The Specials...not a shambles!!

When was the last time a band really made you smile and were beyond expectations???  Not often, huh?!  Have you seen 'The Specials' live??

Knowing they were one of those bands that I had to see I bought a ticket.  Then did some research and my embarrassing naivety of the band did a 360, once I realised that songs like Gangsters, A Message to you Rudy, Too Much too Young and Rat Race were a memory from my childhood.  Formed in 1977 in Coventry, they had released two albums by 1980 (the year I was born) in the upbeat but two fingers to the world attitude of Ska.

Now the Logan Campbell Centre is a reasonable venue, capacity 3000, seating and GA (depending on your ticket) but has one enormous problem...the bar.  Why did it take me 30 minutes to get a couple of beers???  I can tell you, the bar staff were woefully under prepared.  The boy I was served by (who looked about 15) poured each of my 4 beers into a plastic cup - no problems there - however the speed was so slow, it was as if they were working to rule.  No speed, no energy, no brains.  I offered to help the bar tender and show him how to pour 2 to 4 beers all at once, he preferred not to take me up on the offer, thus the annoyance of it all.  Luckily most of the people there were Brits, who if you don't know are prepared to queue and queue...but even though they were keeping their chins up, were still grumbling.

Great gig, good venue, crap bar.  I must remember to take this into account next time I am considering buying tickets for a gig there.  Darn, Slayer and Megadeath are playing there in October and so is Luger Boa.  Maybe it'll be a chance for them to redeem themselves...watch this space!

Puhoi Tollroad Signup Form is a nightmare

Here's my experience:

• try to login
• don't know my username, so i trigger forgot username
• enter my username, press enter.
• nothing happens (its because pressing enter means "cancel")
• so i try again but this time i click the right button with mouse
• site says "The identification you entered is not correct" which is not a standard error. it shoudl either say "the password has been emailed to you" or it should say "user not known".
• click back to homepage.
• can't even find mention of the tunnel on the homepage at http://www.nzta.govt.nz/ (why the link to "home"? this isn;'t the home!)
• find my bookmark and navigate back to www.tollroad.co.nz
• click "open an account"
• skip past reading a massive block of text then click "next" (im sure ive done this once before)
• now i am at https://tolling.nzta.govt.nz/RegisterPrepay.aspx but i notice this form doesn't support Firefox Auto-fill. Nice - i'll have to fill it by hand.
• now i am being asked for my date of birth! wow that's impressively oppressive. what on earth is the justification for this?
• then i see "secondary customer"! what is this? do i need to fill this? im not sure lets just click "Next" and hope for the best.
• This form has 13 elements including the submit buttons, this is such bad design. Many of these elements should be left blank for many people.
• First try see's that somehow i didnt enter my email twice. do this now.
• Yay, i have made it to the next page.
• now i see the confirm screen where i get to choose my login name.
• now i can add a vehicle, so i put my license plate number.
• the design of this screen is also really bad - although i only have 1 field to fill in, i can't see the submit button its below the fold and needs to be scrolled to.
• when i click next it says "You must add at least one vehicle to continue" - WTF?
• what i had failed to do, was click "add vehicle" - perhaps this is why the continue button is being hidden down the page? nice.
• now to add my motorcycle also... hmm somethings up here i can't.
• oh here's my problem - ive just registered my car as a motorcycle. Nice.
• so i proceed to add the license number of my bike again.
• yes now its looking slightly better - both vehicles entered, but they are both showing as motorbikes.
• so i delete the car.
• then re-enter it, this time selecting Car as the type, and choosing Car and add again.
• now its looking better - two vehicles, both correctly set.
• click "next".
• Enter setup amount. No mention of if this expires. WTF?
• I'm pretty certain this money expires at some stage, so i will try to leave all of this blank and press next.
• No - it says "The amount must be greater than zero". WTF?
• NOW I AM COMPLETED STUCK AND REACHING FOR THE TELEPHONE
• probably by the time i have gotten off the phone my cookie will have expired and this whole 30min process rendered a waste of time.
• luckily after my phone call the sesson is still active.
• i try to fill in $20 and nothing for "auto topup" but aren't allowed. i have to set it to auto-topup. nice.
• then i enter my credit card details and everything goes pretty smoothly.
• at the very end i can see my login details breifly. i forgot to write mine down so hopefully these have also been emailed to me.

Overall, bit of a nightmare process, especially that nasty 13 part form that needs to know some pretty personal details. Probably one of the worst signups ive done for quite some time.

I'd strongly not recommend anyone ever try this. Probably best to just drive through the tunnel and pay after.

Interesting point about Google "support"

One of Google's paid services Google App Engine failed recently - for 6 hours. For the first time I'm aware, they had a failure in GFS the underlying disk storage subsystem in one of the data centres that runs some of App Engine.

This Register article has an awesome take on it:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/06/dziuba_google_app_engine/

Basically his point is that Amazon Cloud had an 8 hour outage last year, but that Amazon gave an excellent review of what happened, where, and what they've done to fix the issue and prevent it from happening again and showing technical details of which line of code that failed; He then contrasts this with Google's response effectively showing a lesson in how to communicate with transparency.

I've recently noticed that taking ownership of a Google Maps local business listing is excruiciatingly difficult. Even once you have claimed your business, its not simple to transfer ownership to a different Google account. It's near impossible. The way its done is to have either a postcard sent to the address, a phone call made to the number listed, or an SMS text message sent to the associated mobile phone, showing that you are bona fide. Sounds like a great system, and it is, but its a pain in the butt. Having already waited about 3 weeks for the postcard, its going to be anotehr 3 weeks since the first one was setup on the wrong account.

For the good post about mergin and transferring Google Accounts, check out this post on combing google accounts: http://blog.dave.org.uk/2008/11/combining-google-accounts.html

An old HMX setlist

Not sure when this dates from but found it on my phone cleaning out old junk:

JAM -PORTISHEAD C Bb A Ab
HOTEL VERMONT
(JAM FUNKY SHIT FOR AGES)
PIANO SONG
WATER BABIES
------------------------
HIP HOP 92BPM
GIVE IT UP
FUNK JAM C
SUN CITY 88
------------------------
DISCO BOG
UNCOMPLICATED
TRICKSTER
ONLY GOT TIME FOR FUNK

Toms:
STEAK SANDWICH
HOTEL VERMONT
BEBOO

------------------------
NON-SET SONGS:
HMX
WAR SONG
TRON
STEEL YARD

Dr Vanda Vitali - insensitive, AND incompetant?

Today I read that Vanda Vitali was trying to contest the will of the late Sir Edmund Hilary. WTF?. This is not exactly showing a lot of gratitute toward the gift. What happens now to other people who wish to donate works and artifacts to the museum in their will? This might make them think twice. Silly sausage.

Sure, if it was something low profile that might fly under the radar perhaps, but this is Sir Ed - he's famous around here. Maybe she didn't realise this - didn't someone tell her?

Fixing my mate Hob's "new" old win2k box up

Just broke out an ancient old celeron pc my brother never used which has been donated to my san-computer brother from another mother - Hobs - or El gato negro as they call him, from the favelas. This old machine had IE 5 and the link to windows update was so old, it didnt evenwork! MS had forgotten to put in a redirect. Was a hell of a laugh getting all the drivers and security rollups applied! Ahhh yes a trip down memory lane indeed.