MaW’s Blog

Congratulations to my colleague Simon Moir and his wife, who are celebrating the birth of their first child. Isla arrived early this morning and pictures show that she’s absolutely adorable.

Have ideas for writing more stuff. This is good. Read some articles; these are better.

The Turkey City Lexicon and How to Write Truly Awful Fantasy

Not so much tips on what to do as what not to do, which on the whole is probably more useful.

Just got back from seeing Katie Melua at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. It’s not the best venue in the world for such things, seeing as how the accoustics are fairly awful and the seats are really not made for anybody vaguely human-shaped, let alone someone with as much leg as I’ve got, but nonetheless the performance was excellent and I had a fantastic time — what my bottom thinks about the whole affair is moderately irrelevant, really.

After a very mediocre support act who’s name I forgot before he even finished his first song (probably because he was mumbling), there was an interval, then the lights dimmed and the voice rang out “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Katie Melua.”

Needless to say the applause was thunderous as Katie walked on stage, selected a guitar, lit a candle and settled upon a stool for a beautiful rendition of ‘Faraway Voice’. Then the band appeared, Katie said a few words and they performed ‘Call Off The Search’ — new single released tomorrow, as she was so careful to remind us! The third song was ‘Crawling Up A Hill’ which is good on the album but better live, and she’d applied s/London/Cambridge/g to the lyrics, which must be a pain if she’s performing somewhere that doesn’t have a two-syllable name or abbreviation.

Other highlights of the evening included ‘Spider’s Web’, which she said will probably be on her second album, and is definitely one to watch out for, as is another new song the title of which I can’t remember. She also sang the B sides from ‘Closest Thing To Crazy’ which I’ve not heard before as I didn’t buy the single and they’re not on the album. They’re good though, especially the second one she did, ‘Down The Stairs To The Sun’.

‘Belfast (Penguins and Cats)’ was introduced with a short speech about why she wrote it after she moved to England from Belfast and realised the perceptions people had of it because of the Troubles… what she said about what it’s really like there and what the song’s about really made a lot of sense, and ties in very well with what I felt and saw and heard when I was over there late last year. Actually, it more or less makes me want to go back again!

‘Closest Thing To Crazy’ itself, ostensibly the last song of the set, was extremely well-received and ultimately a perfect finish to the set — apart from the two encore songs, which were absolutely fantastic, and gave the band a chance to show off outrageously. It seems just that such a talented singer is backed up by such talented musicians — including her manager and producer, who plays the piano extremely well.

So unfortunately the concert had to end, but my bottom wasn’t responding to pings anymore, so perhaps that was a good thing. It’s only on about 25% packet loss now, so hopefully I’ll have it all back by morning.

Oh, and in other news today I attended the Cambridge Pagan Conference, which was really rather good. What with the decorating of my room (photos to follow some time during the week), this has been an unusual but good weekend.

Bouncing a TrackBack back to Alex again after he responded to my response to his entry on the subject of a religious experience taking place in, of all places, a church.

Yeah yeah, I know the location’s not a shock.

So Alex had some things to say about the things Carl said in his response to Alex’s entry, and Alex also had some things to say about the things I said in my response to that same entry. Now I have a few things to say about the things Alex said in response to both the aforementioned responses to his original entry.

Gosh I love this, it’s amazing how convoluted the sentences can get when you’ve just got a few levels of TrackBack. Imagine what it’ll be like when we’ve been at this for a few more weeks.

And now to the point.
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I should have blogged about this a while ago, but I was a little distracted with various other things, so I’m going to tell you all about it now. Some of you will already know, but it might be new to some others.

The saga begins some time ago with subscription services being available on SourceForge. Being a regular user of SourceForge’s download services as well as their project hosting for Towel, I decided that what they were asking was very reasonable indeed and coughed up. Especially since it included a free T-shirt from ThinkGeek who make some very cool T-shirts indeed.

So I signed up, got the information to claim the T-shirt, toddled along to ThinkGeek and chose one. If you’re interested, it’s the ‘Will work for bandwidth’ one and it’s lovely.

Of course, the T-shirt didn’t include postage and packing, most especially not to the UK, so I decided to get something else as well, because ThinkGeek have far too much cool stuff. After poking around a bit I settled on a /dev/mug, a most suitable thing to drink out of in an office full of geeks.

All thus ordered, I settled back and waited for it to arrive. Arrive it did, and the T-shirt was indeed wonderful. The mug wasn’t. Instead of deep blue, it was black, and it had a large Megatokyo logo on the side. Clearly it was the wrong mug.

At this point ThinkGeek’s excellent customer services kicked in. Their site provides ready-made scripts to report erroneous orders, so I made use of them and soon they promised to send me a /dev/mug. I assumed I had to send the Megatokyo mug back, and was extremely surprised to discover that they didn’t want it.

Much impressed, I gave the Megatokyo mug to Richard, who likes that sort of thing. I then settled down to wait for the replacement mug to arrive.

Arrive it did, and it was a /dev/mug, but there was still a problem: the printing was faulty, with a nasty smear right across it. I got back on the ThinkGeek site and very apologetically told them what had happened. They requested a return of the /dev/mug, so I took it to the Post Office and sent it off, and waited.

A few days later an e-mail arrived from ThinkGeek. New /dev/mug dispatched (as I had expected). Postage charges refunded.

I stared at that for a while. I hadn’t expected that at all. Was worth grinning about though. Although my experience has left me with some doubts about ThinkGeek’s QA procedures, their customer service simply cannot be faulted.

The new mug came in good time, and is perfect. ThinkGeek may not have made any money at all from me, but they do have a very happy customer. It took longer than it should have done to get one, but they’ve done it. This is how all companies should be.

More power to ThinkGeek.