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Goodbye Virgin Media, and good riddance…

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on January 5, 2013 by telescoper

Virgin-Media-logo

With my move to Brighton imminent, I decided before Christmas to sort out a few things that I’ve been putting off for a while. One of them was to cancel the contract with Virgin Media at my house in Cardiff. Having made the decision to ditch them, I then received a letter from said company announcing that their “broadband” service would go up in price in February 2013 by almost 10%. That’s on top of a similar rise earlier in 2012. A price hike of 20% in a year is nothing short of a rip-off. I wouldn’t mind if the service was decent, but the broadband is particularly poor; I’m supposed to have a 20MB service but I rarely get even a tenth of that. I assume Virgin Media simply doesn’t have enough bandwith to deliver what it promises. And that’s not counting when the connection falls over completely, which is far from uncommon…

In 2012 Virgin Media announced that I was getting a “free” upgrade to 20MB – previously I had the cheapo 10MB service – which sounded great. Then, just over a month later, the cost of my broadband package went up by about 10%. That’s a clear misrepresentation, and I should have cancelled my account right away then. But for some reason I didn’t.

I also get a cable TV package from Virgin Media (which I very rarely watch). Cancelling that will probably mean I spend just a bit more time reading or listening to music, which is a good thing. The woeful state of TV generally, and the dire offerings available at Christmas in particular, make me confident that I can live quite happily without it. And I’ll save the license fee too. I also have a telephone land line which I hardly use either. So scrap it all, I thought.

Anyway, I picked up the phone and called Virgin Media on 8th December with the intention of cancelling my service. A very frustrating experience with automated responses followed. “You now have five options”, you know the sort of thing. After several sets of five options (none of which were to cancel my account), I got through to a vaguely humanoid life-form. Even that wasn’t the end of the story as instead of just following my request she asked dozens of irrelevant questions and tried to persuade me not to quit. In the end I got fed up and said “I’m not going to change my mind, please just cut the crap and cancel the account”. Finally I was told the account would close on 8th January and some packaging would be sent so I could return the box and modem to Virgin Media. Fair enough, I thought.

I was travelling before Christmas, but noticed when I got back that Virgin Media had made a number of attempt to phone me while I was away. Eventually they phoned when I was in. An operative told me he wanted to discuss “changes to my account” and asked for my password. I said there was nothing to discuss as I had cancelled it. He persisted. I put the phone down. When I got back from a Christmas break in Newcastle the same thing happened again, with the same response. Then again the same day. Then again. The third time it happened in the same morning, I’m afraid I lost my temper and told the Virgin Media representative to fuck off. That did the trick.

Yesterday I received a bill from Virgin Media including a charge for the period 8th January to 7th February 2013, being the month after my account was supposed to be cancelled. I picked up the phone and called Virgin Media, assuming that somehow the instruction to close the account had been lost. In fact it hadn’t. The person I spoke to said “yes, your account is to be closed on 8th January”. “Then why have you billed me for the following month?”, I asked. “That’s our standard practice.” was the reply.

Standard practice? Sounds to me like theft! Assuming it would be very difficult to get money back once Virgin Media had purloined it, I immediately cancelled my Direct Debit to stop them taking the funds from my bank account. If they send me a correct bill for what I actually owe, I’ll pay it of course. But I’m never having anything to do with Virgin Media ever again.

P.S. I won’t have internet at home for a while from 8th January, so probably won’t be doing much blogging at weekends. On the other hand, I will have a lot of other things to be getting on with as I gradually relocate to Brighton by the sea…

P.P.S. Just received an email from Virgin Media with the following header…

medialogo

…which is of course exactly what I did.

