I arrived at my parents' house this afternoon armed with a load of washing, a car in desperate need of a good wash, and most importantly, some flowers for mum for mother's day.  This officially makes me the Best Daughter Ever   yay.  It has since been pointed out that I have never given her flowers before..  oh well.

I've been having some fun with ISPs this week...

the short story is that my broadband is now on order and should be activated by the end of next week.
the long story involves much more ranting

My old isp was EFH.  When we signed up with them they were very good - excellent support, no connection problems, nothing.  I figured I may as well stick with them, especially as that way I could avoid a £50 charge for cancelling before 12 months.

So on Wednesday I went on their website to order broadband for the flat.  Existing customer, enter your username/password... which I did.  Website says "Invalid login".  hmm, ok then.  I tried a few more times and gave up, figuring that I'd phone them up instead as they got taken over a few months ago and maybe logins had changed or something.  Only apparently they're having issues with their shiny new outsourced callcentre, so I got a nice recorded message telling me to ring back another time.  fine, whatever..

Thursday.. I go back on the website.  Only it's been replaced by a "no website configured at this address" message...  great.  At this point I start thinking that maybe I should look elsewhere.   Especially when I found a lot of bad things being said about 186k - the new parent company - and how EFH have really gone downhill since the takeover.
Quick panicky search of other ISPs, and I place an order elsewhere (eclipse, if you really want to know).

Friday morning... time to cancel the old account.  EFH website is half back up - the front page has a big angry ASP error, but the rest is ok.  Support pages list several email addresses, all @efhbroadband.com.  So I send an email.  Which bounces.  As do the two I send to the other addresses listed.  great.

In the meantime I've had an email from eclipse saying the order can't progress because BT have said there's already broadband on the phone line.  argh.

Friday lunchtime - mostly spent on hold.  EFH made me listen to really bad quality Enya and then some other depressing rubbish which I could barely hear.  Then when I finally got through, I was a little more rude that I perhaps needed to be...  Get told a different email address - this time @186k.co.uk.  I pointed out that maybe they should update the website, as all @efh emails are bouncing.  Support blokey tells me the website does say the correct thing.  Er, no it doesn't.  

He also told me that I didn't have to cancel just because I was moving house - I could sign up again and transfer the account... continue reading »

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There's a total lunar eclipse, like, right now.  It's amazing   I've been taking photos like some kind of mad woman, because although they're not that rare, it's usually cloudy or at stupid times in the morning so I don't get to see them. 

So yes, of about 45 images taken before all my batteries died this is the best one.  Not photoshopped (well, cropped and sharpened a tiny bit but that's all), still a little bit blurry but I'm rather pleased.  Most of the other images came out quite badly - there was one other decent one but it's a bit too bright for my liking.  Took a while to figure out the right sort of exposure I needed though - obviously I'm a bit out of practise, oops. 

That's a 5 second exposure at f4.8 (using a tripod, obviously).  Full 6x zoom, so about 210mm in 'normal' terms.  Not bad for a compact camera, heh.

I also tried to get some pictures of it when it was still only partial, but that didn't work, probably because I'd got too long an exposure so I ended up with a big round fuzzy blur - not even with any bits missing!  But totality is more impressive anyway   

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Oh look, I'm moving house.  Again.  This would be move number six since I left home to go to uni.

1. halls.  hell.  9 months
2. skanky terrace.  bad housemates.  9 months
3. slightly nicer terrace. psycho neighbours. 10 months.
4. much nicer semi.  lots of cats.  One year and two weeks.
5. lovely detached cottage.  middle of nowhere.  almost 11 months
6. flat. on my own.  eep.
   

Good, isn't it?  Maybe one day I'll settle down and come up with some kind of long term life plan.  But not yet, 'cos that's quite hideously scary.  Short term scary 'eep I have to move house and live on my own and don't know anyone argh' is plenty enough to cope with right now.

But yes, I have the key to the flat and will be spending the weekend painting.  And cleaning the carpets, which are impressively filthy.  But it will be really nice when that's done and I've got my stuff in (which should be the middle of next week).

I have two parking spaces   I knew there was one, but apparently there's actually two.  In Ludlow, this is a Very Big Thing.  The two things that have been filling the papers for the last however long are parking problems and coffee shops.
Quite what I'm going to do with the second parking space I don't know.  Have had various suggestions including renting it out and parking sideways/incredibly badly.  hmm.

Oh yeah, neighbours.  That could take some getting used to again - don't know how much of my music/singing/general noise they'll be able to hear.  I briefly spoke to one of the neighbours yesterday to ask which parking spaces were mine, and she said she was glad "it was someone younger moving in".  So yes, I appear to be moving into old people land (then again, this is Ludlow so should I be surprised at that?).  Let's hope they're all friendly but slightly deaf rather than meddling old gits.

Oooh, and there was a massively fat cat

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