When Amazon.co.uk started DVD rentals I immediately signed up. It was better than renting one disc per week from the local video shop for £3.50, having a limited stock, picking it up on Saturday and taking it back on Sunday.

Amazon sold it’s rental business, or LOVEFiLM took it over and fortunately they didn’t screw it up. It’s more or less just the same as it was and I still get a small discount on DVD purchases at Amazon.

Recently I decided to up my membership from 4 discs per month, 2 at a time, to unlimited, still 2 at a time. Hell I even paid for a year up front to get a few months free. I had over 50 discs on my list and they just didn’t seem to be going down. Last week I managed to watch 3 rental discs in a week. They turn around the discs pretty fast.

Earlier this year I sent a question to their support team asking exactly how their priority system was working. Their response:

We will always try and dispatch discs in relation to the priorities you give on your selection list. Our allocation process by necessity will look at the availability of stock as well as which titles you would like to see first. The selection of which title to send you is based on those two factors, and is not affected by when you placed a title onto your list.

If it so happens that we can’t send you out a title from your highest selection we will always send out the next best alternative from the list that you have chosen.

Today two discs are ready for dispatch. One was in my high priority list, all well and good, the other was Speed Racer which must have been about number 26 on my medium priority list. Of the discs above that only one was flagged as being ‘Short wait’. Strangely I only added Speed Racer last week, maybe the week before, but it will be dispatched head of discs that have been there for months and months.

If, as they say, discs are dispatched relative to the stock availability, they must have thousands of Speed Racer discs for rental. There’s no other rhyme or reason for it.

Does everyone have trouble with utility companies or is it just me?

At the beginning of last month I received a letter from British Gas, my gas and electricity supplier of choice, saying that they were sad to see me go and was there anything that they could do to change my mind. This was news to me. I phoned them and they said that E.ON had taken over my gas, and probably my electricity, supply. They asked if I had spoken to anyone on the phone or had anyone approached me in the street. No they hadn’t. They said that they would contact E.ON about getting my supply returned. This could take up to 3 weeks.

The 27th came around and a pleasant chap from British Gas phoned saying that they were still having trouble contacting E.ON but not to worry they were still looking into it. British Gas followed this up with a letter saying that they were still working on it.

Yesterday I received a letter from E.ON addressed to ‘The Occupier’ with my correct address and postcode. The letter had an account number and was saying that the date of my next bill and meter reading was changing. Obviously E.ON hadn’t taken the hint and were still determined to supply my gas and electric. I phoned them, the person on the other end had trouble with the account number and I explained that they had taken my gas and electric supply from British Gas without my consent. He puts me on hold and checks it with someone. He comes back and says that he’s sorry, they won’t be charging me for the gas and electric I've used and that my supply will transfer back to British Gas. I asked how this could have happened and he said that it happens all the time.

I don’t know if someone comes around to read the meter and reads the wrong meter or gets the wrong serial number off the meter or what, but someone in my block was hoping to transfer to E.ON.

I'm amazed that if I phoned British Gas they'd want my name, first line of my address, postcode, phone number and my 12 digit customer reference number before they’ll do anything. But E.ON can just botch a number and that’s it no cross checking nothing. You would think that if I ever wanted to transfer my supply that I'd have to contact both parties involved instead of just one.

British Gas have been great, Les from the customer complaints department has been keeping in touch, he phoned mid-morning saying that E.ON were now transferring my supply. Another chap phoned at lunchtime saying that it had all been sorted and that British Gas would put it all in writing. So I hope that’s the end of it.

I don’t think I'd leave British Gas judging from the poor service you get from the competition. If you’re getting good service from a company stick with them. You may pay a little more but you get what you pay for.

Yesterday I received another letter from Fredrickson International Limited, remember this is the third debt collection agency that Pipex have used, it said to pay the £74.97 within 7 days or face legal proceedings, a black mark on my credit rating and £145.97 in fees and costs. The woman I spoke to on Wednesday said that there would be a lock on the action for 5 days to give Pipex chance to kill the debt.

Yet again I was completely confused about what action to take. When you talk to Pipex and they say they’ll sort it you can’t just rant and rave and demand to speak to a supervisor. I honestly think that they will do what they say. At the end of yesterday I was ready to just pay the full £74.97 to Fredrickson, to ensure that this sorry tale doesn’t affect my credit rating, and then pay Fredrickson to get the money back from Pipex. After all that has happened, spending 5 months in 2008 sorting this out, I don’t want to spend months trying to get the money back. I'd just solve one problem, the debt collectors, and replace it with another. If there was still a problem after today I would have phoned the Citizens Advice Bureau to ask their advice.

