My Blog

Has anyone here noticed that Liberty is still advertising that they ‘give bad service, but its ok because we’re working on making it better’… 

These ads started over 4 months ago!  I’m begining to wonder if they’re actualy doing anything.  I mean, how long can it take to rip out a call centre and replace it with a more efficient one? And surely if they knew it was going to take this long, they should only have started the ads a month before their change was going live?  Just think of the money they could have saved… In fact, I’m a Liberty Life client – so I’m thinking about my money that they’re wasting on these ads.  If they weren’t paying for the ads, wouldn’t they be able to spend more money to ensure that my investments were doing better?  Or perhaps they could be charging me less fees, so that more of my money went towards my investments?

Anyway, I certainly hope they actually improve their service levels soon so that they can stop wasting money telling us that they’re doing something.  Someone should really tell their directors to “stop telling us that you’re doing something, and just DO it already!” because currently their lack of action is speaking far louder than their ads.

This year got off to a flying start, and I still haven’t said “Happy new year” to the ‘net in general… so here it is:

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

The year kinda started rather quickly, and I’ve had very little time to catch up… I’m not sure if everyone’s year has started so hectically… We arrived back on the 5th of Jan, and within a day our weekends were pretty much booked up till the middle of Feb, quite a few Friday nights were filled, and usually the rest of our week nights are full too.

We’ve got stacks of photos from the trips, but not all of them are digital… I took my digital camera but left my memory stick at home, so that was kinda useless, and I asked the Kodak photo shop near my work to scan the negatives from my wifes camera and write a CD for me, but after complaining 3 times about the lack of quality in the photos I stopped.  The original images they made were about 240×90 pixels in size, and the owners of the shop are very asian – they don’t speak much english at all, so trying to explain what was wrong with the images was a bit of a nightmare.  I’ll post a holiday blog entry later on, when I have the time…

Waaaay back when my whole class at junior school had a “music class” (which was part recorder lesson and part music appreciation), we had a cool teacher (Mr Downham) who at one stage mentioned a theory of his that music styles would repeat themselves, and that perhaps one day we would be listening to the latest thing music which would actually be some form of baroque or other classical style.

Its something that’s stuck in my mind for some reason, and through out my life I’ve often noticed when the “latest style” has had some similarity to older music.  Generally its a re-take on some mainstream style/trend from a while ago, but I was just listening to a playlist of mine in WMP10 and started thinking, “hey, I don’t remember adding my mod files to this collection” (and by mod files I mean mod/s3m/it and other such files)… So I looked at the playlist and I found out that it was playing “Parade of the Athletes” by DJ Tiësto…

Certain bits of the songs just reminded me of the old “chip” mods from an AGE ago, and (I think) some of the stuff by Future Crew… (Not sure if I’m getting my demo groups mixed up)  Anyway, I kinda missed those times with the old 8bit sound cards (or simply just the PC speaker) and the excitement of finding out so many new and cool things.  Using usenet to read up on the latest “scene” news and finding demos that did amazing things on my little PC that I didn’t think were possible with just a 5kb executable.  I still have a part of me that wants to go to one of the “demo scene” competitions (I’m not even sure if they still exist). 

I do remember one local demo group from durbs(? I think they were called Asphyxia) who put out some awesome Turbo Pascal tutorials which got me interested in assembly and 3D graphics… I even ended up helping some guys at school learn trig and other fun maths concepts using their 3D tuts. Oh, the good old days… 🙂

So this looks like its the latest meme on the blogosphere, but check it out… I got this link via Craig Patterson‘s blog about the game industry.  He got it via a post on Jason Olsen’s blog, and the actual link is by a spouse of a guy that works at EA…

Read it! You’ll be happy you don’t work there…