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Around the old home

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on December 28, 2012 by telescoper

Back from a brief Christmas visit up North I thought I’d post a few snaps I took on our traditional Boxing Day spin around Northumberland. The weather wasn’t exactly marvellous, but it did at least stop raining for a while when we reached Amble  so we got out of the car and went for a stroll around the little harbour…

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Although it was a cold and wet day it wasn’t too windy. They must be tough fishermen who go out into the North Sea in those little boats, but they’re friendly folk too – waving to us landlubbers as they came in and out of the harbour.

On the way home we stopped at Benwell, not a picturesque place but the part of Newcastle in which I was brought up. I’ve posted about the little house where my first memories live here, and there’s an old photograph of it here:

The house itself (ours was the one on the left on this picture) was built of brick but to the left hand side you can just see a stone wall. The two cottages were demolished some time ago, along with Pendower School which was behind them as viewed from the picture. The whole area has now been covered with new houses, but for some reason they left the stone wall. I hopped out of the car to take a couple of pictures, as this is all that remains of the first place I can remember living. These were both taken from Ferguson’s Lane, which is immediately behind the stone wall I mentioned earlier, i.e. to the left of the two cottages in the old photograph.

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In the second picture you can see the filled in outlines of the door which led to our backyard (on the right) and (on the left) the holes through which the coalman used to deliver the coal that was the only form of heating in the house. There was no central heating and no heating at all upstairs, incidentally, so we had very cold bedrooms in winter!

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Back in the ‘Diff

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on December 27, 2012 by telescoper

Well, I made it back to Cardiff more-or-less in one piece despite the best efforts of Cross Country Trains. The train I took from Newcastle was three carriages shorter than expected, so my reserved seat was in a carriage that didn’t exist. Obviously not many people travel at Christmas so they thought they didn’t need a full size train. I had decided to treat myself to a First Class ticket to make the long journey to Newcastle and back as pleasurable as possible, but I ended up having to scramble for a seat in second class. By the time we reached Darlington it was standing room only throughout the train, including First Class, and each station stop took ages as scores of travellers tried to board the already packed carriages.

The train was 45 minutes late into Birmingham, but the connecting train from there to Cardiff was also delayed so I managed to catch it. However, never willing to let any cloud show its silver lining, Cross Country Trains decided to terminate the Cardiff train at Newport so I had to scramble again onto another train with a host of similarly disgruntled passengers. You might have thought they would have tried their best to help their customers out on a day that the whole railway network has been in chaos, but no.

Anyway, I got home only an hour late so perhaps shouldn’t complain too much. Expectations must be kept low when travelling on the British railway network. At least I got a lovely view along the Severn in the late afternoon as the train headed towards Newport…

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It’s nice to be home. I think I’ll chill out this evening and defer writing my claim for compensation until tomorrow!

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What’s Your Lecture Face?

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , on December 19, 2012 by telescoper

I was thinking the other day – it doesn’t happen that often so I try to make the most of it when it does – about what a strange situation it is when someone stands up in front of a bunch of students and lectures at them for an hour. In the course module I’ve just finished teaching I’ve had the best part of a 100 people watching, and occasionally listening to, me drone on about something or other. What’s strange is that all those people see basically the same thing, whereas the lecturer gets to see all those different facial expressions. I wonder if the students are even aware that each one has a characteristic lecture face?

I’m one of those people who finds it very difficult to give a lecture without looking at the audience. It’s partly to try to establish some kind of rapport with them, notably in order to encourage them to answer when I ask a question or to offer questions of their own, but also to try to figure out whether anyone at all is following what I’m saying. Not all students are helpful in this regard, but some have very responsive mannerisms, nodding when they understand and frowning when they don’t. When I’m teaching a class for the first time I usually look around a lot in an attempt to identify those students who are likely to help me gauge how well things are going. Usually,  there are only a few barometers like this but I would be lost without them. Fortunately most students seem to sit in the same place in the theatre for each lecture so you can usually locate the useful ones fairly easily, with a discreet look around before you  start.

