Uncle Biek

We had another competition snooker evening just now and we won with a comfortable seven to two frames.

Bas and I both took two out of three maximum frames but Jaap probably couldn’t live with himself anymore after the one frame he lost last time and took all three frames.

My game wasn’t all that great though and it was mostly due to my opponents not knocking in the chances they were getting from me that enabled me to take enough points for the win.

Had they been in a slightly better form I could quite possibly have lost all three frames. But, as history tells us folks, they weren’t so I didn’t. :-)

My mom got married today and I’m very happy for her. I was honored when she asked my to be one of the witnesses and of course accepted this privileged task.

It was a small but very nice ceremony, just the way they wanted it to be. We were there with Karlijn, who was mom’s second witness, Stevie & Eva and Hans’ children as well.

After the wedding took place we all went over to their house and spend the afternoon and evening together which was the first time we all were together as a whole.

Congratulations again mom, I hope you and Hans will be very happy together for a long, long time.

This morning on my way to work I found myself (for the fourth time this week, but for the first time without an accompanying accident further up the road) in a traffic jam and my IFO was positioned behind a nicely grey coated Audi A6 Quattro.

It’s at times like this where all those patient numbers on maximum horsepower and torque levels don’t count, we’re all one big (almost) happy family. :-)

Now I’m not really the biggest Audi fan around. In fact if I would make a top ten list of my favorite car manufacturers they would probably not even make it to my personal top five.

That, of course, doesn’t mean that they make ugly cars, quite contrarily, but it’s just not my thing. US cars in general, and specially Cadillac and Ford definitely are my thing. But that doesn’t matter now, what I’m trying to tell you here is not Audi’s fault or anything.

Anyway. While we were rolling along, at a lot less miles an hour than was desirable at that time and place, I realized that the Audi’s LED taillights were not quite as pleasing to watch as the classic light bulb powered ones are, like the rest of us ’still’ have, specially when the brake lights come on.

The time those LEDS need to go from ‘off’ to ‘on’ is by far a lot shorter than the bulb’s time and somehow they come across more aggressively. I realize that it could very well be a matter of just a couple of hundreds of a second but still, I like the bulb ones much, much better.

Next to the millisecond they take to activate they are also a lot brighter than the older lights. This, of course, is in fact much safer so, though it’s rather bright when you’re driving behind one in clear dark weather, I can see the point in that and won’t ramble on about it.

After taking my exit I had left the highway behind me a long time already, when I suddenly realized just how much more I like the older lights.

I spotted a beautiful 1965 Ford Thunderbird, which taillights cover just about the entire rear of the car. Each unit is made up of 4 separate lights and when they activate the turn indicator the lights toggle from inside out, kind of like they are turning up a giant car sized volume bar.

It’s a simply brilliant sight. Whoever came up with that idea struck gold, right there, and it’s a shame we don’t see things like these anymore nowadays. It would sure brighten up the way traffic looks, not to mention the traffic jams.

Anyone who has seen the amazing science fiction series Firefly and the accompanying movie Serenity will know what this term means: everything is fine. Shiny.

Last Friday evening I, once again, rebooted my modem and hoped for a new IP address but unfortunately it was still the same so no internet. The whole thing took so much energy already that I didn’t even care and threw a DvD in the player to watch a movie. Ha! That’ll teach ‘m …

Saturday morning however I had dome some work on my dads customer database and thought that it would have been awfully convenient had I been able to mail him that database for him to have a look.

So without really thinking I again rebooted the modem and continued my work. You can imagine my surprise to discover a brand new IP address waiting for me when I looked to see what (or if) happened.

But here’s the nifty bit: I still haven’t heard from my provider. At all. Nobody has called, no email asking me if all is working as expected (yeah laugh it up, they do such things), nothing, nada, zilch.

Right now I’m slightly concerned and wondering if they actually know someone fixed it or that somewhere in their system there is still some ticket residing that states that my internet is down and that it needs to be fixed pronto.

I can only hope that they do know it’s alright again and no one changes anything at their end because it’s working like a charm again and I wouldn’t want to miss it again. Not for a week, a day or even five freaking minutes.

Never again.

Apart from myself (and all my stuff) moving from one place to another, one of the more important things for me to take with me was of course my internet connection.

So about five weeks ago I started filling out all the necessary forms to make sure that everything would go super smoothly.

On my telephone company’s website they stated that if I arranged the move right there, they would also arrange for my internet connection to be moved. It just couldn’t be easier.

So I filled out their form and after a few days I already got the first slightly worrying letter: due to some technical difficulties we’re not sure yet if you are going to be able to use your phone line on the first of November. Great …

However, as time would tell, this would turn out to be the least concerning message I’d get … All of you going uh-oh right now … you’re right.

In their (probably automated) email the guys from Orange/Wanadoo (read: first class liars) said that they got the order for the move and they thought I’d be able to use my internet again from November first. Well, think again Sherlock!

At November second I got the confirmation from the phone company that my telephone line was moved, including the ADSL backbone so it should all work. And they were right; everything did work, or at least everything they could manage.

My phone was working again, my modem detected the ADSL signal and it could log into my provider. At that moment I noticed the first awkward thing; I still had my ‘old’ IP address.

Sure, I’d love to keep that because that would mean that I didn’t have to change anything at all, but when I didn’t get any internet across the line I knew that something had probably gone terribly wrong.

And it did. We, dad and I have the very same problem unfortunately, phoned up the helpdesk and tried to get a hold of someone who could tell us what was wrong and how long it would take to fix it. That proved to be almost a bigger problem than the one we have with our internet connection itself …

What a bunch of retards they have working over there, I tell you if they were working here at Philips they wouldn’t last a week.

One told us that he could see the phone company had delivered the ADSL part and that everything should work from the third of November. Another one said that the first one sometimes ‘just tells things’ and that there was no way that it would work ‘that soon’. The next spend more time asking and repeating my questions to a colleague of his, that one cost me a small fortune …

The last one I talked to finally made some sense, but still could only tell me that giving out a new IP address (because that’s what we’ve been waiting for all this time) usually takes up to one week …

So here we are. I’ve moved November first, yet up to today (that’s almost ten days later) there’s still no internet. I’ve given up hope a little bit and refuse to spend more money calling them asking when the h*ll they’ll finally fix my internet connection.

As soon as it’s back though … I’ll start my own campaign in making sure letting them know just what a sad bunch of people they are. And I’m seriously considering changing providers because the way they handled this is just unacceptable.

To be continued.