cable and Acer don't put one in the box or even supply one after market. I've ordered one from elsewhere. I have the technical know-how to fix this. But this is a consumer device. My user experience has been very poor indeed. I recommend you do not purchase an Acer Aspire L200 Media Center.

Faceless corporations II

Me to National Rail: I've moaned about this before but obviously I didn't make myself clear. Here is a good example: my wife is on the 17:30 from Oxford to London Paddington. I want to find out when it arrives in Paddington so I can go and pick her up. It is 17:40 now. How do I use your web site to do this? I can't use the Oxford live departure board because the train has already left so it has disappeared from the board. I can't use the Paddington arrivals board because it doesn't say when it left Oxford, so I don't know which train it is. I can't use the Journey Planner because for some STUPID reason it doesn't let me inquire about journeys that start in the past. How do I find out when my wife arrives at Paddington? What could POSSIBLY go wrong if you allowed people to enquire on past journeys in the Journey Planner? National Rail: Thank you for your email. The next station that this train arrives at is Slough and is due at 18.11. Go to the live departure boards and input Slough.Click on the journey for London Paddington timed at 18.11. This takes you to a page showing the whole of the journey.We trust that this information is of use to you. Me: How am I supposed to know that the next station this train arrives at is Slough? National Rail: We apologise for any inconvenience caused. You will need to go to the Live Departure Boards, input the starting station and the time of departure. Click on the journey you require, this then takes you to a page which displays the journey and the estimated times of arrival at each station. It is then possible to go to each stations departure board to find out whether this train is on schedule. Once again we apologise for any inconvenience caused, and trust that this information is of use to you. Me: Hi, and thanks very much for your prompt reply.You are asking me to go to the Live Departure Boards and input the starting station and the time of departure. However, I can't input thetime of departure on the screen available to me: http://ldb.nationalrail.co.uk/ldb/livedepartures.asp Maybe you have access to a screen that I can't find? If you are talking about the Quick Timetable column on the right handside then that is no good either because the journey has already started and it refuses to give me information about journeys that begin in the past. I sincerely believe that the design of your pages could be improved. The example I have given you is just one genuine problem that could easily be solved. Your system designers appear to have accidentally made these pages less useful than they could be. I say this in a spirit of helpfulness and a desire to make the world a better place. I did eventually find my wife, by the way, so this is a purely academic discussion now. National Rail: We do apologise for the problems caused.When you go to the live departure boards, input the station of departure, click and go to the departure board.Then you look for the starting time of the train. When you find that, click on the destination. This takes you to the page showing the complete journey and the estimated time of arrival.If the train is running late, the times will appear in red.Your comments will be passed on to the development team for consideration for the future. Me: Thanks very much for passing on my coments to the dev team. On your final answer, I would say that this would be great except that the train I want is no longer on the departure board because it has already left.

Faceless corporations

Can I say at the outset that I did a dumb thing. I take full responsibility for doing a dumb thing. The dumb thing was done by me, not to me. What I did was to swap my defective mobile handset for a new one. The new one is lovely and shiny and all the buttons work, which was the point of the exercise. But the old one had a 1GB storage card in it that cost me quite a lot of money. I'm not too too concerned with the contents of the card. As far as I know there are no incriminating photos of me or my loved ones on it. Or my pets. Plenty of photos of my pets but no incriminating ones. I hope. So with little expectation of satisfaction I called Orange to see if they could trace it for me and possibly return my card. I got through to a Customer Services person quite quickly for a change and this raised my hopes just a little. Fatally, because they were dashed almost instantly by the robot on the other end of the line. Not only couldn't they trace my storage card, they also said it was now their property. I asked them on what grounds they believed it was their property but there was nothing in the robot's script for this so she just repeated the statement. I hope I'm past getting angry at faceless corporations represented by anonymous telephone operatives, but it's difficult. Sometimes it feels like their business processes are designed deliberately to make the customer feel powerless, frustrated and alienated. The arrogance of a corporation that can say, with a straight face, that your property belongs to them because it is in their possession is astonishing. What's the answer. Should I change my mobile phone operator? Are any of the others any different? Of course not. Should I take out some sort of legal action to recover my property? I would quickly use of £250 worth of my time and it probably wouldn't get anywhere. I tried www.orangesucks.com but it's just a cybersquatter. Dead end. Pah.