Most other students seem to have a default lecture face.  The expressions range from a perpetual scowl to a vacant smile (each of which is in its own way a bit scary). There’s the “wish I wasn’t here” face of pure boredom,  not to mention those who are fast asleep; I don’t mind them as long as they don’t snore. There’s the Bookface of someone who’s not listening but messing around on Facebook, and the inscrutable ones whose faces are masks yielding no clues as to what, if anything, is going on behind. The brightest students often seem to belong to the last group, although I haven’t done a statistical study of this so that must be taken as purely anecdotal.

Anyway, I feel a Christmas Poll coming on. Please participate if you can be bothered. If you don’t know what your own lecture face is, then you could always ask….

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Passo del Tonale Winter School 2012

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews with tags , , on December 18, 2012 by telescoper

I’m having a restful morning at home because (a) it was our Departmental Christmas Lunch yesterday meaning that I’m feeling a bit fragile and (b) there’s a planned electrical shutdown in our building this morning meaning that there’s not much point going in until it’s all back up anyway.

Anyway, since various people made the odd facetious comment accusing me of skiving off last week, I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect a little on the Winter School that I was lecturing at last week. This took place at Passo del Tonale, in the Italian Alps and was the Sixth in a series of schools for graduate students and postdocs held there annually. When I was invited to take part, I was asked to give five lectures as a sort of overview of the current state of cosmology. Subsequently one of the other speakers dropped out so instead of inviting a replacement, the remaining four were given an extra lecture each. Then one of those was taken ill during the summer school so I stepped in at short notice to give another one. And so it came to pass that I gave seven lectures altogether, in the space of five days. That’s considerably more lecturing than I would have done had I stayed in Cardiff.

Anyway, here’s a picture of me during one of the lectures (taken by one of the participants, Chris Crowe).

Tonale

Afternoons were kept free for skiing and snowboarding, but my dodgy knees don’t allow me to participate in such activities. I am not shap’d for sportive tricks nor made to court an amorous looking-glass. I had lectures to prepare anyway.

However the hosts looked after us well and there was a fine conference dinner on Wednesday evening,

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the main course featuring a roast pig brought into the room by the chefs with some aplomb:

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Everything was eaten. I was given the honour of having one of the ears, in fact. A bit chewy, but quite tasty in case you were wondering. I don’t know what the vegetarians did.

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Anyway, at the end of the school the lecturers were presented with bottles of fine Grappa. I’ll no doubt be sampling mine over the Christmas vacation!

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Back to “Civilization”….

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on December 15, 2012 by telescoper

Time for a quick post this evening now that I’m back in Blighty. I’ve spent the last week in Passo del Tornale in the Italian Alps giving some lectures at the 2012 Transregio Winter School in Cosmology, of which (perhaps) more anon. I was in fact a day late getting home because British Airways decided to cancel the flight on which I was booked (from Verona to London Gatwick) yesterday. I’m not sure whether it was to do with the fact that it was snowing pretty heavily, or that the flight was under-booked and they couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, BA at least sent a text message while I was still on the train from Trento to Verona and I was able to re-book to 10.30am today straight away by phone. Rather than get grumpy about being delayed for a day I decided to make the best of it, there being many worse places in the world than Verona to be stranded after all. So, having found a nice hotel, I went off with two others from the meeting who had been similarly inconvenienced for a stroll around the city, which looked very atmospheric in the slush that was developing as the snow turned to rain. Here is the famous Arena di Verona as I snapped it with my Blackberry:

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And here is the even more famous, at least for people who’ve heard of Shakespeare, but somewhat less impressive Casa di Giulietta.

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What light from yonder window breaks? Actually it’s a floodlamp.

After that we had a warming glass of vin brulé (mulled wine) in the Piazza delle Erbe before finding a rather posh Trattoria and having a sumptuous meal, accompanied by a bottle of excellent (and rather expensive) Amarone. What the hell, it’s Christmas, and anyway when in Rome….