I've just been on the phone to Fredrickson and I was just told, “We’re no longer dealing with this you’ll have to Pipex directly”. To say that he was brusque and abrupt is an understatement.I even asked him to confirm that the debt had been cleared, he just repeated the same phrase again. The funny thing was he pronounced it Pip-ex.

After a week of worry and lack of sleep over this whole fiasco I still don’t have it in writing that this has all been cleared.

I've just phoned Pipex to confirm that the debt on my account has cleared. ‘Anne’ said that the account had been closed in August 2008. She seemed surprised that I'd started to get letters from a debt collection agency again. I was told that she would clear the account. That’s what I was told was going to happen on Monday.

I then phoned the debt collection agency and they said that the debt was still active and hadn’t been cancelled by Pipex. A lock has now been put on the account for 5 days. If Pipex haven’t cancelled the debt, which should only take 24 hours to do, then they’ll be on to me for at least partial payment.

Because I doubt that you’ll want to read all the archive posts journaling my trouble with Pipex I give you a little re-cap.

Unhappy with Pipex in February 2008 I decided to switch, I mean how hard could it be! I requested my MAC code and used it to sign up with O2. On the 4th of March 2008 Pipex disconnected my internet connection, not good when you work from home. Luckily I was only without broadband for a week and soon I was on O2. According to the Pipex terms and conditions I used my MAC code which terminated my contract with them. I was paying by direct debit which I thankfully cancelled myself. Then I started to get letters saying that Pipex would disconnect me if I didn’t start paying by another means. In August of 2008 I started to get letters from a debt collection agency saying that I owed Pipex £99.96 and that they were going to send someone ‘round to collect it. With solicitor and court fees this nearly doubled to £180. I phoned Pipex to try and sort this out and ended up paying £24.99, not something that I wanted to do under the circumstances, but was glad to finally get it all sorted. I even phoned Pipex 3 days later just to verify everything was clear, it was, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

That is until I opened Saturday’s post. Yes, almost 2 years after it was ‘settled’, another letter from a debt collection agency demanding £74.97 or else. I phoned them first thing this morning and obviously, having dealt with companies like this before back in 2008, all they want is payment. I explained that I had been through all this before and that it had all been cleared, “Did I have this in writing?” she asked. Pipex will not send you written confirmation because I asked. At the end of the conversation I was told that I basically had until Wednesday of this week to pay all or half of the sum before they start legal proceedings.

I then phoned Pipex. It’s a call centre in India somewhere so they have trouble understanding you and you have trouble understanding them. But at least it saves Pipex some money. I gave my account number, they couldn’t find the account, I gave my name, address and date of birth at least 3 times, then they found it, my long dormant account. I had spent 18 minutes on the phone and been put on hold a total of 5 times. She said that the £74.97 was being ‘waived’ and that I owed them nothing. Big surprise. She said to phone back in 24 to 48 hours just to check. So that is what I’ll be doing on Wednesday morning. Let’s hope that the debt collection agency are also told that the debt is clear.

My legs ache, my feet still hurt, I have another day of walking ahead and to cap it all it’s raining. Not the water running down your neck kind of rain, just that fine drizzle that blows around instead of just having the decency to fall vertically.

Breakfast first then I decided to take the tube from Holborn to Tower Hill. I certainly couldn’t face walking the full distance again. A single ticket in zone 1 is now £4. On my first London trip it was, I'm sure, just £1. At least I bought Carnet tickets 10 for a tenner and that was it, all of my travel in London paid for. There was a change at one station and I ended up surfacing before realising my error and going back down underground to find the correct line. Getting through the barrier at Tower Hill was fun, as the machine took my ticket the gate snapped open, but I wasn’t quick enough on my tender feet and almost got stuck. The alarm went off but no one stopped me.

