I saw the story about Clare Short resigning on Google News and clicked through to the story on the Times’ website. Now, here’s a screenshot of what I saw:
Where’s the actual content?!? Top quarter of the page is advertising and headers, two thirds of the rest is standard navigation, contextual navigation and more adverts. That means about 25% of the screenshot is actual news content (including the photograph). I know that advertising is an important revenue stream, but the combination of the ads and the navigation stuff makes it almost impossible to read the actual story comfortably. The other thing is that all the content is squished into the first two thirds of the width of my monitor, which leaves a great big blank space on the right hand side. Bah!
I’ve got a carrier bag full of 35mm negatives from photos I took over my teenage years. (The negatives are in the little paper wallets, not directly in the bag itself.) They are mostly of sentimental value rather than photos of great artistic merit. I’d like to get them digitised so I have a backup, can sift through them electronically and upload the appropriate ones to my gallery. There are over 40 films worth (so about 1000 frames, potentially), so I don’t really want to scan them in myself (I have a negative scanner, but it’s very old and slow) and it would be easier to review them on the computer than from the negative. So I’m looking for recommendations for bulk negative scanning services. What I’d want would be:
- Scan negatives at ~2000dpi
- Produce output on CDs or DVD
- Output to high quality JPEG or TIFF
- Return by registered post
- Turnaround time isn’t really important
- Dust/dirt removal included in the price would be a plus.
- Pricing that won’t bankrupt me
Google has found these two firms, but the first one has a bit of a dodgy looking website and the second one looks very pricey (although I haven’t enquired about their bulk rates yet). So, does anyone have any recommendations?
Grrr @ Seagate.
- w/b 4th September 2006. I suspected the hard disk in my Meeja Box was dying. It failed to mount partitions on boot, with fairly typical CRC kernel error messages shown. The Seagate SeaTools diagnostic CD and floppy disk reported bad sectors and the box locked hard during testing. I checked all the cables and tested the hard disk in a different box with the same results.
- 10th September 2006. I went to the Seagate Warranty Check tool (which doesn’t show its stylesheet in Firefox for some trivial reason) as a precursor to requesting an RMA. On entering the serial number and model of the drive I was presented with an error about the serial number not being found and the warranty status being “Unknown”. I went back and double checked the serial number on the drive, as instructed. It was correct. So, following the instructions on the website, I e-mailed Seagate customer service using their web form, saying that the warranty tool can’t find the serial number of my drive and can I get an RMA please?
- 11th September 2006. I got a reply from Seagate saying that the warranty status of the drive is “Unknown”. They asked for a photo of the drive label. Fortunately I have a digital camera with a macro mode so I took a photo of the label and e-mailed it to them.
- 12th September 2006. Seagate e-mailed me to say that the status of the drive is still shown as “Unknown”. E-mailing them a photo of the label has just been a method of them ensuring I was entering the right characters in the web form. The issue has been escalated to the “concerned department” who, I am assured, will be in touch “very soon”.
- 16th September 2006. The concerned department aren’t all that concerned, as I still hadn’t heard back from them. I e-mailed Seagate again, asking when I was likely to hear from the “concerned department”.
- 18th September 2006. Seagate replied that the concerned department would be in touch “soon”.
- 21st September 2006. A representative from the concerned department at Seagate got in touch, asking me to send her all the details I have on the drive, where I purchased it and when etc.
- 22nd September 2006. As I purchased the drive online from scan.co.uk I was able to forward all the e-mails I had saved relating to the order. Being an online order, I didn’t have any paperwork I could forward. (I said I would look for the delivery slip, but couldn’t find it. Not surprising as the drive was delivered over a year ago.)
- 23rd September 2006 – 29th September 2006. Silence. Not a sausage.
- 29th September 2006. I sent a tentative e-mail enquiring if there was any progress on the matter.
- 30th September 2006 – 7th October 2006. The rest was silence.
- 7th October 2006. Sent another e-mail enquiring if there was any progress on the matter.
- 12th October 2006. Still nothing.
When the drive first started playing up, I pondered going and buying a replacement one whilst the RMA happened. But as the drive cost over £100, I didn’t want to pay that money out and then end up (hopefully) with a replacement drive I didn’t need. So I refrained, thinking that the issue would be resolved by now. I’m starting to wonder if I made the right choice, as 6 weeks later I don’t seem to be any closer to getting the drive replaced.
