TV advertising

TV adverts can be annoying or amusing. I find most of them annoying and the adverts on the English commercial channels such as ITV, Channel 4, CBS Reality, Fiver etc. are apparently increasingly geared to an audience of an IQ which is the equivalent of the plant next to my TV. Moving stick figures, repetition, words of no more than one syllable appear to reflect the low standard of education in England. Either that or they are geared to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who cannot speak much English.

There are however several outstandingly good adverts which I always enjoy(ed). At the very top of my list was the superb 25th Anniversary Virgin Atlantic advert with the intro to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s song “Relax” as background music. There is no speech at all in the advert – just images of an airline captain and his crew walking through an airport and the reactions of people around them. A superb ad (can be seen on youtube) which proves that you don’t need stupid, semi-literate blabla to put your point across.

Another is the meerkat series of adverts from comparethemeerkat.com – actually comparethemarket.com  – the meerkat website actually exists. Rudi and I love the antics that the meerkat (and his ancestors) have got up to.

A new series of adverts for beer shows my old mate Lemmy of Motorhead singing part of  “Ace of Spades” in a café but much slower than the original version. The message is “take it slow”. I rather like that version of the song.

Some more of my favourites are the Aviva (insurance)  ads which feature Paul Whitehouse. I adore Paul Whitehouse, a brilliant comedian (loads of stuff by him on youtube) – he is a man of 1,000 faces. On the Aviva ads we’ve seen him as a 1960s hippy, an aging laptop user taking advantage of free wi-fi in a vegetarian café (Now, where can a chap get a bacon sandwich around here?”,  and a family man buying a house in Spain or Italy, a Plymouth Argyle football fan and as a Welsh Goth.

But alas, these well made, interesting or humourous adverts only account for about 1% of the ads which are forced upon us day in, day out – the rest are just annoying, time-wasting crap made for a low IQ public – or at least that is how these ad-makers appear to view the public.

Software That Makes Life Easier

I was thinking tonight about relatively small programs, which make life easy. I don’t mean games, but utilities. So I thought I’d list some of the programs – not big professional ones ones such as Word, Adobe, Excel etc which I also use a lot – but smaller ones which are my absolute favourites.

1. NoteTab Pro (and NoteTab Light). I use this text editor for absolutely everything. The way it allows you to write your own simple or complex scripts or clips (if you want to), edit text of any kind (including e.g. Thunderbird emails, for example to cut out all the unrequired lines from Paypal, ebay, etc. so you just have the information you want, thus saving LOADS of space). It’s the first thing I open when I start up my computer. I use both the Light and the Registered Pro version. Another brilliant function is the “disc search” and “disc search and replace” with which you can search and replace text on your entire harddisk. This was extremely handy when I needed to add a script to about 50,000 html files for wildwinds.com. See www.notetab.com

2. Handy Backup. What a life-saver ! You can set it to backup incrementally (new or edited files only) or overwrite old files, tell it to back up x times a day at times you want, select files, folders or entire disks and it costs so little, you’d be silly not to pay for it. See www.handybackup.com

3. Mailwasher from Firetrust. I’ve been using it for nearly 10 years now and it is also a life-saver. You view the emails in the Mailwasher window and can delete emails immediately from the server, add people to Friend’s list, addresses or entire domains to a Black List, add your own filters (and e.g. tell Mailwasher that appropriate emails should be deleted without even showing them to you.). Another little program well worth the registration free because you get free updates for life. My best regards to Nick and his team at www.firetrust.com for this and…

4. Cool MP3 Splitter from Yaosoft. www.yaosoft.com. I had the audio book of Suetonius’ “The Twelve Caesars” and the Augustus, Tiberius, etc. chapters were so long that if I fell asleep in bed listening to one, I had to start at the beginning again. I must have heard about Augustus’ childhood three times.. I searched google and found this little program, downloaded it, and tested it. You can select to split MP3 files according to length or time or size, or you can join MP3 files together. It split the Augustus chapter into 15 minute sections in 5 seconds. I immediately clicked on “buy”. It costs under $10 and this little gem is worth it’s weight in gold.