Anyway, a good night’s sleep followed and the second attempt to get home worked out very well: flight on time, train connections fine, no problems with the house when I got home (apart from the fact that my cable TV seems to have packed in), and it’s a lot warmer here than it was where I’ve been for the past week. Buying today’s Independent at Reading station, in between trains, I discovered that I’ve won the crossword prize again. Dictionary No. 10 should be here before Xmas.

It’s nice to be home.

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My Last Cardiff Lecture

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 7, 2012 by telescoper

Hey ho.

This morning, as usual for a Friday, the alarm went off at 6am and I started the slow process of getting my brain in gear for a two-hour 9am lecture. As usual, by the start of the lecture I was still trying to wake up, but I at least managed to get through the performance  making only  finite number of errors.

The topic for day was Fourier series, and especially how to use them to solve interesting partial differential equations. The one I chose to illustrate the general method of separation of variables was the heat conduction equation, appropriately enough because Joseph Fourier, the man himself, developed the idea of using   trigonometric functions to represent other functions in order to solve that equation; he presented the method in his book Théorie analytique de la chaleur way back in 1822.

During the lecture I also had to distribute another bunch of questionnaires to the students to allow them to give constructive feedback vent their spleen at my incompetence and lack of organization. We already had one set of questionnaires halfway through the term, so I’m not sure why we need another one. Perhaps the students gave the wrong answers to the questions last time, so this is like a resit?

When it was all over, and I returned to my office to recover,  I suddenly realised that it was my last Cardiff lecture ever. (There is in fact another week remaining before the Christmas break, but I’m away next week and a colleague will fill in for me. ) In fact, it might have been my last undergraduate lecture ever, as I’m not sure how much time I’ll get for actual teaching when I move to my new job in the New Year. I think I’ll miss it, actually, but I’m not sure the students will!

Still, at least I get to set my alarm to a more sensible time from now on.

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Passenger Action

Posted in Biographical with tags , on December 4, 2012 by telescoper

I made it  to Brighton last night, safe and well and in good time. It seems the flooding was finally fixed early yesterday morning and my train was neither delayed nor re-routed. I even got here in time for dinner. Having a look at facebook while I was on the train I saw a friend of mine had posted a story from the Independent about suicides on the railways, which are sadly on the increase, and the cold and unsympathetic response they often receive from the travelling public.

A few years ago when I was external examiner, I was on a train from Nottingham to Cambridge going to an examiners meeting at the University of Cambridge. I had a window seat near the front of the carriage on the right hand side. Just outside Peterborough, the train was on a curved stretch of track so I could see the line in front of us. There was a level crossing with the barriers down and cars waiting either side. I could see quite clearly a female figure standing in the middle of the crossing but as the train got closer to her she vanished from view, obscured by the train. I heard the train’s warning signal and, seconds later, the driver shouted out “Oh No..”.

There was a horrible thump and the train lurched as it travelled over something that had gone underneath. The gruesome sound of a human body being sliced apart by metal wheels is something I’ll never forget. The train came to a halt, and the driver opened the door to his compartment. I could see that blood had sprayed over the front window. The poor driver looked like a ghost. He sat down, shocked. He said that when he sounded the alarm the lady had turned and walked along the track towards the train. She looked directly into his eyes as the train hit her.

Eventually, perhaps an hour later, transport police and an ambulance arrived at the scene and a replacement driver was brought to us; train drivers can never carry on after such an event.  Some even have to quit the job. A police chaplain came too. The police and ambulance people collected the remains, made measurements, interviewed various people who had seen what happened and declared it a suicide. We moved to the next station, March, and got off onto the platform, the front of the train quickly hidden from us by a large piece of white canvas.

There had been time for the transport policemen to talk to the passengers who were all, like me, rattled by the experience. They (the police) had been through this all before, they said. That particular level crossing was  a place people came to specifically for that reason. Nobody could say why there and not somewhere else. Apparently it’s the same on the London Underground. Some stations have many suicides of people jumping in front of trains, others virtually none. Who can say why.

