jbwan: WordPress’ed for time…

Awakened March 30, 2007

I’ve been quiet for about a week now: What have I been doing? Well as I mentioned previously I’m on a 2 week break from work so after a week of trying I finally managed to switch off this week. I’ve built my new garden fence (I’m sure you’ll all be happy to hear that – photos to follow 🙂 ), I’ve been heading to the gym quite a bit trying to improve my running distance in line with my ambitions and a few other odd jobs and general relaxation.

However, I have still been doing my daily reading but only this morning did I read a post from Damien Mulley that I just had to reference. It’s an extract from the books of ComReg for 2005 and shows a breakdown of their costs totaling almost 20 million. Now ComReg have come in for a lot of stick in recent times, and rightly so in my opinion which is not just observer-based, it’s from personal experience. Last year during my phone line/broadband debacle with the incumbent and the opponent I contacted ComReg with details of my case (quick recap if you are not familiar: I was over 4 months without a phone line and broadband having moved house within the same exchange, working phone line in new house, broadband previously present, etc, etc). Anyway, the incumbent refused to speak to me about my problem and the opponent seemingly couldn’t get a response from the incumbent. I contacted ComReg with all these details. It took them about a week to get back to me with what amounted to a P.F.O.

“ProviderX have informed us that the matter is still ongoing and that they are aware of the issue. We have added your email to the file and your case is still open with us.”

I also contacted the department of the Minister for communications and their response was template:

“I wish to acknowledge receipt of your recent correspondence, the contents of which will be brought to the Minister’s attention.”

Surprise, I never heard any more from them! So I don’t think that I stand alone in saying that the 8.7 million spent on 112 staff, 4.1 million spent on consultants, 4.4 million spent on legal costs and 2.2 million spent on administration was far from being well-spent. ComReg was recently referred to as the “Poodle of the Irish telecoms”. I would like to correct this: A Poodle is a show dog, one that likes attention. Any organisation that spends the minute amount (comparative to other expenses and in relation to the cost of advertising in Ireland) of 23,000 per year on advertising is clearly not interested in interacting with the public or creating awareness of its existence or services. I would liken ComReg to a 12-year-old Golden Labrador: Anyone living beside it knows its name, you’d never get it put down because it would hurt those close to it, it’s totally f**kin useless as a guard dog and the only thing it knows how to do when challenged is give the paw or roll over, albeit very slowly. source for figures: Damien Mulley

Another Facelift! March 20, 2007

It’s only a wet day (well a snowy one anyway) since I changed the look of my blog template. Doing that however, made the other residue on my site look like a heap of crap. So, I then changed the rest of the site pages to something more pleasing. I then decided that having the site and the blog maintained in different styles wasn’t a good idea for those passing on through. So here we are, the blog has been upgraded again to look like the rest of the site. In addition to re-re-sprucing the blog template I’ve added a couple of little gizmos (nod of the head to scriptaculous for the javascript but images by moi). Beside each post heading and beside most of the sidebar headings you will now see a little minus sign and a plus sign. For example, if you get annoyed looking at the beautiful people in MyBlogLog reader list then click the minus sign and they will disappear. Miss them already? Then click the plus sign and they’re back again. The same functions apply to anything with a minus and plus sign beside them. Someday I might even get around to persisting your choices in a cookie so that you can personalise my blog. We go all out here you know! 🙂 My reasons for adding these widgets were that you can not only have fun with my blog page but you can simply click the minus sign when you have read a post and not have to scroll to the next entry. Almost like a feed reader in some ways… Any problems, please let me know.

Please note: These changes only apply to my main site jbwan.com/weblog and not my WordPress mirror.