A few years ago, if you’d told me my package was being delivered by TNT, I would have been impressed. I mean, they’re a big worldwide shipping agent, they ship around the world to millions of people, they must be good, right? No.

Last week I ordered some jeans from an online clothes shop I use occasionally, a couple of days later I came home to find a slip from TNT saying that they tried to deliver a parcel from said company. I looked at the piece of paper a couple of times, trying to work out what I was supposed to do about it. There was no ‘Call us to arrange another time’ or ‘We’ll ship to you tomorrow’. I eventually gave in and phoned the number on the slip of paper. After ascertaining who I was, the conversation went like so:

TNT: “We’ll try delivery again on Monday. Will there be anyone there then?” ME: “No, I’m at work everyday this week. Can I have the parcel sent to another address?” TNT: “No, only the person who sent can send the address. You could leave a note saying to leave the parcel, and where to leave it.” ME: (fearing the worst, and not really wanting to leave a note) “OK, but what happens if I forget to leave a note?” TNT: “Then we won’t deliver it again.” ME: (getting pissed off): Ok. Thanks. Bye A very similar thing happened when I had my Mac delivered by TNT. They told me exactly what day the laptop was due to be delivered, so I organised to work at home that day. I waited all day long, by 4 o' clock, I thought I’d phone up and see where the parcel was.

TNT: “It seems like your parcel has been put on the wrong lorry, because of the snow” (yes they really said that) ME: “I’ve specifically taken the day off because you said the parcel would be here today” TNT: “Well why don’t you have it delivered to an address you’ll be at, like your work address?” etc…

How can such a huge company have such rubbish customer support? And being such a huge company, their branches are miles away, so I couldn’t even go and pick up the parcels either time.

Rant of the day over.

In Q this month there is a feature on the 100 Greatest Songs ever. I was bored and awake late last night and decided I’d see how many of the songs I had, and make an iTunes playlist of them. I have a fairly paltry 58 (so far) out of 100 tracks. It would be quite nice to have all of them for completeness, but that could perhaps just be me being sad.

If you want to contact me, you can find my details on the contact page on my website.

Since no one wanted to come with me to see this, I was rather pleased to see that they’ve done a podcast with inteviews of some of the stars of the event

This is so cool..

Click me and listen to ‘myspace picture’

Can someone tell me what is the difference between this:

1
2

>>> print datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
2006-08-09

and this…

1
2

>>> print datetime.now().strftime('%Y-%m-%d'),
2006-08-09

… because I have no clue, but it appears to be the difference between a piece of django/python code working and not working!

I ordered one of these for my TiVo the other day. I’m hoping it’ll come before the weekend so then I can start playing with it and installing TiVoweb and other such fun stuff. There is a very cool piece of software for the Mac called Tivotool which allows you to get programmes off of your TiVo over a network connection, so I can finally archive off Prison Break to watch later without having to delete - huzzah!

Had a phone call at 8:30 this morning to tell me not to bother going into work as we had no power. Turned out the dishwasher which we weren't allowed to use and then were allowed to use again had a broken element, which tripped the fuse for the whole building. Twice.

Got to work about 10:15, had a project meeting. Then spent the rest of the morning fighting our mail server to try and get it's load below 300 and to try and archive off some of my bosses inbox. It started off at having 7000+ emails in it which funnily enough Outlook didn't want to deal with. I filtered off email from 2004 which took care of 400 emails. Then I filtered off the email from 2005 which cut the mailbox in half. I then told Mr. Huge Inbox to fire up Outlook and see if it would deal with it and it just started to when... our connection to the internet broke.

It proceeded to stay broken for the rest of the afternoon. The guy who manages it turned up and told us he'd connected to the downstairs router and it was all fine, so we left at 5:20 not having a clue what the problem was - hopefully it'll be fixed tomorrow.

Will finally came to the decision that if I was to have nothing to do with the business, I was to have nothing to do with the web site either so alas, I am sad to announce that the Reynard City website that I designed is no more. It is apparently to come back in another guise sometime soon, so I look forward to seeing that.

I imagine this will be the final post in my Reynard City blog category - except when I get round to finishing off the Launch party story.