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/

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.

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.

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 !!!

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?

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.

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.

There is a series on English TV, it’s been going for years, called “Time Team”. A small team of genuine archaeologists plus one other person spend three days excavating a small area of the British Isles, talk about finds (if there are any) and show computer-generated reconstructions of what the houses, pot, or whatever will (possibly) have looked like. It’s sometimes a bit far-fetched when they find a 1″ square piece of pottery and suddenly you see the computer generated picture of an ornate bowl overflowing with fruits.. but it’s good entertainment and to give them the archaeologists’ due, they have to date discovered one example of the rarest Celtic gold coin ever found on British soil.
Well, this would be a great program except for an annoying little man by the name of Tony Robinson, whose main role appears to run around fields waving his arms about, shouting in his nasal, whiny voice in order to attract the onlookers’ attention to himself and away from the archaeologists doing their work. The man is so annoying and so patently false, that he spoils the entire program with his continual whine.
The income he receives from this program is obviously not enough for Mr Robinson – he has now begun to prostitute his voice to all and sundry companies for TV advertising – so we hear his whines and shouts in adverts for things from toilet cleaner and washing aids to soft drinks. I will NEVER buy the products this little man advertises.
And now he is doing a new series on one of the British Four channels, about the history of British Law. What a pity, I would have enjoyed the series, but with this horrible little man doing the talking – no thankyou, I’ll stick with Heartbeat and Judge Judy.

I often buy books about Roman coin hoards to add previously unknown types found in such hoards to my RIC lists. (http://www.catbikes.ch/coinstuff/coins-ric.htm)

From one of my favourite s/h book suppliers in Great Britain, I just received a couple of skinny little booklets (one is about the Bicester hoard, by C.E. King, and the other, published in 1908, is called “Roman Coins From Croydon, Constantius II, Constans, Magnentius and Gallus“) plus the large Coin Hoards of Roman Britain, vol. X

Well, it appears that the Coin Hoards book and the Croydon booklet were previously in the personal collection of Dr. John Kent, the author of RIC VIII. The Coin Hoards book had an empty envelope stuck inside the pages (probably used to mark a page), postmarked 11.2.99, addressed to Dr. John Kent, from the University of Birmingham. It’s a fancy, odd-sized envelope and probably contained an invitation (it’s that kind of square size).

The Croydon booklet has the name “J Kent” beneath an older stamp “From the collection of Walter J. Zimmerman” on the first page, and it is full of underlining and numerous notes in a small, academic hand.

Wow. This Croydon booklet is probably one of the information sources for RIC VIII and is certainly part of our numismatic heritage.

To be honest, I am not a fan of Dell. In my opinion, companies who find it necessary to spam people that have never had anything to do with them, in order to drum up business, are not to be trusted with my money. Dell spammed me for 2 years several years ago and it wasn’t until I finally called their head office in the US telling them to tell their German importers to stop (German companies often spam Swiss people) otherwise I would take drastic measures, that they finally stopped.

But our son-in-law, bless him, is a fan of Dell and when my husband decided that he wanted a laptop - the first computer he’d ever owned – our son-in-law recommended a Dell and we ordered one.

At this point, I must add that I also have a laptop (besides normally using my PC). I have a Toshiba Satellite, bought unseen in an emergency situation (I was going to France and my Sony had given up the ghost after I tried upgrading it from Win98 to XP) from “Top D” Biel. My Toshiba has XP on it (the only conditions I set Top D were XP and WiFi). I LOVE my Toshiba. It’s fast, beautiful, has connectors for about everything (except camera memory cards but that’s no problem as I have a little USB Hama card reader).

Anyway, on 24th April 2007 my husband’s Dell arrived, very pretty, but with Vista on it. It took absolutely AGES to start up – I timed it. It took over 10 minutes for everything to be loaded and ready to go. Disabling that stupid, stupid “widget” sidebar knocked nearly 2 minutes off the startup time and getting rid of McCaffey AV and replacing it with AGV reduced the startup time to just over 5 minutes. A restart would take 10 minutes. 5 minutes for “shutting down” and 5 minutes to start up.

Then he started getting error messages about Roxio.. I found out that this was part of the bloatware which Dell put on their PCs. Thanks to very useful information on another wordpress blogger:

http://teknobabble.wordpress.com/2007/08/27/removal-of-roxio-software-from-dell-vista-system-%E2%80%93-probably-a-good-idea/

I was able completely remove the damn thing yesterday and the startup today took about 2 minutes. So many thanks to teknobabble!