DHL and City Link are incompetent

August 19, 2008 – 10:42 am

Blogging can be cathartic, I hear. Let’s have a go.

Delivery companies. All a bunch of muppets, or is it just me?

I ordered myself a new computer recently from Dell. I also picked out a shiny new monitor from OverClockers. Both delivered via a different company. Both, apparently, completely incompetent.

Dell first. They delivered my box via DHL. Dell offer a snazzy “this is how far your order has got” type page. On this page, at the last stage, it states that when your order is ready and has been passed to the delivery company, the page will update within 24 hours to let you know who that company is and a tracking number, so you can see it’s on the way. Did that happen? Nope. I was under the impression that the order hadn’t been shipped yet, so imagine my surprise when I find a card letting me know that I’d missed my delivery. Annoyed. So, okay, I’ll arrange to work from home on a Tuesday, and they can deliver it then. DHL say “no problem, Tuesday is fine.. we probably couldn’t have got it to you on Monday anyway.” Coolios! So, what do they do? They deliver it on Monday. Fantastic, idiots. Thanks for listening to my request. Fortunately, my ever-thoughtful flatmate was home and signed for the box and I have that now. Slightly miffed that they ignored me, but a happy Frances is a Frances with new toys and I’ll forget about it for now.

OverClockers and City Link have been far worse. I ordered the monitor on a Friday and thought I’d like to reduce my amount of work-at-home time and I’ll pay the premium for a Saturday delivery. Did it show up? Did it hell. The tracking notified me that a delivery had been attempted and no one was home. No - only 4 people with their hearing still intact were in the premises that morning. Apparently we must not have heard our very loud intercom buzzer that morning and the card he was supposed to have left must have mysteriously vanished into the ether.

I phoned OverClockers that Saturday afternoon, because City Link was closed at noon, and was rudely told by the girl on the phone that there was nothing she could do until Monday. At which point, rather than taking my name and order number, or evening apologising, she simply hung up without another word. Beautiful.

Pretty annoyed at this, I arrange for them to deliver the parcel for Tuesday on the Monday morning, since I’ve already arranged to stay home for the Dell delivery (read up, those with short attention spans).

Tuesday morning, and I sit patiently in my pyjamas, doing some documentation jobs, and I think I’ll just have a look at the tracking and see where my parcel is (this is at 9:30am). Oh, lovely. Apparently delivery was attempted at 9.03am and I wasn’t home. Did I die or something? Am I actually in the after-life and I just think I’m living, but to the rest of the world, this is but a ghost-flat?

So I phone OverClockers who phone City Link. Apparently the driver is “very good” and wouldn’t have left a card if someone had been there (well no, he’d have delivered the parcel I’d hope, and also note the distinct lack of said card). I state I’m slightly concerned that this driver is lost and has the wrong address, but I’m assured it’s okay, but at this point I’m assuming by “very good” they mean “can’t operate a doorbell”. She gives me the number for City Link, and I phone them. City Link inform me that the driver doesn’t have a phone, but they’re sending him a message some other way (carrier pigeon? smoke signals?) and that if I don’t have my parcel by around noon, I should phone back. Any one want to roll the odds on me being on the phone at noon?

What gets me the most is how on Earth is it beneficial for these companies to be so bad? It’s not like they get to keep everything they fail to deliver. It costs them more time, more money (petrol, man-hours etc.) and they have companies and customers calling them all the time to ask them why they’re so incompetent.

Additional: 2 phone calls to City Link later (one of which involved a very sarcastic lad who was adamant my husband had phoned earlier and told them I’d “popped out” - hint: my salutation is “Miss”) and another to OverClockers and the parcel finally arrived at just after 4pm. The cardboard box was a bit bruised, but fortunately the monitor works a charm. OverClockers are also refunding my Saturday delivery charge. Well, it’s the least they can do, right?

By Frances | Posted in Life | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (2)

The Mae Shi/Dananananaykroyd

August 12, 2008 – 11:51 am

Dananananaykroyd

Second time I’ve seen them, and just as much fun. Running around in the audience, screaming vocals, tons of energy and drumming to die for.

The Mae Shi

Hugely entertaining and very crowd-pleasing. Slight hints of math rock with 8-bit backdrops.

Bonus entertainment points for Calum Gunn’s comedy raffle at the end.

The Mae Shi at The Old Blue Last, 4th August 2008

By Frances | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Death Cab For Cutie/Styrofoam

July 18, 2008 – 10:18 am

Styrofoam

Indie-electronica with a dash of 80s synth. Pretty upbeat and good fun and reminiscent of Postal Service, making them an obvious support act. I also dig that they’re Belgian.

Death Cab for Cutie

Difficult to be objective about a band you’re sentimentally attached to, but they were a good show. To play to the big crowd, they stuck to the favourites and played them as-is from the recordings. I prefer live shows to give something a little unique and varied from their releases, but it’s a minor complaint. I just won’t need to see them in the flesh again.

Death Cab for Cutie at Brixton Academy, 17th July 2008

By Frances | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Pinback/Phosphorescent/Prego

July 15, 2008 – 10:01 am

Prego

Post-rock by numbers. Accomplished, but boring

Phosphorescent

Beautiful voice and keys. Shame about the bassist and his attention seeking ways. A good find, regardless.

Pinback

Keeping it old skool with plenty of non photo-blue vibes. Pity 95% of the audience had never heard it and it’s chums though.

Pinback at Scala, 15th July 2008

By Frances | Posted in Music | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Microformats, the BBC and friends

July 7, 2008 – 12:46 pm

I recently had the job of letting the microformats community know that the BBC were having to drop hCalendar due to accessibility concerns surrounding the use of abbr and the date-time pattern.

