The muppets return

I still have to deal wiht Powergen it seems. But, not as you would expect for currently burning their gas and using their electricty, no, this relates to my previous address still.

Most bills I recieve tell me I owe them £WX.YZ, and this will be taken from my bank account on or after a couple of weeks later. Three cheers for direct debit remembering to pay all my bills for me. I like direct debit, as it allows me to chcek the bill is within the realms of plausability, and if it is then just file it away, in the knowledge that in time it will be paid.

I was (for reasons following from the above) rather surprised to discover that Powergen had written to me about my previous address using red paper. Red correspondance is never a good thing… After phoning them (twice) it turns out that they had taken the payment, canceled the direct debit, and then returned the payment, hence my banking records were a little bizzare (recording against the direct debit that it had been taken on that day, and it had been cancelled, but not showing money movements in my statement) but the blame was firmly with the PowerGimps after talkign to my bank.

I maybe shouldnt have given them the money, but i have sent a covering letter inviting them to explain what went wrong. And I used a prepaid envolope (so i dont have to pay postage). And that goes to a different address to the envolope that came with the bill…..

I await the next installment…..

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Getting there slowly

I tried to do a windows update with my XP box the other night. It asked for a reboot. I did. And then it wouldnt. It just hung on the XP boot screen (the one with the Night Rider bar)

I had to go home on sunday morning to fix up my Mum’s PC, oh, and to wash my car on their drive… so Sunday afternoon found me reinstalling my Windows Box. and again, and again. It just seemed to keep hanging up on reboots. I finally decided it was probably somekind of hardware issue (i had been installing more drivers) so I pulled the soundcard that I had installed for Linux on that machine, and Lo, it did work again.

SO now I am running windows without the PCI soundcard, however if I go back to Linux on that box (when I find the boot disk, or reinstall that is) then I suppose I will have to put ti back, and out again, and back…. etc. Maybe there is some kind of config I could do, but in the meantime, until I sort out tesco.net on my linux box, then I am going to have to be a little cunning.

I did about 4 installs in one afternoon.evening though. Something of a personal best/worst….

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Gimme Light, Gimme Heat

Others have been known to have problem with power companies. I finally reached the end of my patience with crummy Powergen yesterday. Its not that the people there are no good, they are polite and try to be helpful, but the system there seems to be conspiring against somethign as simple as setting up my electricity and gas accounts.

I have had a number of conversations with them, and it doesnt help that they keep trying to set up new accounts with different parts of powergen. The fact they keep bouncing me around in the business, and then I get cut off was not helping….

So I phone up British Gas tell them I have had problems with powergen, and so want to move supplier. I give them my details, and now will just have to wait to see how it goes. I phoned up powergen to tell them i was moving my accounts, seeing as they had not managed to set up an account in the firstplace. The bod at powergen seemed to think that the system would deal with it automatically. I am not so sure.

What I am not going to do ever again is phone powergen. They will have to sort themseleves out, and get it right…. who knows, maybe i wont end up paying them anything.

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Speed Demon?

Vital statistics for my journey to work this morning start with the average speed from me leaving just outside my garage, to the back of the cycle compound here at work to be 16.4mph. thats not bad, even if it dropped by 0.2 between "my" roundabout and the compund. Usually its just bordering on 15.0

I think I may well have had a tail wind, the distance travelled was 7.59 miles, in a time of 27:44.9 but the scary bit is that the maximum speed was recorded as 28.2 that may have been the point I was weighing up the odds about over taking a car….

Somedays it just seems to go well on the way in. I must admit I had more than a little luck with traffic lights this morning, and although the cycle computor does notice when i am stationary for a period of time, it tends to take a few seconds to realise i have stopped moving.

Its going to be a few more miles today too, as its the Peterborough Young Engineer Quiz tonight, over at Perkins. I will of course cycle, as then I can have a pint, and a gentle cycle back as opposed to my non alcoholic at all driving. At least I dont cycle on pavements….

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Connecting Anytime Soon?

I will not be at work tomorrow morning. This will be because I will be sitting at home waiting for a BT Engineer to visit, and then I will finally have a phone line in my home.

Obviously the first thing I want to be doing is getting an internet connection…. as that really is my main form of communication, as opposed to voice over phone. The question is really how to achieve this.

Looking at the Tesco Website I discovered two things, firstly that getting broadband over adsl looked to be a drawn out process, of them talking back and forth to BT and sending me out my modem. etc. Secondly I found out that there is no minimum contrct, as there used to be with Freeserve. A plan hatched in my mind. Obviously there will probably be a surge of people trying to get broadband in the run up to the holidays, and the holidays will ensure that service levels (i.e. customer support, engineers, shipping) will be less than they could be. So, why bother? I will just get a dial up anytime account as soon as my phone is connected, and then start getting broadband after christmas. Its not what I want (I want broadband) but its better than not being connected at all….

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Not a Pie Eater. Honest.

Having had an eye test at the weekend, I needed to drop some frames back into the Occupational Health Nurse. I had the frames so *if* I needed a new perscription, then I could get it sorted out there and then. Now, work does pay for this, but i didnt really feel like the new frames so I wasnt going to get new ones if i didnt need them, and it doesnt make financial sense either….

So obviously I decided to drop off the frames on my way in, having dropped my bike off. It made sense, it was on my way to my locker, and the nurse works factory hours monday to thursday.

The fact that she now thinks of me as a fit and healthy staff member is neither here nor there….

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Variety is the spice of meal times

I have been getting a bit bored of sandwiches recently. Do to a visit to a number of hostileries in Stamford on Wednesday night, I didnt make lunch for myself on thursday, so went over the road to the newsagent/shop insted. Having done that once…. I found i didnt want to make sandwiches for today either. Oh dear…

Making sandwiches is one of my key money saving tricks. Yet again this goes back to my time at Uni, where in my third and fourth years I spent huge amounts of money at QTs and also in the union on food, when i could have made sandwiches at home the night before, or just that morning. My lunches at the moment are costing £3.50 a day.

To me it looks like my Lunches need the same treatment as my Tea. i.e. its time to be more inventive, and maybe even more healthy, and bring in more food from home. And not just Sandwiches.

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