By the time I arrived at the Design Museum I was slightly damp to say the least. Thankfully they were open and I purchased my ticket by handing over £8.50. The first floor was filled with architects models and photographs of buildings, some actual, some proposed, including a few designs for Tate Modern that didn’t make the cut. Not all that interesting. The second floor seemed to be closed off. I don’t know if this is usually an exhibition floor, this being my first visit, but I'm sure there must be something there. The third floor had more architects models of futuristic houses as well as some artwork done by someone who did the design for one of the last Olympic games… and that was it. Talk about being completely underwhelmed! After seeing all the great stuff in the shop I thought that the museum part of it was going to be more of the same. Chairs, furniture, gadgets, iPods anything that is well designed and serves it’s purpose, but there was nothing like that. I'm sure I've been to the art galleries in Manchester that have had more ‘design’ items than that. Yes, bitterly disappointed having visited the place twice on consecutive days. I just had another walk around the shop, which was infinitely more interesting, and free, bought my pack of Field Notes memo pads and headed back across the bridge to Tower Hill tube.

On the underground again to Euston Square and a trip to the Wellcome Collection, which I had only passed the other day. I've always had a fascination for medical artefacts like this and admission is free. It is just wall to wall science. A printout of the human genome, that isn’t something that you’ll see every day and certainly isn’t something that I think you could replicate with a bubblejet printer. Guillotine blades, hair and teeth of those long since left us. Amputation saws, shrunken heads, male anti-masturbation devices, chastity belts, artificial limbs, dentists chairs, it’s all just wonderful intriguing stuff and did I mention that it’s free? The café was packed so I just had a little wander, more of a limp really, around the shop and then outside to decide what to do next.

I still had places I wanted to go to, Hyde Park in daylight might be nice and it had stopped raining. In the end I decided to head back to the hotel via M&S for something to eat. Walking was still painful to say the least so back down to Euston Square tube I went. At a ticket window I asked for a single to Tottenham Court Road, the bloke behind the glass said that I just needed to go up the stairs and left and that was Tottenham Court Road… and like an idiot I did just that. I guess it did save me another £4 tube fare. So I ended up walking back to the hotel. By this time I was limping quite badly, so much so that passersby were checking my left leg to see if it looked wooden.

Back in room 721 of the Covent Garden Travelodge I lay, under the duvet, eating my sandwiches, watching afternoon TV and I really noticed how grubby the room was. The ceiling was false, which is fine, but they always seem to be made from the same substance that egg boxes are made out of, that really course cardboard that has just been loosely mashed together. So there’s a brown stain on the ceiling, a light bulb no longer works over the door, the window frames are metal and have fixtures missing, this allows cold air and any outside noise easy passage into the room. There is both a vast air-conditioning unit, which looks as if it was fitted in the seventies, I didn’t try it, and a Dimplex heater, again untested. One wall had a large bubble in the wallpaper, another had scuff marks from a boot, it was certainly a boot as there was also a clear print of it on the wall. I counted 4 electrical outlets that must have been in use at some point but now just had covers on them. The bathroom was in a similar state of disrepair. Caps that should have been covering the heads of screws were missing, fixtures like the toilet roll holder had been broken, replaced with new holes drilled without filling in the old ones. A bath was completely out of the question as there was no plug. Four drill holes in the tiles didn’t seem to perform any purpose and lastly, the one thing that never seems to work in hotel bathrooms, the ceiling extractor fan didn’t work. Or possibly it was so efficient and well made that it was inaudible. A snip at £120 a night for a room with only a single bed.

It doesn’t stop there – the other annoying thing was that the two lifts had indicator numbers for the floors, so that you knew if it was your floor. The LED indicator numbers didn’t work, so twice when the lift doors opened I got out. Thinking that that was my floor. There isn’t even a sign on the wall where the lifts are showing which floor it is. The only way you could tell that you'd hit the ground floor is to look for a tile pattern on the floor instead of carpet.

I had been sending text messages to my niece Zoe, telling her what I was up to. She had sent me one back asking if I'd go to the Apple Store on Regent Street and get her a Magic Mouse. I thought that she was mistaken and that it was called a Mighty Mouse and that there had been rumours of a touch sensitive mouse with no scroll ball. I said that I'd only been in there the other day looking for one myself. Little did I know. You don’t check the internet for a couple of days and look what happens.

Yes, tonight I would have been at the Last Night Of The Poms at the M.E.N. in Manchester but alas it was not to be. Through no fault of my own you understand because the date was cancelled back in July with ‘unforeseen circumstances’ being the reason given.

I had been dying to see Sir Les Patterson and Dame Edna in the flesh and had booked the ticket back in January. In my official capacity as curator of a web-site dedicated to Uncle Les I felt it my duty to attend. Even the ticket price of £53.50 didn’t dissuade me. That is a considerable amount of money in anyones currency for two, possibly three, hours entertainment. It would have been the first appearance by Sir Les on a UK stage in many years.

