epic fail

Last week several government databases decided I was living in Leeds again. Whilst I like Leeds, I'd quite like my post to end up in the same building that I'm living in. A few phone calls into the problem and the finger looks to be pointing at either the National Insurance Contributions Office or HMRC. I can't get through to NICO because all their lines are busy. As usual. However, as another department kindly sent me a letter saying they'd been in touch with HMRC about my tax code several days before things started going wrong, this is where I pick up the trail.

The phone number for HMRC in said letter leads to a recorded message telling me to call another number, which I immediately call and after navigating a tortuous path through their answering system I finally get connected to a tired sounding human. Before he can help me he needs to ask a number of security questions including my most recent address. Can anyone spot the fail here. Further fail seems to be a one strike policy on the security questions, and the final fail is a refusal to discuss how one can go about establishing one's identity if the system is indeed wrong, because I am assured that the system is never wrong. Have I woken up in a Terry Gilliam movie? Am I in hell?

I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

Now on the the WD I'd had to set the jumper on the back to limit the drive to SATA I (150Gbit/s) in order for my old Asus/Nvidia socket 754 motherboard to recognise it. It runs quiet and cool and should I need to replace it it'd probably be a bigger power supply, a new case, and PCI Express graphics card. This would be expensive and overkill when the Nvidia FX5200 graphics card is perfectly adequate for displaying digital TV. I digress.

The new samsung disk requires one to use their software (ES-Tool, well hidden on their website and the kind of thing that expects you not to need a manual) to adjust drive settings. The problem is the computer needs to be able to detect the disk before the software can adjust the settings, but when the problem is the computer can't detect the disk in the first place there's a bit of a problem. The software in question is a dos-based bootable CD. I try using the the much newer PC in my room, that can't boot the CD, something to do with an out of memory error. This might be something to do with said PC being a modern multi-core multi-GPU 64-bit machine. It can, however, communicate with the disk so I know it works. My trusty Dell Precision is similarly too old to cope with the new disk.

Finally I get both the disk and the setup software running on my mum's desktop, which appears to finally have a feature that's made it really useful. It's an early EMT-64 capable 3Ghz P4, not as fast or as economical or as stable as anything else in the house but today the damn thing redeemed itself. I, on the other hand, need a small dose of public ridicule for not checking how to set the drive to 150Gbit/s before ordering it.

Having complained lots, it is very quiet, draws very little power, and and is more than quick enough to serve as a repository for myth recordings, however it'll be obsolete by the time I can tell you whether I think mine's reliable.

I had a load of frosting left over from another project, so I looked for a really quick way to use it up, other than show up to my monday game with a bowl of frosting and some spoons. For some reason I decided to ignore the big "NO!" scribbled on the swiss roll recipe in my BeRo book. Needless to say my swiss roll tin was slightly the wrong size and the planned swiss roll kind of turned half way over and cracked. I think I remember why the grafitti is on that recipe now. I can't be bothered to take a photo, but as it's currently sat in my fridge wrapped in greaseproof paper and will be fed to sugar-addict gamers anyway, I'm going to call it the Doncaster Failbag.

Our internet connection is playing up. The upstream connection has been stuck at 288kbps since monday. Not the end of the world in itself, I go through the documented troubleshooting procedure, which revolves around a BT speed test tool. The BT test tool demands extra tests, after reconnecting at bt_test_user, at which point the test tool has a DNS failure. Fail 1.

I raise a support ticket on the Plus.Net website. When I click 'submit' I am redirected to a page requesting old credit card number are updated. Support ticket is not submitted. Fail 2.