AO.COM... Yes, a review of a website for you all, this lot have a real mixed experience for you, my experience went from being quite happy with my purchase to utterly and totally dismayed by them, so much so that I ended up having to call them and threaten them with a cease and desist order.

Lets explain, Monday our tumble drier died, Tuesday the house was getting over run with washing drying, so Wednesday the wife asked me to sort a new drier... We're strapped for cash, so cheap cheap, was the order of the day, I checked Coop Electrical, and they had a drier, but you had to pay delivery and it'd take a few days, and we have the estate agent coming... yadda yadda yadda...

So I looked elsewhere, and remembered a TV advert for "AO, Lets go"... bringing their site up, same drier, same price, free next day delivery... bargain?>!?!... I ordered, and at the end of my ordering process it asked me to update whether I wanted to be contacted with offers, and I declined.

However, I had set all the contact details, the email, the mobile number to my wife...

Next thing I know she calls me, "Who are these AO that keep calling?"... Oh, I thought maybe they were trying to arrange the delivery...

No! They were telemarketing, trying to sell the wife cover for £2 a month or week or something for the drier, the drier which a) had not even arrived yet and b) she knew nothing about and c) which I had declined contact on.

So I sent them a nice e-mail asking them to stop... because by then the office was closed, but they kept on calling, 16 calls later and the guy was pestering my wife, she said he was pleasent enough, but when she said "I am sorry, I do not do anything with the bank, I can not set up, and do not want to set up any payments for protection" the guy said... "Go find a bank statement, the husband won't want to miss this offer, get the bank statement and read me the numbers, I'll set it all up my end"!!!

THE FUCKING CHEEK OF THAT!

I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and the pressure it was putting on my wife, you must understand she suffers anxiety, social anxiety, that I've even got her to answer the phone is a big thing, but to have this arsehole calling and hassling her was totally unacceptable.

So, come Thursday lunch the calls not abating I asked the wife to read me the number and I called them, and I got this gal, now she was not the one calling, and I said it's not her fault personnally, but it is the fault of the company, she took my info and appologised.

Meanwhile the drier was delivered and my wife asked the driver about the calls, "Oh christ" he says "the number of complaints they have".

Pressure sales, pushing and pestering, pissed me off... And it seems they're more than aware of it, bunch of wankers.

I'll never be buying from them again, and I'm pretty sure if you read this you should take my sage advice and avoid them too.  Coop Electrical, just as good, zero hassle, and we've had fridges and driers and washers from them before.

We will never be buying from AO again!

Also of interest, I used the wifes e-mail, yet just after browsing their site I was receiving junk mail in my inbox... "You've left something in your basket"... HOW THE HELL DID THAT SITE GET MY E-MAIL?... Clearly through accessing data on my machine, cookies most likely, but... That's against EU law, they've just passed a law saying that sites using cookies must inform you they're doing so... The AO site did no such thing, I got spammed, and when I hit unsubscribe you get someone dressed in a badger on the site giving you gip, it's all just not very funny after the pertubation of bullshit they've put us through, over buying one drier, once...

NEVER AGAIN, AVOID THEM!

Dark for a Fortnight

Right folks, I'm going to see you all soon...

I'm about to go around the Darkside, and I'm sorely tempted to quote something from Apollo 8... Going behind the moon and bricking it in the radio darkness of that lonely place.

The reason is, we're about to move, so the home internet is going dark on the 1st, but we're packing everything up, so I'm packing all my home office up and storing things safe for the move - I am taking all the PC kit in my car with me - the wife can run behind like, riding two sauce pans on a bit of rope... Just so long as my PC is safe.

So, I'm not going to speak on here beyond maybe Thursday - from work - as things come together.

I've already told the wife the kit is going back up in the dining room until the outside ManLab work is done, but basically the ManLab work begins after the move is done... I got three different people advising me already... I might just let them do it, if they don't want to charge.

The plan has however run into one BIG problem, the roof has to go its asbestos... But this is a dirty war kind of situation, I got to clean it up and get it out... I've had warnings about it going to landfill and needing permissions, or paying £4000 to get rid... But then I've also had warning to double and triple and quadruple wrap the stuff...

They pulled my old Junior school down as it was full of asbestos... And wankers ruined the buildings.

It's like... ARGH I hate this.

Banking, Maria DB and Panzer!

I have already briefly blogged about the identity thing with a certain bank, well the irony continues.

The DVLA identification I need to update my drivers licence is all the stuff the bank just turned down, so when I send all this valid, correct identification to the DVLA to get my licence, and then send the license onto the bank... I'll basically  have been chasing myself around in circles and wasting time...

Its all rather annoying.

In other news I'm moving forward on my personal project to create a game, and to host my world I'm setting up a persistent server, I had done a bunch of preliminary work on this in MySQL, but I've decided to go with Maria DB instead.  So I'm going to be putting together the basic "how to register" an account PHP & database.  Then I'll be linking to that with C (well C++).

I've got a login-server which will then pass them onto the hosted game world server.

On the very small scale I'm at, with just a few test accounts concurrently connected, I've got these various servers hosted on my beefy desktop PC as a series of Virtual machines, and I'm connected into it over the wireless and my wired hub from two laptops (and the Raspberry Pi).

And now onto Panzers, specifically Girlz Und Panzer... I found a playing of the first episode... and I've taken a look, before I order the DVD... Nop over to "Daily Motion" folks and search.

Its completely mental, absolutely mental, but that's Japan for you... (And I speak from experience, Oss).

The other "tankery" issue was my edict to only play TD's... it worked a treat, I earned over 1,000,000 credits, did my 15 mission wins in random games, got lots of fun... My Stug III went from a pooting 46% win rate to 49%.  And I generally had a damn good time.

However, come Monday a new mission arrived, "Flank them"... where you earn a gun laying drive (500,000 credits worth) for getting 15 wins in random missions in a TD from the list... Of course this swamped the Match Making with dozens of bloody Tank Destroyers.

In one game there were 7 Stugs, 4 Hellcats, 2 Hetzers and a T80... it was mental... No tank could move, no-one could breath, let alone play!  So, tho my plan for the weekend was ace fun, when that mission came out it ruined it.

I'm also still not enjoying the Tiger II at all, I just die... and die hard.  I'm clearly doing something wrong, but I can't place what I'm doing that's so bad.  I kind of wish my commander had sixth sense, but my performance is so bad they've only got 30% of their selected skill trained - and I didn't even pick Sixth Sense first for him as its a 100% kick-in.... Hey ho.  I'll figure that out.

Oh, whilst watching this video on Daily Motion, I notice that the ad-blocker count is already at 101 adverts... That's as compared to YouTube where you get 2 per page... 101 adverts!