5. Ashampoo Burning Studio. I used to use an old version of Nero but it sometimes told me that the CD was invalid, or burned with errors. I tested the new version but it is soooo huge and bulky, so I deleted that again and decided to try Ashampoo. It is lovely. Extremely easy to use, inexpensive and has more burning and data backup options than you will ever need. I registered that too.

6. For the website I look after, www.wildwinds.com, I often need to make a lot of thumbnails at a time, in the size I want. After trying loads of different programs to do this, I finally came across EZ Thumnails by the same programmer as NoteTab Pro above. It is freeware and is absolutely brilliant. Once your sizes and source folder are set, you don’t need to change them unless you need to. What a brilliant man Mr. Fookes is ! See http://www.fookes.com/ezthumbs/?Easy%20Thumbnails=3000

7. The last utility I will mention, that I use a lot is originally over 15 years old. It’s called “Text Finder” written by “A1 Soft”. I use the old version 4.03 (2003). It’s simple to use, just write in the text you are looking for, tell it where to look, then click on “search in these files” for further text etc. until you find the file you are looking for.

Scammers

We all know about scammers and the way they work. The latest family of scammers have found a new way of hiding themseves without having to register an email address at e.g. yahoo or gmail.

What they do is, they use a company in Holland called PrivacyProtect.org to hide behind. They then have an email address they can use and can begin to find high-end products and write to the shop owners and attempt – usually with stolen credit cards to buy the products.

The emails always have the same format:
- the scammers save time by not actually mentioning the product, they simply write “I have plan to buy several things from your store”.
- They always ask “Do you accept major credit card as the payment ?” They never mention Paypal or a bank transfer
- They usually have an English-sounding name
- Checking the web address (not the email address) at any who-is website always brings up this PrivacyProtect.org as Domain Registrant.

PrivacyProtect.org do not give out any information no matter what reason you have and even if you use their “http://privacyprotect.org/#contact_domain_owner” link. They seem to be happy to earn their money hiding thieves and scammers.

Over the past month or so we have received three such emails. I can’t remember one of the names, but the other two are from
- gutenshop.com (calling himself Michael Otawa in Redondo Beach. CA) but the email name is Asian
- watonmuni.com (calling himself Dave Dann but again with an Asian email name)

Added later: More scammers using this trick:

cangkem@watonmuni.com

rejeki@gutenshop.com

sambel@shambelkecap.com

master@nuhashop.com

All emails have almost identical content: asking about unnamed products, wanting to pay by credit card, etc.

I have forwarded all three to the Internet Fraud department of Interpol in Paris as well as the address of this Dutch place who is aware of the criminal behaviour of their clients but who seem to want to do nothing about it.

So: if you or a friend sell high-end products and receive such an email, AlWAYS check the address in the email address on a whois site. It may save you being scammed.

Update: I am also reporting the internet provider to the Dutchj Cybercrime department.

Memories of Steam Trains

In late October, the BBC ran a series of programs about the demise of steam locomotives in England which were killed off by the Minister of Transport of the time, Beeching. These nostalgic programs brought back some memories of when I was a little girl. The closest train track was about a 2 mile walk from our house – down the road, down the lane, across the main road, down another road which also turned into a lane, across a field, over a style then across another field to that magical place – the bridge over the railway line. My brother Mick and I often used to escape the constant beatings handed out by the woman who called herself our mother, by walking to “our” railway bridge. There, we would just lie on the grass, staring up at the sky and waiting for the sound of a train. Then we’d jump over to the bridge, take a deep breath, lean over the bridge, shut our eyes and felt the tingle of
glowing soot particles on our faces as the train passed beneath us. Then we’d breathe in again and then soon there would be the silence again, broken only by the sound of skylarks hovering in the sky. It was a great thrill for us if the driver saw us and the train whistled for us.

Another time, we were still very small, we heard that the legendary streamlined, “Class A4″ locomotive, Mallard would be coming to our nearest big station pulling the coaches of the Seaside Express. Fortunately it was a fine day, so off we set for the 5 mile walk to the town to see the Mallard. We didn’t have any money for bus fare, but our Nan had given us 1 penny each for Platform Tickets (you needed a ticket to go onto the platform back then). As it turned out, we were allowed onto the platform for free by the very kind guard, and he told to not to get too close to the edge, when I told him we wanted to see the Mallard.