Suicides are not as rare as you might think. In the United Kingdom each year about one person in ten thousand takes their own life; we’re actually quite a long way down the league table for suicide rates. Men are about three times as likely to do it as women. My cousin Gary did it a few years ago. There are several per week just at railway stations or on railway lines across the United Kingdom, adding up to over 200 per year.

When I was told these facts I was completely shocked. It has never crossed my mind to take my own life, especially not in a way that seems designed to cause other people suffering too. And I’m not talking about the inconvenience of being delayed. Meetings can always be rearranged, plans can be altered. I mean the anguish such events cause to people who care about their fellow human beings, even strangers. Nobody really understands another person’s pain, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. If we don’t then do we really have the right to call ourselves human?

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Taken at the flood

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on December 3, 2012 by telescoper

I find myself in the unusual situation of having lunch at home on a working Monday. This is because I have to travel down to Brighton this evening for some Sussex business tomorrow. Not wanting to carry all my stuff into work and thence to the station I decided to plan on coming home for a bite to eat before setting out on the journey.

Normally the journey from Cardiff to Brighton would be expected to take about four hours via London, but there’s been a lot of disruption to the trains recently owing to flooding that occurred after a period of heavy rain about 10 days ago. In fact the area, between Bristol Parkway and Swindon, that flooded this time seems to do so regularly, each time catching Network Rail Notwork Fail completely by surprise. Why has this localised flooding taken so long to fix? I have no idea. I’m no engineer, but I would have thought it should be possible to do something about a problem so well known. But that never seems to happen, and the system is thrown into chaos nearly every time it rains, with trains having to be re-routed or cancelled in shambolic fashion. We are however getting a bigger station at Reading, which apparently means that more trains can be run into and out of London. Until the line floods again.

Anyway, I’m taking no chances and setting out early. If I am to endure a scenic diversion via Bath at least I’ll have plenty to do: coursework to mark, stuff to read, and papers to revise. Wish me luck. I think I’ll need it.

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To my own correspondents…

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on November 26, 2012 by telescoper

So. Today I finally finished a stack of things I should have done weeks ago, including compiling the teaching timetable for next semester (when I won’t even be here) Anyway, that means I can now move onto the next stack of things that I should also have done weeks ago, after I’ve finished marking the batch of 100 second-year coursework scripts sitting on my desk. There’s no rest for the <insert appropriate adjective>.

Anyway, it’s now just a couple of months before I shuffle off the coil of Cardiff, and the enormity of the impending move becomes more apparent every time I go into my office and observe the quantity of books and papers filling the groaning shelves. Today, however, I made a decision that will make moving simpler: I decided to ditch all the drawer-loads of correspondence marked “Other”, i.e. all the unsolicited letters and manuscripts I’ve accumulated over the years about “alternative” theories of cosmology and whatnot. Here’s an example:

I can’t really make head nor tail of this one, but sometimes have a vague feeling that it might just be a sort of cosmic Rosetta Stone, offering up the Secrets of the Universe in diverse languages. Sadly, however, it’s more likely that the languages involved are Balderdash, Gibberish and Gobbledegook.

I regret to announce, therefore, that the plethora of papers telling me why Einstein was wrong, how the Universe is really in the shape of a spiral, how the Great Pyramid of Giza explains the Higgs Boson, and why the Big Bang couldn’t have happened, will have to go to the Great Shredder in the Sky (if that’s where it is).

Anyway, to all my correspondents all I can say is that I’ve enjoyed reading your letters – you must be very fond of your old typewriters – and I’m grateful for the time you took to draw the diagrams by hand in so many lovely colours. And I’m impressed by your qualifications as Electrical Engineers. Really. I’m sorry I didn’t reply to you all individually, but I just didn’t have the time. And now it pains me to realise I don’t have the space either…

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