The LambCutlet Disorganisation

Our army of 8 furry Bertie Bears have already passed their target of £200 on their fundraising page hosted at JustGiving.com! There are still 2 weeks till the closing date on the 10th of February, 2005 where you can submit a small donation making you eligible to win a Bertie, the soft & cuddly Official phpBB Plush Bear. Monies raised will be donated completely to provide much needed cash for the Disasters Emergency Committee whom are giving relief to the millions of people affected by the recent Indian Ocean Tsunami, so please enter if you haven’t already to raise even more money!

Right… That’s it, hands up whomever it was that has stolen January? Barely have I got used to this “2005″ lark and the first month is pretty much over; meaning in just a fortnight’s (14 days for the rest of you) time, I’ll be setting foot in 香港 (Hong Kong) for the first time since being re-patriated back to the U.K. in the winter of 1990. Difficult to say how I feel about the whole situation, though what I think I do know is the fact I am starting to feel a lot more restless, compounded by the truth my exisiting contract at my current employer will only have about 1 month left by the time I return in the end of February.

Obviously, such situations are not intrinsically bad and give us oportunities we otherwise wouldn’t have. Nykky herself has decided she’ll be visiting 香港 (Hong Kong) sometime in May ‘05 for a couple weeks, having heard good things about it and I’ve been designated as “her scout” when I go there next month. Such is life as 香港 (Hong Kong) was one of the stops we had differences in opinion as to whether we should visit or not, on our original 6 month back-packing plan for the two of us! I guess the time away in a different land will perhaps give me some ideas as to what I wish to pursue later on…

Alas, if I’m in a job or not come July ‘05, I’ll be meeting back up with Nykky somewhere in Australia for her birthday celebrations. :D

I’ve been holding off updating the site’s backend in any major fashion… though as long as you are reading this post, then it would seem the update to WordPress 1.5 CVS has gone pretty smoothly, which it should have given the fact I’ve been giving the whole caboodle a good testing away from prying eyes! :D

In anycase, I’ve made good use of 1.5’s templating function meaning this site is more WordPressified™ than ever implimenting some of the site specific features meant my skills (or lack thereof) in PHP were giving a good eating! Bitch & moan via the comments should anything be FUBAR… :)

It’s been just over a month since I plunged for an account at blo.gs and with a bit of secret PHP kung-fu kludged up a working blogroll which I’m rather pleased with. However, something that bugged me since day 0 was the fact Unicode wasn’t being handled properly…

As an example, Inese’s site description should have been display as “Inese Dūka” but was actually getting displayed as “Inese DÅ«ka”. Now Inese’s site was using UTF-8 throughout and the issue appeared to be the fact blo.gs were taking UTF-8 strings, treating them as if they were ISO-8859-1, then outputting them as UTF-8… Gah!

Whilst I could fix it with a little bit of PHP:

ereg_replace("D\xC3\x85\xC2\xABka", "D\xC5\xABka", $foo);

… it still meant loads of other blogs, mainly the ones using Asian text, were having their characters mangled so having popped an email to their support in the middle of Decemeber last year, I’ve finally got a reply today saying that they’ve finally fixed the annoyance which I can confirm to be the case! :D

This year would have marked the 6th, maybe 7th year that I’ve been a customer at Dabs and have historically been very pleased with their fast & efficient service, sometimes even making a jaded veteran like me pretty surprised. However, with a recent attempt to purchase a rather nifty Samsung P28 series laptop had made rather a mockery of the whole “Dabs Experience”. My order was placed on their website just a bit after 10 p.m. on the 6th of January, processed the next day and sent out via the “ParcelForce 24″ service meaning with a bit of luck it should have arrived on the 8th of January, a Saturday.

Saturday came and went but still not shiny new laptop so chances are for a Monday delivery, which isn’t too bad as only 1 full working day would have actually elapsed. Monday was soon here and a little bombshell arrived in the form of an email for a returns authorisation! Something I certainly didn’t ask for but it transpired as I was trying to spend under £600 for my new toy, I opted for the Windows XP Home model as opposed to the Windows XP Professional one, saving me £44.88. Somehow, they had sent me the posher model…

Since ParcelForce had yet to show up with a delivery, I figured I’d pop Dabs an email and ask if I cancel the return, keep the laptop they were going to ship me and debit my credit card again the difference I owe them. After getting an auto-responder saying the response time is around 4 hours, I waited it out delaying a booking for having the package returned to them via ParcelForce. The man from ParcelForce duly arrived around about 2 or 3 p.m. with the parcel, knowing that it was to be returned back to Dabs, yet had no authorisation to do so yet via the booking system. Gah!