Even thinking back to it, I get teary-eyed. Here we were, two little kiddies, all on our own like something out of a Dickens novel staring open-mouthed in awe, as this stunningly beautiful blue and black locomotive slowed down and chugged its regal way past us. I wanted to touch it, because it looked like something from another world. But I didn’t have the nerve. Mallard is now in the National Railway Museum in York, NE England and one day I will go and see it, and I will touch it.

But until then I can re-live those days of steam thanks to an excellent website which has not only pictures, but sound files to listen to, or to download. The website is http://www.fleetsteam.co.uk and if you want to hear a real train whistle, listen to the Oliver Cromwell whistle as it thunders towards the site owner, David.

 http://www.fleetsteam.co.uk/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/70013_farnboroughdown620_140908.mp3

David has been extremely kind and has sent me a short version of the whistle and train, so I can hopefully put it as a ring tone on my mobile phone.

Other sounds of steam locomotives can also be found on

http://www.steamsounds.org.uk/

Cancelling online memberships and accounts

I am currently in the midst of having the sad duty of cancelling various online membership accounts of my dear sister-in-law, recently deceased. Like most internet users, she had an account with various online stores, she used Skpe until she was too ill to do so, she bought books from Amazon, used ebay, etc. I had all her passwords so I was able to access all these accounts and attempted to use them to cancel her accounts and memberships.

You will NOT believe how difficult it is, to have accounts of some of these places shut down. The information and photocopies which some of them demand before they are willing to cancel a membership and stop their email advertising is not only personal, insulting and intrusive, but also very upsetting.

Official Swiss institutions such as the Post Office, Swiss Rail, Swisscom were very fast, efficient and caring.

A “bonus point” collecting scheme by the Jelmoli department store was very bad – they needed – according to a man on the phone - a copy of the death certificate, a copy of my Power of Attourney, her credit card number and even her security code (!). I did not give them any of these and sent them a very angry email of complaint.

Ebay was by FAR the worst so far. A week after I started all this, I thought the account was closed, but then the ebay advertising started rolling in to her email account. I checked, and the account hadn’t been closed at all.  I filled out the form again and received an email from ebay Switzerland asking me to send a copy of the death certificate and a covering letter to a fax number in Germany. I did that and received an email on Nov. 13th saying that the account was being closed. A week later yet more advertising came in.

I checked the ebay account and sure enough it was still open. I then sent another fax to Germany asking what was going on and on the 18th November I received another email, saying it was being closed down. 6 days later yet more advertising for “Christmas gifts on ebay” came in and by now I was REALLY angry. I sent a furious fax to the number in Germany and demanded that they shut down the account IMMEDIATELY. Their reply was that they would “initiate” the closing of the account from the 24th.  And so it goes. Today is the 9th December and the account is still open. It is an absolutely intolerable  and distressing situation.

Amazon have what looks like (but really isn’t) a link somewhere on their website (you have to hunt for it) to cancel an Amazon account. Via numerous corners and clicking, you can eventually send them a message asking for an account to be cancelled. I got an email back saying that they needed the account name / email address (which I had already entered into the online message form). Replies to the email address that they sent it from bounce back as invalid, so you need to either use their online message system or to call them by phone in Germany.  I did both and explained the situation yet again, giving her account no, email address etc. They also demanded various photocopies per fax. (I really do not know where online shops find the impertinence to demand copies of death certificates). Anyway I sent the faxes to Amazon.de as requested and received an email saying that the account had been cancelled. A week later yet more Amazon advertising appeared in her inbox. I was absolutely furious and sent them an email demanding the cancellation of her account according to Swiss Data Protection Laws and saying that, at the same time they can cancel my own account because I am not prepared to support a company which breaks Data Protection Laws by obviously avoiding cancelling accounts on written request. The account was closed a week later.

The Swiss online supermarket LeShop was very quick and understanding.

 

Skype sent an automatic email saying that the money she had as credit for calls to normal telephone numbers was now “forfeited” (!) and that they would be booking the next “payment” from her credit card again. I think I managed to stop that by hunting around the Skype website trying to discover where to cancel automatic debiting.

Lottery24 (“Euromillions”) had also been taking money from her credit card every week. It looks like I was successful in cancelling that, online on their website.

