Rants

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Errorcom

November: right now I'm very annoyed at Errorcom (disclaimer here, mirror list here) who succeeded in making both my phone line and my ISDN line go completely dead on Thursday. I rang up that morning and yelled at them, to be told "we'll get back to you". The following day they got back to me blaming some contractors who were working for them replacing telephone poles, and seemed very reluctant to respond to my comments that they should (a) be aware of what their contractors are doing, and (b) notify customers in advance of planned outages caused by routine maintenance such as replacing telephone poles. I mean, if the ESB can do it, why not Errorcom?

December: Eircon have again succeeded in irritating me immensely. I decided there was no need to keep paying rental for both an analog and an ISDN line at the same time, given that an ISDN line is equivalent to two analog lines, and I never make more than two calls at once (one voice, one data). So, I decided to call those really wonderful (NARF!) people at Errorcom and tell them I wanted to cease my analog line and transfer its number to my ISDN line (so I don't have to tell lots of people my phone number is changing)... simple enough, you would think? No.

One Eircon representative I spoke to (after having my phone call passed from pillar to post and back again several times... I think that was the fifth person I talked to, but it's possible that I may have lost count while navigating touch tone menus) reckoned that it should be possible (given that both lines are housed in the same telephone exchange, all of 300 metres away... at first they tried to tell me it wouldn't be possible because the analog and ISDN lines were housed in different exchanges, but changed their tune when I told them how far away the nearest exchange was), and there would probably be a £16 number change charge, which I can live with. A day later, a different person called back (from Galway, for some reason) with a different answer: the only way to achieve the desired effect (having an ISDN line with the number of my old analog line) is to upgrade my analog line to ISDN (at a cost of £100), and cease my existing ISDN line. So I told them where to stick that idea.

A few days later, I had a bright idea - what if I get Errorcom to cancel the analog line in the usual way without changing any numbers, but to set up a recorded message to the effect "this number is no longer in service; please dial "xxx" instead". So I rang them up and asked them about this. Eircon's response was less than helpful: "a number change message? oh, we don't do those any more... if you want one you'll have to record a greeting on your message minder and keep paying line rental for as long as you want the greeting to exist".

January: on phoning Errorcom to tell them to go ahead with ceasing my analog line and retain my existing line, I was told that to do this they have to close my account, and reopen it with my ISDN line as the main number. This means that my account number has changed. No big deal, you might think; just change my payment details with my bank. But Errorcom also told me that my chargecards couldn't be moved from the old account to the new, despite the fact that a couple of years ago when I moved house (and closed my account, and opened a new one) they transferred my chargecards then. So, they're cancelling my chargecards and I have to reapply, in writing, for new cards with new numbers (so, yet more new numbers to learn). Aaaargh!!!

February: amazingly, Errorcom didn't do anything to piss me off in February. Maybe they had something better to do?

March: Errorcom rang me up saying my number had been placed on a "warning list". Apparently I'd been making too many international calls, and they wanted me to make a deposit, or my phone line would be "disabled". Took me a while to get to the bottom of this, but eventually it turned out that because of the whole January fiasco, they thought I was a new customer with no credit history. When I explained to them that I'd had that phone line for three years, they left me alone. Seriously folks, aren't *they* supposed to keep track of this stuff?

Is it any wonder that Errorcom are universally despised? If you have any more stories about Eircon and their "we screw you harder" policies I'd love to hear them.

If you'd like to express your dissatisfaction with Errorcom (sometimes also referred to as Eircon) and the deplorable state of internet access in Ireland, please support IrelandOffline, an action group campaigning for realistically-priced broadband internet access to be introduced to Ireland. You may also be interested in IrishWan (or if you're in Cork, CorkWan), the beginnings of a community-run internet access consortium.

cjvdb1 - the longest username in first year

Eleven lucky people in First Year Computer Science have 3-character user names. A hundred have 4-character user names. Forty have 5-character user names. I'm the only person cursed with a 6-character user name! Obviously then, I will be the first person in this class whose fingers wear out purely from logging in :/ It's not like I asked to have a first name, a middle name, and a surname in three parts... and to get a username which includes the initial for every bit!!!

Okay, I'm now at the end of second year so the 'first year' bit isn't entirely accurate... but the rest is true!

Symantec sucks! oh, and so does Windows

So, I'm giving a win95 machine a bit of a going-over for a friend of mine.

I put more RAM in it, I add a network card. I download service packs, updates, a new browser, all that good stuff at work, bring them home on the laptop, ftp it to the 95 machine, and it all installs uneventfully (though Windows decides it wants to ask to dialup to the internet every time I want to ftp to a local IP - even when I remove the dialup adapter from the network control panel. Good eh! For some reason when I remove the dialup adapter the defined connections still remain in Dialup Networking...).

Then it comes to antivirus software. So I google a bit, and decide to try Norton AV 2003 eval on it.

I do the whole registration thing on the Symantec site, get something calling itself an installer, about half a meg in size. I decide that's suspiciously small, so I download the current set of virus definitions too.

I ftp *that* over to the 95 machine. There the fun starts. It seems the installer isn't really an installer, it's a downloader. So I shrug, set up a http proxy on my lan and let it at it - only to find that the file it wants is 40 megs in size. Let's see... downloading 40 megs on dialup at home, or on a 5mbit line at work? Easy decision. So, I find out from my proxy logs what the file is that it was downloading, get that at work, bring it home, ftp it to the 95 machine and copy it over the partly downloaded file in the windows temp directory.

But the downloader reckons it's still at about 10%. So I quit the downloader and figure out where it's stored its progress in its .ini file, and change that to reflect the full size of the file, and tell it to resume again. But it's still not happy. At this stage rage hits me, and I set up apache on my lan with a suitable virtual host to make this downloader *think* the file is coming from cdrom.digitalriver.com - after a bit of faffing about with that, I eventually get the downloader happily slurping the installer down, verifying it, yadda yadda yadda. It launches the installer - which tells me "windows 95 is not supported - please contact microsoft for an upgrade".

Would it be too much to expect for the downloader to mention this *before* potentially spending hours downloading 40 megabytes on dialup? Would it? Really?

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