So with still no reply after nearly 6 hours, it was back to the Dabs’ website to get a returns booking sorted out. Annoyances galore were now to attack me as the earliest I could book for a return collection was Tuesday, the 11th of January meaning though my ParcelForce guy said he’d probably pop by to check & collect before he was to headed off to Coventry, the chance of this as no booking could be made online for the 10th was basically nil. Then there was the little Javascript application Dabs use for the address labels which was utterly non-functional under Mozilla meaning I had to switch back to Internet Explorer briefly just to get a damn label printed off. Dabs had redesigned their site about a year or so ago and for reasons best known to them, it was like doing web applications 1997 style and anything other than Internet Explorer more or less didn’t work. Slowly they’ve fixed most of the issues, however this label thing certainly wasn’t one of them! Grrr.

Now it was the 11th and I got a nice human-generated looking, though extremely brief email proudly announcing the fact a collection had been booked for today. No shit Sherlock! I believe it was me that did so the day before? Oh, and still no reply regarding my first query about upgrading to the posher XP Pro model… The same ParcelForce guy arrived late in the evening to pick up the very box he delivered the day before and off to Coventry he went as my house was the last customer stop for his day.

According to ParcelForce’s own package tracker, the returned parcel arrived at Dabs just after lunch time of the 12th and I took the opportunity again to ask via another email when would I expect the correct model to be sent to me. The rest of the afternoon and early evening passed without reply… though I did get their “4 hour response time” auto-responder! Oh joy!

The 13th arrived and still no email to either of my queries though it did seem they had finally processed the returned laptop and refunded my card the full value of my purchase. Odder still was the fact that if a “replacement is required”, then I should re-order the item again via the normal process. Considering I had waited a week and ultimately still laptopless, pissed me off quite a lot through ignoring completely 2 of my emails with me trying to help them resolve the screw-up as quickly as possible and lastly the amount they paid for postage was roughly the difference in cost of the 2 items. They may have as well just offered if I was willing to accept a “free upgrade” as recompense for their error, which isn’t an usual thing to do in Customer Services in keeping customers sweet.

Anyway, they’ve lost a sale and a long time customer since I have no intention in shopping with Dabs again. I can’t honestly say I’d recommend them anymore for someone looking to get new kit since all points of contact for Dabs are now handled online (call their old phone number and you get a nice voice message to that effect) though it’s no use delivering it via this way if they completely ignore the fact their customers exist. I’ve voted with my feet and Insight have already taken my order this lunchtime and their carrier City-link says my goods should be delivered by tomorrow, the 14th of January. Much better! :D

Our furry little friend is now discontinued though you can still win one of eight through our competition hosted at JustGiving.com! All monies raised will be donated to the Disasters Emergency Committee and the fund raising target is £200, which I’m sure we can happily beat!

So go forth, read the rules and enter! If not, spread the word so someone doesn’t miss out on a chance in getting a super dooper bear! :D

A week tomorrow, I shall be making a trip to Londinium and meet up with Arta and Inese whom are to visit the capital for a 3-and-a-bit day whirlwind tour. Quite a shock that it’ll be coming close to a year since I’ve last seen them both in person, which was on my 8 day long visit in Latvija. Plans for the day are currently unknown, though I will be taking the day off from work since I’ve still got a fair bit of holiday left yet to take before the end of the holiday year on 31st March, 2004.

Roll on next Friday! :D

2005 has arrived for most on the globe at the time of writing and marks the beginning of the second half of the first decade which we just couldn’t make up our minds and decide upon a name!

I don’t wish to dwell on selfish things, so my only hope is for everyone to be more compassionate to others; regardless of race, creed or colour. I know full well that would include those we percieve as moral and/or ideological enemies; which is hard, but nothing worth while doing was ever a walk in the park is it? :D