Some newspapers and magazines also seem to be unwilling to end subscriptions. One, (“Haus & Garten“)  was very nice and said I could throw the renewal invoice away, despite it being 3 weeks overdue. Another newspaper has sent a renewal reminder since I cancelled the subscription…

There are others – I could go on all day. So my advice to everyone is, don’t be too quick to sign up for online companies. Don’t be too quick to allow money to be booked off your credit card automatically. Memberships and automatic debiting are not as easy to stop as you may think.

Comcast does it again

Well, your favourite (NOT!) US email provider has just lost ANOTHER company in the US a $2,000+ order.

I have been in contact with a supplier for over a week now – they have a comcast address and – surprisingly –  all went well for 4 emails sent and received – until today, when I sent an email with the definite order information. As to be expected from that pathetic excuse for an internet provider – the email bounced with the message:

xxxxxxxx@comcast.net (reading BANNER): 554 IMTA05.westchester.pa.mail.comcast.net comcast 195.186.18.61 Comcast BL004 Blocked for spam.  Please see http://www.comcast.net/help/faq/index.jsp?faq=SecurityMail_Policy18628

I am not going to bother with that company again. No wonder the US financial situation is in such a poor state. As long as companies use a service which blocks perfectly legitimate emails – which contain ORDERS FOR GOODS – as spam, well, you can’t expect much else, can you ?

The email had no advertising in it, no links, no words which could possibly be construed as spam unless Comcast’s atrocious filter considers “we would definitely like to purchase”…. as evidence of spam.

So yet another US company loses business. What a pity.

Comcast

Well, Frank was very kind to post his comment. But it doesn’t help.

…indicates the user name is invalid or there is trouble routing it to the Comcast.net server by the ISP or mail provider you use

he writes.

Well, there is a very well-known numismatic organisation in the USA and they use comcast. The CEO of the organisation has two comcast.net addresses. I needed to reply to an email which I had received from him – both emails bounced. This was from my bluewin.ch address. Then I tried using my gmail.com address – both emails bounced. I then tried my old web.de address – both emails bounced. I asked my brother in England to send the mails from his BT (British Telecom) address in England - both mails bounced. I asked an English numismatist living in Germany to send them from Germany – both mails bounced even though he tried sending them from two different addresses on two different mail servers, one of them being aol.com, the other t-online.de. The same applied when the emails were sent from the Professor of Numismatics and Archaeology at an Italian university. Both mails bounced. Finally I asked my friend in the US to send them – the emails got through.

So what Frank is again suggesting is that the DNS of all these mail servers, in Switzerland, England, Italy and Germany – are all set up wrong. The suspicious thing is that the email sent from Germany from an aol.com address was bounced, whereas the emails sent from the US from an aol.com address got through. So that puts paid to any DNS excuses and puts paid to any nonsensical “user name is invalid” rubbish.

• Fact is, emails from most European servers don’t get through.
• Fact is, comcast needs to stop blaming the error on European mail servers - where, by the way – email was invented (by CERN in Geneva, Switzerland).
• Fact is, no other mail server in the world acts in the same way that comcast.net does, by bouncing emails with such depressing regularity.
• Fact is, I am fed up with being humiliated by having to ask friends in the US to forward emails to comcast.net addresses.
• Fact is, US companies are certainly losing business and will continue to do so. (We finally gave up on ordering $12,000 worth of bicycle components from a firm in Arizona because emails to their comcast.net address kept bouncing).
• Fact is, that our (European) mail servers can find every other mail servers all over the world. But Frank says they can’t find the comcast.net server. So where is the error, hmmmm?
• Fact is, even a reply to Frank’s  @cable.comcast.net address bounced !!!

Comcast blocks emails from Europe

The USA is blessed (not!) with an internet provider called comcast.net. Apparently a lot of people who get TV through comcast are happy with them but more and more people – especially businesses who sell internationally or those wanting to sell their goods to Europe – are getting really really angry with comcast’s email service.
The problem is that comcast.net’s primitive anti-spamming filters check the headers of arriving emails for the sender’s IP. AND THOUSANDS OF HUNDREDS OF LIGITIMATE EUROPEAN IPS ARE BEING UNNECESSARILY BLOCKED BY COMCAST.NET’S ANTI-SPAM FILTER. Emails sent from most European countries to your comcast.net address will be bounced as undeliverable. This applies at the very least (and to my certain knowledge) to senders of emails from Germany, Switzerland, Holland, France, Italy, some British IPs, Sweden, Ireland and Austria. It applies to ALL comcast.net email addresses.

