Philip Nicosia

I received another letter from TalkTalk credit control reminding me that my account is overdue. It also states “This letter is notification of our intention place a restriction on your service until above balance is paid”.

Grammar police out there, is the above sentence grammatically correct? Doesn’t sound right to me!

So anyway, I go through the process again and call them up. I don’t owe them money, they owe me and I don’t use their service so any threat of cutting me off is nonsense.

The guy on the other end of the phone tells me there are notes on my account and credits need to be raised but for this to happen I have to speak to their customer service where I politely tell him I have tried in the past to no avail and I don’t see why I should wait in a queue for more than an hour to speak to someone and suggest he does it instead.

He tells me he can’t talk to customer services. I tell him I’m not prepared to waste my time holding on for them and at least he gets paid for his time so he can do it. He tells me again he can’t talk to customer services.

So I guess we are at stale mate. I don’t see why I should have to waste my time trying to sort out problems that are of their own doing.

When I get time I might take TalkTalk to the small claims court for the money they owe me but it just seems a lot of hassle for the sum involved.

Well it looks like the lake levels at Watermead are finally coming down albeit slowly. It got pretty high at one point as you can see from the pictures below. The bollard lights at the Piazza were in the water, the small bandstand on the small lake was cut off and park benches by the Riviera were in the water.

Click on images for full size view

The amazing this is there is still a hosepipe ban because of the water shortage!

I don’t know whether it is the time of year or whether I’ve been singled out or just plain unlucky but on one of my email accounts I am currently getting about 3500 spam emails everyday.

I’m also getting a lot of spam comments on this blog and may have deleted some genuine ones by accident.

It’s really starting to piss me off and takes a lot of time to filter out the junk from the legitimate messages. I think I’ve managed to sort out a way of getting rid of them but only time will tell if it works.

I have a site that according to Google Sitemaps gets crawled regularly. In the last 90 days it has crawled on average 2209 pages per day.

Now here’s the thing. I don’t get any visits from Google Search and Google has no pages listed in its index for the site.

So why is Googlebot crawling the pages and waiting my bandwidth?

We flew out to Prague at the weekend from Heathrow Airport Terminal 1 and went through the security section reserved for Business Class travellers.

There were no queues there which was good but when I walked through the metal detector I set it off. Now this normally doesn’t happen to me and I said to the security guard about this and then realised I had my mobile phone still in my pocket. I gave him the mobile phone and he put it through the X-ray machine but didn’t ask me to walk through the metal detector again.

So just how safe are we? Okay we don’t look like terrorists but then again can you tell by someone’s looks alone?