My friend and colleague Jake Archibald published a summary of what’s happened so far, what the current alternative suggestions are and the BBC’s take on them. It’s a useful read if you want to catch-up and see where we are.

I think the best thing to come out of this is probably that we’re talking about actual alternatives again rather than just waiting for more evidence (which often feels like a get-out clause for inaction). Whether we’re doing that right though… well, we’ll see. I appreciate the apprehension that comes with changing something that’s already had some seal of “yep.. good to go.. use it!” - no one wants to get this “wrong” again. Equally though, I really do hope we can come to a compromise and “solve” the problem this time. Extending HTML 4 was ever going to be especially pretty, but bear with us (please don’t mention HTML 5 to me - it’s for your own good).

On lighter notes, here’s a couple interesting microformatty things:

And lastly, I wanted to mention that I should hopefully have details on the next London Microformats vEvent very soon.

Based on feedback from the last event we held during London Web Week, Drew and I are planning a “Getting Started” event, with back-to-basics semantics and microformats implementations.

By Frances | Posted in Microformats, Web Dev | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Women of the web

May 23, 2008 – 1:02 pm

Yet again the subject of women in our industry has reared its head and yet again I find myself basically fuming. Why exactly do we keep rehashing this discussion? Can’t we just get over it, already?

Okay, first things first - I realise there’s a wider discussion about women in any industry, and specifically in stereotypically male orientated ones, such as science, engineering and technology. I happen to work within a specific sector of all these - web development - and therefore I realise I’m only qualified to really comment on this one area, and that’s fine. I only want to comment on that one, this time.

The Guardian published “Geek Goddesses” today suggesting that there aren’t more women in the field because of a lack of female role-models:

Young women show huge interest and aptitude in these fields, out-performing the boys in chemistry, maths, biology, physics and technology at A-level. But while 90% of 11-16-year-old girls think technology is cool, 73% would not choose it as a career because of its lack of female role models.

Is this suggesting that 73% of women need a role model in order to pursue a career? What the hell? I’m sorry - I thought that people chose careers based on aptitude and interest rather than a lack of people to follow or look up to. And let’s just pretend for a minute that that factoid is correct - do people need to have role models of the same gender (which this article also suggests)?

I find that some articles paint web development as an inherently sexist industry. I must have missed a memo detailing how and when this occurs, because that’s such complete and utter nonsense as far as I’m concerned. I find it hard to think of an industry that in my experience has been nothing but completely open, inviting, easy to join and easy to work within.

I have spent the best part of the last 3 years attending, or being involved with organising, all kinds of geek events - Geek Dinners (not the “Girl” variety), Pub Standards, @media, d.construct, SxSW, WSG… the list goes on - not once have I ever seen a women being ignored or belittled because the men in the room think she’s “not in the know”. I don’t know what events Sarah Blow is hanging out at, but, quite frankly, they’re not the right ones if she’s being treated as she claims to have been in the article.

Articles like this can only do damage to our industry by describing it incorrectly in a bad light - why on earth would anyone want to be involved in an industry that is made out to be bigoted, let alone the women this is aimed at?

If you think you’re being subjugated, creating a little club just for you not only drives home the idea that yes, you do indeed need to be treated with kid gloves, it lets any discriminatory behaviour off the hook by walking away from it.

By Frances | Posted in Life, Web Dev | Tagged , | Comments (19)

The BBC needs you!

May 16, 2008 – 3:27 pm

Are you a screen reader user, or know someone who is? Want to contribute to making the Beeb a more accessible place?

The BBC is looking for people to let them know what screen reader users hear when they visit the new Programmes pages, which just happen to contain the ever controversial abbreviation design pattern contained within the hCalendar microformat, or whether they expand and listen to title attributes and abbreviations at all.

Please pop on over to the BBC RadioLabs blog article and leave your feedback or get in touch if you would think you can help test!

By Frances | Posted in Microformats, Web Dev | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Microformats vEvent and London Web Week

April 3, 2008 – 3:01 pm

I mentioned at the start of the year that we were planning to have another “Microformat vEvent” in the first quarter… well, slightly later than planned I’m pleased to announce that we’re good to go and you can now sign up!

LWW

The event has been delayed so that we could take part in a new grander event which is London Web Week. It’s going to be a solid week of all things webby, and includes other such highlights as @media London, BarCampLondon 4, a Web Standards Group event and a new one-day conference aimed at new comers who are just interested in or starting out in web development and design, called Web Roots. Even Pub Standards is sneaking in on the act (keep an eye on upcoming for the “The Great Pub Standards Heresy“).

The full schedule of events is available here and I expect it’ll expand to contain a few of the London user groups for various web… things… over the next few weeks.

So, back to the point of my post. Microformats vEvent!

The good news is, I’ve managed to twist the arms of a couple of nice folks to do some speaking for us. We’ve got Dan Brickley and Tom Morris. Surprisingly, both usually more aligned with the RDF camp rather than microformats - but I’m personally up for breaking down that wall (and I hope they are too) and seeing if we can’t all “get along”. So, with that in mind, they will each be taking on topics that look at microformats working along side other semantic web technologies in complementary ways.

Full details on what these guys will be talking about are again, on the sign-up page, as well where and when (The Yorkshire Grey Pub, Holborn, Tuesday 27th May, 7pm) you need to show up. Make sure you sign-up quickly though - we’ve only got a limited amount of space, and entrance is with ticket only.

By Frances | Posted in Life, Microformats, Web Dev | Tagged , , , , | Comments (2)