Karoo email.

In an effort to stifle customers  Karoo are now sending out the following email when a customer emails an individual within the organisation (all email addresses munged for obvious reasons).

"Thank you for your email.

So that we can ensure that your query is handled appropriately please
direct it to the relevant contact listed here.

***@***.com <mailto:***@***.com> 

This email has not been read.

Thank you."

Then there is the usual organisational bumph following that.

"This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan
service.

Please consider the environment before printing this email.

The content of this email and any attachment is private and may be
privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, disclosure,
copying or forwarding of this email and/or its attachments is
unauthorised. If you have received this email in error please notify the
sender by email and delete this message and any attachments immediately.
Nothing in this email shall bind the Company or any of its subsidiaries
or businesses in any contract or obligation, unless we have specifically
agreed to be bound.

KCOM Group PLC is a public limited company incorporated in England and
Wales, company number 02150618 and whose registered office is at 37 Carr
Lane, Hull, HU1 3RE.

118288 - KCOM UK Directory Enquiries. Calls will cost no more than 49p
connection + 14p per minute including VAT from a KC or BT landline. Call
charges from mobiles and other networks may vary. If you are calling
from a mobile you will now receive your requested number via text
message. You will not be charged for the text message."

Ignoring the crap at the end which nobody with any sense takes any notice of, let us consider the first part and why they are sending these email out as auto-replies.

My take on them are that they are designed and created in the hope that genuine customer emails get lost in the noise that such email addresses generate. This then enables them to claim that they never received the email. This has happened to me, and others, several times when being directed to a blanket email address.

While such blanket email addresses make sense for the organisation they make no sense whatsoever for the customer. As always it is the customer that loses out in this deal for the reasons stated in the above paragraph.

One such example was an ongoing conversation I was having with an individual with an @***.com email address. After some 40 odd emails to and fro suddenly the above auto response was generated to which I foolishly duly replied. After a wait of 10 days I then emailed the individual again who said that the previous email i had sent was never seen by her. After some investigation it turned out that the email referred to was 'lost'. Now, we all know that organisation never 'lose' emails but due to the fact that the person  claimed it was there was nothing I could do. I did try emailing the individual again but that ended up creating the never ending  circle of email sent, auto-response returned and so on.

So, if you ever receive one of these auto responses you now know why they do it. After emailing an individual I urge you to ignore what the email says and continue emailing the individual. While this may seem counter productive it will, hopefully, inform them that such a blanket email address is wrong for the customer.

Do you use the BBC web site?

I do. in fact I spend a lot of time on it visiting all the various bits dotted around it. Some hidden from immediate view while others are displayed in prominent and semi-prominent links.

My reason for asking is that I feel that some of it could be vastly improved. Take something like this as an example. Am I the only one who dislikes how they display each entry backwards to how people normally read? The entries on that page, as it is everywhere such things are displayed, start at the bottom with that first entry. As each successive entry is added they go up above the previous one until the last one which is at the top. It simply does make for a natural reading style.

Why they do it this way only they know as I have asked, via email, several times with no reply so it would seem that:
1) I will never know who made the decision to do such things backwards
2) I will never know why whoever it was that made that decision made it
and
3) I will never know why or who decided such a backwards reading style was a good idea.

Simply put it is not. There is, to me anyway, nothing more annoying than finding an article, or several articles as these things are, well, mini articles anyway, like this then realising it is coming to a close or has already closed and having to scroll down through several other days worth to start reading at the bottom. Some of such articles can be several days worth so scrolling takes a while. It is frankly bloody annoying not to mention arse-backwards.

I am aware that there are many, possibly  thousands, of people who start reading on day one and return as each successive days worth of text is added so to them  it may seem right and proper as it is laid out. To those people, and to the BBC, I say there are probably many more thousands, if not millions, who find such pages by accident many months after whatever it is the article covers who then find they can only read the various days worth of text by scrolling first down to the bottom, reading a page which means scrolling up to find that days start then down again as one reads a days worth of text then up to the next days start and so on. Down, up, down up, down up. It absolutely makes no sense.

So, BBC, if you see this then please for the love of all things correct turn these types of daily  articles the right way up. Then those the read the daily articles can read them as normal and those of us who find such daily added articles can read them as normal too.