On a side note: when the cancellation was announced Ticketmaster.co.uk managed to get the ticket out the next day. This was so that they could still charge me the £2 booking fee and leave me with a souvenir ticket that was worthless. £2 for a piece of flimsy card. They did refund the £51.50 but considering that they had my money for six months, that the date was cancelled and that they hadn’t even sent out the ticket, it was robbery.

Last night was the first Last Night Of The Poms so my Google Alerts were firing with multiple links to various reviews. You can read the selected high-lights over at Sir Les Patterson’s web-site. From all accounts, the word isn’t good. The monologues by Sir Les and Dame Edna certainly seem to have been well received but when the band and the huge choir strike up that’s when things take a dive.

From what I've read the musical passages just aren’t that funny, witty or humorous. These musical sections have been performed before and, again from what I've read, most people wanted to forget them.

With the country digging it’s way out of a recession I can’t see that that many people would have paid £50 or more, each, for one night out. And that doesn’t include meals, parking, drinks or a stay in a hotel.

The tour should just have been in theatre sized venues, of which there are at least 4 or 5 around the centre of Manchester, with Laurie Holloway on the piano, a few songs (hence the pianist) and buckets of phlegm and gladdies. Possibly do two nights at each venue, one for Sir Les and the other for Dame Edna (I think I've missed my calling, I should have been a tour manager).

There is a possibility that the tour will return to the UK next year after a stint in Australia during December. Here’s hoping that Sir Les leaves the band behind and plays a show near here.

The town centre has been gridlocked for months. The council has been hard at work hacking down the old traffic lights and pedestrian crossings signals and erecting shiny new ones.

For those gentle readers who live outside the U.K. This is how the old system worked.

You'd approach the road crossing, push the button (usually on a post to your right) and the ‘Wait’ signal would light. Directly across the carriageway there would be a post with lights to control the traffic and also lights to control the pedestrians. Traffic lights would change from green to red and the red stationary man would change to a walking green man. You could safely cross the road. Notice that you are looking up, and over, the passing traffic. Looking across the road in the direction that you want to travel.

The new system is different, naturally. The lights for traffic are the same, but the red and green men, instead of being high and in the direction that you are walking, are on the post with the button and the ‘Wait’ indicator. But now the ‘Wait’ indicator has changed to just a red box that is lit. So you have to be looking to your right and not over the traffic. The problem, that I found this evening, is if there are 4 or 5 people waiting to cross, and you are to the right of the post with the button you can’t see the red man change to green. You are totally at the mercy of the people crossing to give you an indication that all is well. If they’re the kind of people who just cross when they don’t see any vehicles then you could just blindly follow them. Instead of waiting for the correct signal.

So you have to be able to see the red and green men indicators to be sure that you can safely cross. This is only about 4 feet off the ground on a box, on a post. If there are many people waiting to cross, and someone is stood in front of the box then none of you can see the signal except those people really close to it. When the green man lights there is also an audible signal that it is safe to cross. If you’re hard of hearing you would still need to be able to see that the visual indicator has changed before attempting to cross.

Surely whoever designed these things tested them out. As far as I'm concern these new pedestrian crossing are a huge backward step.

So Apple have taken steps to limit app reviews to just the people who have downloaded or purchased it, according to Matt Gemmell.

I, for one, hope that this will filter out to the movie reviews (or film reviews, as they are called here in the UK). How many times have you seen one star reviews of good films that start with, ‘Welcome to rip off Britain’, which are just a tirade against the purchase price and not about the film? If you don’t want to pay £6.99 for a film then don’t buy from the iTunes store. When do you ever see someone storming down the baked bean aisle in Sainsbury’s saying that you can buy them cheaper in Tesco. You don’t.

Lets hope that this restraint filters out to other online stores like Amazon. As I said last November the reviews on certain items can become absurd especially on pre-release items like video games and music.

I received a letter from Pipex in the post today.

This letter is in response to the registered letter that I sent to them on the 3rd of July. Apart from my name and the date of my letter it is just a standard reply letter. I haven’t even bothered to read it all, it does run to one and a half sides of A4, but it is just waffle saying how I would have to prove that any fault with my, then, internet connection was due to Pipex.

It just goes to show that customer care is not high on their list of priorities, if at all. Remember they managed to send two payment reminder letters to me every month between March and August after I had left them for O2. If they want something, they shoot letters out at high-speed, if you want anything from them be prepared to wait 83 days.