I think I may be the victim of a “phone scam”. This morning two lasses came round claiming to be students just moved into the house a couple of doors a way. The said they were trying to set up their internet connection  but they needed a corded phone to check the line - of course they all had mobiles but not much use! In the spirit of kindness I lent them a phone, but it hasn’t some back.

I’ve read about phone scams but didn’t really know what one was until now. I expect the guys from the real hustle are explaining what you can do with four thousand used land line phones…

Update! They just brought it back, with thanks and cake (students feeding me? isn’t it supposed to happen the other way round?).  People being nice to each other, I’m sure this is more frequent occurrence than The Daily Mail would have us believe but they make their money out of worrying the worried with “news” of real scams. If we weren’t worried we wouldn’t buy the rag so they have keep up worry levels to keep up sales.

I blogged a while back about the exciting(!) purchase of my new Dyson http://www.itpro.co.uk/blogs/davef/2008/09/09/hoovering-up-engineering/

I’ve just had an email asking me to write a review. Being an opinionated guy and someone who values user reviews I thought I would just type a quick “yes it works” at http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/product/406848/DYSON-DC14-ANIMAL. but what do I get?

“Done, but with errors on the page” and no chance of making an entry.

I’m using ie 6.0.2800 - if it don’t work with that what does it work with? More to the point what did the designers check it with?

The email is from a  no reply address and I’ve got better things to do then spend 20 mins trying to get a contact address from the the website so the world will have to live without my opinion. Anyway it may explain why there are so few user reviews on the Comet site!

Stop press on that - I have tried to track down a contact and on their “contact” page I noticed “we recommend using the Firefox web browser ” I’m cool with OSS but things do need to work with MS stuff if you want to maximised your audience!

I don’t know about the end of the world - though my son keeps pointing out CERN won’t get round to colliding things for a while (in fact they are ahead of schedule and may even start today!) - but I had a more serious worry myself.

I few nasty beeps like a disk in pain, windows “hard error” messages and I had to power off the PC yesterday. Today it tried to boot from the CD as there weren’t any hard disks

I took the PC apart waggled some wires and I’m typing on it now.

Maybe we should all take it as a hint to BACK UP. The trouble is removable media is always so far behind fixed disks. Just when CD’s seemed a good option HDD’s leaped up to the 10’s of GB. Even with a DVD writer how am I supposed to back up 40G?

I actually have some removable drives - biggest spare I’ve got is about 10G though. I guess it’s time for a usb hard drive. I noticed when doing the weekly shop that Tesco (can you remember when the thought of a supermarket selling hard disks was insane?)  had a 150G USB drive for about £50. Be cheaper still on ebay I guess - but harder to return if it’s faulty.

Can you remember when buying a spare hard disk for backup would have seemed insane?

I’ve just checked out PC World online. What’s the difference between Desktop External Hard Drives and Portable External Hard Drives - apart from one gets 500GB & the other only 150 for abou the same cash?

Having finally given up on my Hoover which needed its filters cleaning after every room (seriously!) I found a cheap (relatively) Dyson online at Comet (the animal at £200 is way below Dyson’s own price). I have just been to www.dyson.co.uk to register it and from there drifted across to http://www.jamesdysonfoundation.com/ to have a look at ways they are encouraging engineers. They seem to do stuff with schools and all sorts so if you have young (potential) engineers around you may wish to take a look.

One thing that was a bit depressing was that the downloadable diagram for making your own cyclone was a JPG in a ZIP file. What kind of engineering example is it to put a lossy compression like JPG inside a lossless compressed container (ZIP)? Hardware guys, what do they know?  Once you have downloaded (and unziped!) the diagram you can make your own cyclone but it still doesn’t explain how it extracts the dust. Wikipedia it is then… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclonic_separation