They're pretty much the same as others of that kind. How long do I cook them? The
instructions say 6-8 minutes! I was expecting more like 2 or 3. OK, separate them, not an
easy job, especially since they state a serving size of 50 g, so the packet (375 g) contains
7½ servings:
Reading my news this morning, discovered this SMS message, sent yesterday at 9:20:
Hi Greg, Unfortunately, there was a technical glitch with your Web Order: 162882951, your
order has since been cancelled and a refund is in progress. Please allow up to 3-5
business days for the funds to reflect back into your original payment method. We
apologise for the inconvenience this may cause.
What's wrong with this?
This was the first time I had seen the order number.
It was sent about 2 hours before I contacted their customer support. And customer
support knew nothing about the situation.
It was sent as an SMS only. In fact, I have not received a single email message
from them. Why?
It's breach of contract. “We made a mess of things. We give up. We won't deliver”.
This is particularly annoying in view of the fact that this was a special price valid
until the end of the month at the latest, and possibly not repeatable.
Contacted their customer support again demanding that they honour their contract. No hope,
of course:
Stefan: I am sorry the order failed to process into our system, it was cancelled
and we can't fix it
Me: I insist that you fix it!
Stefan: I apologise, the order was rejected by the system there was a technical
error with it. There is nothing we can do to fix it.
Me: You must! Cancelling the order is breach of contract.
Stefan: Thanks for chatting to us today. Have a great day!
Stefan: Thanks for reaching out to The Good Guys!
Terms and conditions? Breach of contract is breach of contract, and Australian consumer law
prohibits their action. But for the sake of completeness, followed the link, which was
broken (no anchor orders; it was 6-orders. The closest I got was:
6.11. The internet can be an unstable and sometimes insecure marketplace. At times the
facility to place Orders may not be available, your Order might not be received, your
Order may be lost or misdirected, or your Order might be delayed due to issues with the
Website beyond the reasonable control of TGG.
But nothing that they claim gives them the right to unilaterally cancel a paid order.
So what do I do? Called up the Good Guys in Ballarat and spoke to Daniel. Yes, he has two
in stock and can match the (ostensibly “online only”) price. But I need to pay before he
will reserve one. Wait for—wait for it—an SMS with payment details. OK, wait for half an
hour for the SMS and pay, again with PayPal. And yes, a confirmation that it had been paid. Into town and picked it up.
I needed to get the invoice in-store (why?), which was easy enough: just give my phone
number as identification. What kind of security is that?
How do I install the new dishwasher? In principle it's simple: slide it into place, connect
up feed hose, drain hose and power. But last time we had the devil's own job, and today I quickly came to the conclusion that
we would have to get Brett Younger to come and do the work. And he can't come until Friday,
as arranged.
But later he sent me—an SMS, saying
that he might be able to make it tomorrow. OK, let's do that. Any time. Just give us a
bit of warning.
As promised, Brett Younger showed up today to install the new dishwasher, just as we were
about to prepare breakfast. Why didn't he tell me when he was coming, as arranged? Oh, he
did: he sent me an SMS ¾ hour
before.
Should only take about 10 minutes, right? Wrong. It took him nearly an hour. Admittedly
he put it in more tidily than I would have done, but I was still surprised.
And when it was done, the thing wouldn't work. After some concerns about DOA, it seems that
this particular model takes a long time to wake up the first time it is used. After that,
all seems to be normal.
First time use was easy enough, though I still need to work out how to load the thing. To
my surprise, the “Auto” setting took over 3 hours, much longer than the other machines. And
in passing I discovered that not only does the machine have a setting 0 for water
hardness, it was set that way when I got it. Other machines have always insisted that the
water has some residual hardness, which is not the case with rain water.
And how does “Extra Dry” work? Not worse than the other machines, but also not completely
dry. The Bosch is better than the Whirlpool, and this seems better than the Bosch, but in
each case glasses and bowls in the top shelf retain water and need to be dried with a tea
towel, so there seems to be little advantage in more drying.
Security is important of course, especially on the Internet where so few people really
understand what's going on. But current methods are just plain ridiculous. I hate
CAPTCHAs with a vengeance, and I
suspect that my refusal to fill one out confused The Good Guys' computer system, and maybe that's
why I haven't received a single email from them during the entire fiasco.
But is it necessary? Yesterday I went in to the Ballarat shop and had to pick up an
invoice that they could more easily have sent to me by email. And the only identification
they wanted was a phone number. Anybody could have picked it up.
Somewhere in between is the question of multi-factor
authentication, typically a message sent to your mobile phone. That can work, though
it's irritating. But what if you have initiated the transaction from the same phone? I've
seen a couple of cases like that, and under those circumstances it has no use whatsoever. I
wonder what security will be like in 10 years' time.
Another pain is SMS. It should no
longer exist. It grew up in the early days of digital phones, where phones and Internet had
nothing to do with each other, and to enter text you had to use the numeric (only) keypad
with multiple presses per letter. Now every phone has Internet standard email, but not only do people not use it,
there seems to be an insurmountable barrier between the two.
Of course, neither SMS nor email are appropriate when you want to contact somebody quickly
and be sure that they get the message. There phone calls are more appropriate, as would
have been this morning when Brett contacted me. But for some reason (maybe difficulty in
using the app) voice calls seem to be decreasing. I just can't understand how anybody can
go through the pain of a glass keyboard for a quick message.
In passing, The Good Guys' sent their
cancellation message by SMS, and it took me a day to find it. If I hadn't found it today,
things would have been very different: instead of $733, they are asking $999, fully $266 or
36% more than I paid. That would certainly have been worth a breach of contract complaint.
How do you restore old photos? Both Affinity and ACDSee offer functionality to do it. But there are no
tutorials to back it up, and my attempts have been less than successful.
Oh. I had never heard of it. Out to take a look, and yes, it seems to offer just what I
want. Download the trial version, which at least allowed me to rotate images and change
their exposure. But to use the features for which it's intended, I have to buy the product!
OK, it's only (US) $39.20 for a lifetime license for the PRO version. I can do that.
But I ended up paying $7.45 more: they had decided that I was in Germany (why? Do they have
outdated geolocation software?) and charged me 19% EU GST. Sent their support line a message, but
got no response.
Trying it out was almost intuitive,
and with little effort I was able to restore some old photos. Here a couple taken in late
1957:
On the whole, things look a whole lot better, but there are plenty of artefacts that appear
to have been inserted where it couldn't work out what to do, like on my left foot here:
And the aspect ratio seems to change. Maybe there's a way round that. After all, I spent
very little effort to get these results. It also offers other things, like colouring old
photos, and that could be interesting.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