In living memory eh?

In this BBC article we have the lib-dem leader saying "Today's school leavers could be the first generation in living memory "to end up worse off than their parents". No doubt it has been reported elsewhere but as the BBC is one of the most respected web site for news at all levels that is where I read it first.

Now, being as I am 48 years old at this time in my short stay on this planet I can well remember the problems of getting a job during the late 1970's. i left school during 1976 when jobs for young people where very hard to come by. Sure, things improved during the 1980's but it is that time during 1976 to 1980 i am referring to. A time when if you did manage to find a job you was lucky yo stay in it for more than a few months.

I myself had many such jobs during that time. Not all good jobs either but being from a family that viewed unemployment as something nasty not having one was not an option for me. So, I went from job to job always hoping the next one would last but they never did until in 1978 my Granddad got me a job at a local tannery which lasted some 21 years until my disability get the better of me and I took voluntary redundancy.

But for the leader of a political party to claim the current crop of school leavers as being the first generation in living memory to be worse off than their parents shows either he is too young to remember the late 1970's or he lacks the knowledge about that time. As one who lived through those times I can tell him this current crop is most certainly not the first to suffer through lack of jobs. Not in living memory and not ever.

Yet another Windows worm.

As news spreads of yet another massively spreading Microsoft Windows worm infects every machine it comes into contact with via several different methods such as USB sticks is it not time that Microsoft realises it has lost this game of cat and mouse?

As I am sure some of the more technological mined people know not all the blame can be laid at Microsoft's door but just as certainly some of it can. Microsoft's unending quest for an operating system, rotten at its core, to be an ease of use operating system the  doors that remain in the kernel core and DLL files are just as culpable as the user-base of it.

The new worm wreaking havoc on Microsoft Windows machines is called Cornficker (also known as Downadup and possibly other names as well) is a case of same old same old as far as the worm code is concerned as apparently it is a rework on some much older worm code base. So, why are we subjected yet again to an estimated 3.5 million Microsoft Windows machines being infected with a variation on a theme worm such as this Cornficker is?

There is one main reason why the infection is so quick and prolific and that reason is the general population not installing critical updates that became available as lng ago as last November. So, the blame game surely points at users. Yes? Well, yes and no. Yes because when Microsoft declares something as critical it is worse than that. They have regularly claimed some patch or other as being severe when the world plus dog knows it to be a very very critical hole indeed so when Microsoft say some patch or other it is  critical then it is indeed very very deeply critical. No because if Microsoft did it right they would force ALL critical patches onto user machines and not even give the user a sniff about doing it either. There are those who claim such a  strategy as that is open to abuse and that anyway Microsoft can't do this without the express consent of the machines owner as it could fall foul of various Laws governing remote access, and more importantly changing files on a remote machine which could be classed as hacking,

But those who create such a fuss about a forced installed patch are surely missing the point. For every one of those who complain about such a thing tens of thousands of machine get infected to create yet another botnet on the back of Microsoft's operating system. I have long held that the vast majority of compromised machines are compromised because of user incompetence. When I have build a machine for someone and at their behest installed a Microsoft operating system one of the first things I do is turn on auto updates. If, as is invariably the case, the machine comes back "because it is running slower now" the very first thing I do is check that auto updates are still set to on. Then I check the the virus and malware programs are still being run and still set to auto update their definitions files. Invariably it is these three things that have been turned off due to them "being an annoyance". So, that is a clear case of user stupidity and has nothing whatsoever to do with anything Microsoft may or may not have done.

So, in the end who should get the blame? Microsoft for not forcing such critical updates and patches onto people who know no better and also users for being stupd enough to turn off the very applications designed and installed to protect them from such things as this latest worm. Now, I have been building and using machines since before the very first IBM machines rolled into the general public view and, of course, I am acutely aware of user borne stupidity. For me though the blame lays half way between Microsoft and their users of.

One thing that is for sure over this latest mess is that once again Microsoft Windows, for all its stupid users, it shown to be the broken by design mess it really is.

Will they ever learn?