So say you are a European buyer on ebay and – after purchasing something – you attempt to contact the seller at his/her comcast.net address by email. Your email will be bounced back and the seller will not receive your email. This can lead to a lack of communication and possibly to poor or bad feedback.
Or you are a European seller on ebay and want to send an email to a buyer who is a comcast customer. Hard luck – the buyer will not get your email.
Or say you are in the US and have a business. A potential customer in Europe wants to order several thousand dollars-worth of goods from you. He copies the email address on your website to his email program, writes you an email asking for a quote – but within seconds, the email is bounced with the following message:

>xxxxxxxxx@comcast.net;
>
-> Failed
>Error-Code; 5.1.2 (bad destination system address)

Did you write the email address wrong ? NO! The address is correct and if you ask a friend in the US to send the email for you,  it will go through.

Comcast appears to have a personal grudge against European IPs. Even Europeans using yahoo, gmail, hotmail or other US freemail system will have their emails bounced, because the European IP is included in the header lines.

Comcast.net steadfastly refuses to revise its list of blocked IPs and ignores all requests from IP staff in Europe, preferring instead to apply its “why use a scalpel when you can use a sledgehammer?” policy.

And the really ludicrous part of it all is the lack of knowledge of their so-called customer service. I wrote to them explaining the problem that Europeans have. The first “solution” was that I …. wait for it…. clear my Internet browser cache (this is like telling a car driver whose engine has just blown up to empty the ashtray to solve the problem). Their next reply was that none of the 20+ addresses I gave them as examples, were valid. Utter nonsense! I asked my friend Don in the US to write to those addresses explaining the problem – and all the emails got through.

The last intelligent (not!) missive I received from comcast staff was that EVERY SINGLE MAIL SERVER IN EUROPE – plus yahoo, gmail, hotmail etc. WERE ALL SET UP WRONG and only comcast was set up right. Apart from shaking one’s head in disbelief at the sheer arrogance and ignorance of such a reply, it appears that nothing to be done.

So if you have an online business and use a comcast address and wonder why you don’t receive any enquiries from willing customers in Europe – or why you don’t receive replies to YOUR emails to Europe – you know why. Your insular provider apparently doesn’t think you have the right to receive emails from Europe and bounces them all as undeliverable.

Maybe it’s time for you to change your comcast.net email service to an email provider with a little more IT knowledge and customer-friendliness?

Support your local…

We used to have a butcher in our 2000 inhabitants village. His products were fantastic, fresh, direct from local farmers and you could get exactly as much or as little as you wanted. He  trimmed the fat off the meat, prepare cordon bleu as you waited, made his own lasagne and if you got unexpected guests on a Sunday (most shops here are closed on Sunday), he’d meet you at the back door of his shop and see what he could do to help. Gristle was unheard of, and he always had a little bag of something for customers with cats or dogs.
I used to buy all my meat from him, plus other stuff he sold, such as his aforementioned, to-die-for lasagne, herb butter for steaks, even a simply fabulous Gruyere cheese which he also used to buy from a local farmer.
He closed down his shop over 2 years ago and I still miss him.
The problem was, that there is a Co-Op almost opposite and a huge Migros supermarket only a mile or so away. And people think that if, say, the supermarket’s lamb chops are 35 Swiss Francs a kilo and the butcher’s lamb chops are 38 SFr a kilo, then obviously the supermarket’s meat is better value. But that’s not necessarily the case. These customers don’t calculate the difference in price when they have to cut the fat off themselves, and have to leave chunks of gristle at the side of their plate. Look at it like that and the butcher’s meat – besides probably being fresher, and most likely coming from more naturally raised animals than most  supermarkets’ offerings –  is better value for money.