It’s particularly annoying as the fault seems to be fairly obviously in their database of serial numbers. The only other possible cause is scan.co.uk sending out cheap knocked-off versions of Seagate hard disks and Seagate are planning a daring midnight SWAT raid (no pun intended) on them to uncover their malpractice. Either way, the customer, I am suffering this extended period whilst they look into it. It’s bad enough with a home system, but if it were one at work, I would be disgusted. And I have a lot of systems with Seagate hard disks at work…
Update: Got a reply on 13th October, which gave me further information on the status of the hard drive and that Seagate were essentially unlikely to replace it under warranty. I replied asking for some further clarification on the 13th and again on the 18th October. I have yet to receive a response. I’m pretty unimpressed to be honest.
In the last couple of weeks or so, Jono has added me to Planet Advocacy. This must mean that “some point” as finally been arrived at. 
He has wisely taken a categorised RSS feed, so I have to make sure I tag posts up properly. Most of my advocacy is done through the UK LUG movement, so the contents of my posts will reflect that. However, I’m also interested in FLOSS within education, as that’s the sector I’ve worked in for the last six years.
LUGs can be vital grass roots advocacy; real people using Linux on a daily basis and supporting others in doing so. Some of the larger Linux companies are developing support models that “compete” for the same market, and good luck to them. However, it would be great to see the big Linux companies actively supporting UK LUGs and the grassroots advocacy that they do. What is a tiny part of a corporate marketing budget could easily help a LUG hire a meeting venue, buy some network equipment or set up local advocacy projects. And it would raise the profile and enhance the reputation of that company enormously within the thousands of UK LUG members.
We have ID cards at work but the plastic clips that attach the card holders to clothing aren’t very strong. So lanyards are a popular option. I’ve been given a second-hand plain grey lanyard. It’s not very clean, either. So I want to combine some snazzy neck attire with advocacy and wear a lanyard that suits my personality and interests. And no, the dirty grey one does not already do so…
There’s a company in Germany making be-Tuxed ones, which I think are a little in-your-face. (Rather like those blue ties with Tux all over them. Yes, I have one. I think I’ve worn it once.) The Reverend Ted Haegar was dishing out Novell lanyards at LUG Radio Live in the summer, which would be OK for work because we are a Novell network. But I didn’t get one and to be honest I don’t have the same passion for Novell as I do for Ubuntu. It is the distribution I use most after all, so it should be Ubuntu that I give the valued advertising space that is my neck & chest area. The official Ubuntu shop doesn’t stock lanyards. Thongs and cuddly bears, yes. But lanyards, no.
So, what to do? Well, I’m going up to the LinuxWorld Expo in a couple of weeks time. I might get given one as a freebie from a random IT company, if I’m lucky. But it probably wouldn’t be quite me. And I was really after two, in case I get soup down one. I could just order a custom one from Spreadshirt or similar, I suppose. Personally I think Mr. Shuttleworth has missed a trick here. I’m sure there’s a potentially massive market for Ubuntu lanyards as it makes inroads into the corporate data centre. Ubuntu laynard fanciers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bits of dull grey string!
Following the EGM at the HantsLUG meeting on Saturday, I’m now the LUG’s newest Hostmaster. I’ve taken over from Adrian Bridgett who did a great job, so my main priority is not to screw it all up. Fortunately I sysadmin for quite a few servers so it should be OK. 
Having stepped down as Chairman back in August, you might be wondering why I decided to stand again. Well, the period for nominations was almost up, and no-one had offered to stand as Hostmaster. Given that it’s a relatively small post, I thought it would be a good way to keep involved with the running of the LUG without it taking up quite so much time.
Having said that, one of my first jobs is to draw up a mechanism for members to register to vote at LUG meetings. This might sound like some horrendous beaurocracy, but it isn’t really: There are usually only votes once a year. But the LUG mailing list had grown so large that we needed 26 people to have a quorate meeting! This was proving a bit of a problem, so the voter registration idea was introduced to try and keep the effective quorum down to something more managable. Fortunately lots of people made an effort to get to the meeting, including some especially dedicated souls from that London, made the journey down for the meeting and we had exactly the 26 members we needed.
It was great to see Andy Smith and Phil Clarke again, having met them properly at LUG Radio Live this summer. They had come down to help us reach quoracy but also to vote on the hotly debated issue of whether the LUG mailing list should have an open archive. It’s one of the debates that the LUG has had several times over and over in the past. So there was a vote and the short story is that the LUG is going to have a new list with an open archive. It’s good to have finally had a vote after everyone had the opportunity to put their side and hopefully the issue has been put to rest for a long time.
In other news, I’ve been playing with PHPSurveyor and it’s my latest favourite niche-filling web app.