With reports going around that the MOD's navy  ships  computers have been infected with a virus (or two or three) will these people ever learn? Our Royal Navy ships computers run Microsoft Windows. What flavour I do not know but in all probability it is either Windows XP or Windows Vista. Yes, I could research and find out but all we need to know is two words, Microsoft and Windows. Whether XP or Vista really makes no difference. Both are easily infected.

As the latest virus  calamity strolls around the Internet infecting any and all Microsoft Windows machines it finds it should speak loud and clear to anyone using one of those operating systems that the design of Microsoft Windows is flawed at its very core. And yet, we continue to read about some large and small companies being forced offline because their machines have been infected with whatever is the latest in a long and boring line of viri designed to flush out the flaws and very well they do it too as this reports shows.

So, our Navy runs a known broken operating system that has a track record of being blown wide open on so called none critical systems. Tell those poor sailors that their email is not critical! Seriously though, critical or not that fact that it is well documented is all they should need to have known and know they surely did which makes it all the more surprising that they took Microsoft's word (and probably back handers) on security is frightening.

Microsoft and its operating systems are a busted flush. If, and I doubt they ever will mange to do it, they can clean up their broken operating systems they may still be around in years to come. However, if they continue to follow the same path they have always followed and people see more and more of these virus riddled systems of some high profile company or government department stories circulate then I cannot see a world in years to come where Microsoft still dominates.

More and more countries the world over and leaving Microsoft behind it is about time our country does the same.

Living in a box.

Living in a box, living in a cardboard box as the song goes. Well, more a case of living out of a box.

After some 18 months at our new place we are still unpacking boxes which where filled at the old, much smaller, house we had. It simply amazes me how we fitted so much into that much smaller house. So much, it would seem, that we can't, or haven't yet, found the space to fit it all in at this new, much larger, house.

The old place was a 2 up, 2 down house pretty common here in the U.K. The new house is a 4  bedroom place with a living room area twice the size of the living room and kitchen  areas combined at the old house which makes it all the more surprising we can not, or have not, yet  found the space here to unpack everything.

While not an excuse directly. my previously mentioned disability does not help matters either nor the fact my wife works as both these things mean it is hard to find the time to unpack the mostly hardly ever used stuff. One day....Maybe.

While most of the rooms are now decorated, they are all carpeted, there are still a couple where we have not planted a single lick of paint. Thankfully, as those rooms left were freshly plastered they do not look too bad. Again, my disability and my wife working make getting around to doing these last bits  difficult.

We will of course  finish it all eventually but they are not in our immediate sights. As each family birthday and Christmas passes more and more stuff gets added in spaces we had earmarked for one or more of the unpacked boxes which means another box or two does not get unpacked. Actually, neither is the unpacking of the remaining boxes in our immediate sights as everything we needed to be unpacked was when we first moved house. A box now and again was rifled as and when we wanted the stuff within over time.

I have always hated moving house and will always continue to hate moving house. Apart from the well documented stress associated with moving house these two mentioned parts of the act add to the hate i feel towards the act.

The open world of yesterday.

It is often said that todays world is a global one. From business to the internet it is all global in nature. Or rather that is the nature of the beast. So, when we read about all the various countries with all their various border controls where exactly does this global world fit in?

We have seen many times where those from so called 'problematic' countries are denied access to some other country. This also makes a mockery of the global world in which we supposedly live.

Our financial systems, banks etc, are  global companies and look at what has happened to them. Part, if not all, of the worlds financial meltdown can be attributed to how the  financial sector played in the global world. There are other examples of companies that played in the global world who are now suffering because of it.

So, we live, as our own Prime Minister is want to say, in a global world and yet that global world for many people is a closed door.

A few years ago one could move between the various borders of various countries just as easily as one could walk the streets of ones own city or town. What exactly happened to close the global world door no-one really knows. We can surmise however that the U.S.A. being finally dragged screaming into the terrorist malee (we here in the U.K. had to suffer the U.S.A. funded IRA attrocities a long time before any real terrorist activity landed at the door of the U.S.A. but I digress..) was the catalist for the global world to be unattainable by some. And of course where the U.S.A. goes many other countries follow which closes more and more doors of the global world for some.

The world of today is only global because of the rise of the Internet. For all other aspects the world is no more global now than it ever was and for some never will be.