The same applies to bakers. We still have a baker’s shop in the village and I still go there to get my bread. And if it’s late in the afternoon and she has too many small cakes left, she’ll give them away to customers in the shop, or to passing schoolchildren, rather than let them go to waste.

The next village to us still has a cobbler. Remember cobblers? Usually dark shops smelling gloriously of leather and polish. Fortunately local farmers and horse riders go to him to have bridles, saddles and other leather goods repaired so I hope he’ll be around for a long time to come.

These small local shops and businesses are the true lifeblood of communities and they deserve everyone’s support to help them survive in this modern world of superstores and supermarkets. So if you’re driving through a village, don’t look for a supermarket to do your bit of shopping – look for the small shop where you are treated with old-fashioned curtesy and have the satisfaction of supporting part of our world which is being elbowed out of existence by megastores.

Letters to the emperor

I am currently reading the book “The Letters of Pliny The Younger” and have reached Book X (=10 to those who weren’t paying attention in history class). This section comprises of some of Pliny’s letters to the Emperor Trajan and the replies he received. In many of them Pliny seeks advice about how to deal with certain situations in his job as Governer of Bithynia – a province which had previously suffered from corruption and poor administration.

Trajan was a very “approachable” emperor, even for common people when they needed his help. This led to one of the happier and more peaceful times of the Roman Empire. A couple of these letters can be read here (in English) (though the book has many more).

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/pliny-trajan1.html

Now, here in Switzerland we have a similar system concerning the approachability of those “in power”. I remember many years ago when we turned down the offer of having cable TV (even though the cable runs through our land) because we felt that satellite TV was preferable for us (more freedom of choice) and had a 1,5m dish on our roof (the first private dish in Canton Berne as it happens).

Once the cable TV system was up and running our local (village) administration sent a letter to everyone telling them that external antennas has to be removed by a certain date – most people didn’t need them any more anyway. But we did. So I wrote to them and said we still needed our Swiss TV antenna and our dish, as we weren’t on their cable system. The letter was ignored. A month or so later we received a registered letter saying that our dish was to be taken down from our roof or they would send someone to forcibly remove it at our expense. Now, if our house was an ancient monument (it’s ancient but it ain’t no monument!) or in a historically protected or “listed” area, I could understand them, but it’s not. I called them and said again that we needed our dish because we’re not on their cable system, but they practically said “that’s your own fault” and “remove your dish or it will be removed”… The fact that they pulled the cable over our land, did a lot of damage to our land and never paid us a penny compensation didn’t matter to them.

So I called the National Government in Bern. Switzerland doesn’t have a king or a single president in the usual manner. We have – at the top of the chain of power – a group of seven people called the Bundesrat, who basically have the main power (apart from the people, when we vote by referendum on whether we agree with the Bundesrat wants to do). Anyway, I called Bern and immediately got through to the secretary of one of the most approachable and popular Bundesräte of his time – Willy Ritschard. She put me through to Mr. Ritschard Himself (and I didn’t even realise until half-way through the conversation that it WAS him.)

When he heard of our predicament he was furious and practically cursed petty local government politicians and, thanks to a letter signed by him on our behalf and sent to the chairman of our community government, they “decided” to allow us to keep our dish.

Mr Ritschard came to our aid yet again a couple of years later when our daughter, then 9 years old, was forbidden from riding her bicycle to school. Local school by-laws allowed only children over 11 from riding to school. I protested that a local government was not allowed to say who could or could not ride on National roads. They countered by saying that she would not be covered by the school’s insurance. I lobbed the ball back saying that Swiss law states that ALL children have to be insured by the school for their way to and from school, no matter whether they walked, rode, skated, or flew. And that if they are saying that their insurance did not cover our daughter, then they were breaking the law and I would do something about it. They ummed and aahhhed and then said that if she rode her bike to school, she would not be allowed to ride it on school grounds but would have to leave the bike elsewhere.. So Mr Ritschard again stepped in, told them not to be so petty and to allow our daughter, who lived at just over the “legal” distance of 1 km away, to ride her bike to school.

Things have changed in our village since then. You see kids who live only a few houses away, going to school on bikes, skates, skateboards and scooters and nobody is stopping them. Maybe Mr Ritschard and ourselves finally made them see how petty they were and change the rules.

So for me, it was rather like writing to the Emperor.