I’ve recently been looking to purchase a piece of equipment online which is not available from big-name suppliers, only from a limited number lesser-known websites. Having no reputation upon which to base a purchasing decision, a viable method to choose between a reliable site and a potentially bad site could be to see how well each site’s Terms & Conditions comply with the legal requirements of the UK Distance Selling regulations – legal requirements which either seem to be frequently misunderstood by legitimate sellers or frequently mis-quoted by sellers who seemingly wish to shirk their responsibilities in an attempt to force unlawful terms onto unwitting customers.
Please note that these regulations only apply when goods are purchased remotely, without having viewed the goods prior to purchase. They in fact give consumers many more rights when making purchases via the internet than if they purchased from a shop – to the point where it in many cases no longer makes sense to purchase big-ticket items from a bricks-and-mortar shop at all!
The other weekend I spent Sunday at RAF Upwood, an abandoned RAF base near Peterborough, on a photo-shoot organised by Alex Beckett. Alex has put together a video of the event, featuring some of the most striking photographs taken.
If you keep your eyes peeled, you might even spot me in a couple of the pictures
At work we have several Sony laptops and have recently upgraded to the latest Vodafone-branded Huawei 3G/HSDPA modems… and on all laptops we’ve experienced intermittent connectivity and constant errors.
Some of the guys at work have been reporting for several days that they haven’t been able to send email when working off-site and connecting to the internet by their Vodafone 3G dongles.
Specifically, Thunderbird was saying that it received an invalid server response of “421 too many connections”.
It looks as if the roadworks at the top-end of Milton Road are finally complete… the net result seeming to be that where previously there was a lane for traffic headed for Cowley Road, the Business Park, and the Park and Ride and a lane for heading into town, there is instead now but a single lane for all of this traffic. The dual-carriageway to the Science Park seems as unused as ever (I’ve never seen more than three vehicles between both lanes) – but now the queues down that single lane which carry all of the other traffic are enormous. By 10am each day, the queues go right back to the roundabout, so goodness only knows how bad it must be at 9am.
More to the point, it’s downright dangerous: this insane road layout encourages, almost ensures, that people will drive straight down the (empty) left-most Science Park lane, and then try to cut back into the traffic stream between two sets of lights. I guarantee that this will cause an accident sooner rather than later.
Despite looking (quite literally) as if a bomb has hit it, my house continues to progress nicely. I think we’re about at the point now where everything really starts coming together fast: the new kitchen has arrived and is going to be fitted over the next couple of weeks, the bathroom now has the toilet and basin fitted and only needs tiling, painting, and the glass-block wall between the show and sunken bath building – and once they’re out of the way I’ll be able to move back in. Hurrah!
(At which point I’ll also be able to start walking to work again, which – given the blazing sunnt spring days we’ve been having recently – should be lovely)
I’ve placed adverts for the rooms at Gum Tree and on the Cambridge Accommodation Notice Board, and the response has been great! I’ve had several people come around to take a look, and I’m now just waiting to hear back for ⅔ to have already gone!
The back-box and exhaust pipe fell off my car on the way to work this morning… it’s obviously not going to be my day <sigh>
(I think the driver behind me was surprised, though!)
In other news, the renovations on my house continue apace: The kitchen wall is down, the plaster has been removed from external ground-floor rooms to a height of 1m, and the electricians are about ready to kill the carpenters for making too much noise!
Well, my home is currently slowly being packed up, ready for moving on Monday (11th December) to my new, bigger, place closer in to Cambridge.
Scary stuff
This does mean that I’m going to be off-line from about now until as long as it takes to arrange ADSL at the new place… admittedly, that means that most readers will see this message after the fact – but at least the RSS feed will get it, and even Google might catch it in time(!)
(Yes, I really should mirror this site to a backup server… or even just relocate artoo, this machine, into my employer’s datacentre on a spare external IP address, if they’d let me)
