In short, it was fantastic - the cast, staging, and music worked brilliantly together. I highly recommend you go and see it if you get the chance (it won about a billion Tonys too).

The only complaint I had was that I felt the homosexual awakening of two of the characters was played more for laughs than tenderness - camp rather than dangerous boundary crossing (in 1890s germany…) A lot of that seemed to come from the audience, who laughed at the kinds of teenage awkardnesses that were received as poignant when it was the (straight) leads discovering each other.

That said, it brought real depth to its exploration of all the other issues it dealt with, and its frankness, and wit, was really refreshing. You really should go and see it.

But, there’s this thing I’ve been attempting to build in my spare time that I haven’t been able to, because my spare time isn’t nearly as spare as they needed.

So, I’m leaving my job at the BBC to pursue it. I finish in mid-August, after which I’ll be working half-time on the project. The other half, I hope, will be spent gainfully employed with freelance work. (Perhaps for you, dear reader.)

And I’m looking forward to building, announcing, and releasing the project like you wouldn’t believe. Seriously. This is going to be so much fun.

On the writing things of interest front, there is no time. Maybe when the DIY is finished. Just possibly before (but, let’s face it, that’s not very likely).

So far, we’ve booked 4 appointments, through British Gas, for an engineer to come and reset our meter. On three of those occasions the engineer has simply failed to show. On the last occasion, British Gas told us that the visit was booked at one time, but actually booked it at a different time, so we received a confused phone call from an engineer who was several hours early. (We were out, incidentally, hurrying round to get stuff done so we could spend the entire afternoon and early evening waiting for an engineer.)

Most irritating is that, several times now, the British Gas staff claim that this isn’t their fault. There’s nothing they can do except book another appointment in a very vague time slot.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the problem of dealing with problematic third parties as much as the next employee of a large corporation, but there’s no way I’d ever tell a customer that the behaviour of a third party supplier the customer never dealt with directly was not my fault.

If the third party fails to do what they said, and that causes problems for the service I provide to a customer then that’s my fault. Saying it’s not my fault is like saying that the customer’s service is provided on a best-efforts basis, but we don’t really care if it goes wrong, and you’ll still have to pay us. It’s also like claiming that my relationship with the supplier is beyond my control: that I am incapable of managing that relationship properly.

British Gas claim that they cannot book visits from engineers into anything more accurate than a half-day slot. Since I have now booked a day and a half of holiday in order to wait for an engineer who has never shown, this is no longer acceptable: If I’m going to wait, it’s going to be for fifteen or thirty minutes. They’ve had their shot at coming at a time convenient for them.

Since the first-line customer support people claim that they cannot do any better, I have asked to speak to their supervisor. They claim that their supervisor cannot take phone calls, but will call me back (within four hours). This has happened three times now, and I have never been called back.

When we moved in, the meter was already in emergency credit, the special spare £10 of credit for situations exactly like ours. There is now £0.40 left. We have already had to shut off the central heating and I expect the gas supply to cut out today or tomorrow morning.

When I demanded to speak to a supervisor today, saying that I wouldn’t accept a call back and would continue to speak to the customer service person until I did, the customer service person went away (to talk to their supervisor, perhaps?) and told me that they could not do that, and then hung up the phone.

I not sure quite how this qualifies as customer service.

I haven’t been a British Gas customer for several years now, and, if this is how they treat their customers, I doubt I ever will be again. If you’re a customer, I’d think about switching. After all, if you’re left without heating you probably want to deal with a company capable of solving the problem.

Update: Possibly ironic, certainly not funny

A man named Joe Dyer has his signature at the bottom of our British Gas welcome letter, and gave this presentation. Here’s a choice quote:

Some of you may ask what the difference is between ownership and accountability, and empowerment. It seems like the same thing. Actually, it is vastly different, because with empowerment comes a significant amount of accountability, because one cannot hang one’s hat on “I obeyed this rule and followed that escalation process”. The ownership and accountability will rest at the point of contact to deliver the results. We will be talking about that, and it is about doing the right thing. It is about leveraging knowledge and a deeply caring culture to execute at the first point of contact, resolve the customer problem, and deliver the customer value, which, ultimately, drives the shareholder value.

The single most recurring phrase I’ve heard from British Gas customer service people is that they can’t, either because ‘the system’ won’t let them, or because it’s to do with National Grid, and therefore beyond their control. Way to go, Joe.

Incidentally, there are two phone lines to call if you’re a British Gas customer, one for monthly billed (credit) meters and one for those of us saddled with pre-payment meters. Just as an experiment I called both numbers at the same time (just after 5.30pm this evening) and was answered on the credit meter line in ten minutes, and the pre-payment line in forty minutes. I must say that I’m beginning to feel like a second-class customer.

The competition is split by region and age, and Clare’s cousin Zoe is the London area winner for ages 9-13! How cool is that! (It’s very cool, in case you were wondering.) It’s now up to the public to vote for overall winners in each of the age categories. So, everyone should head over to the vote page and vote for the best doodle. Clearly, in the 9-13 age category that’s Zoe’s entry (for London). Not that I’m biased or anything.

The vote closes on 15 October, so get voting!

A bearing (or something like one - the sleeve maybe) in the server’s case fan had seized and the internal temperature reading said 70 degrees celsius. The server was shut down, but the next morning I started it up again to see what happened. The temperature rose high again, so I shut it down over ssh from work.

Alas, the server did not power itself off, and even though the system was totally idle it remained hot.

Suffice it to say that the machine didn’t come up when I tried to boot it the next time.

The moral of the story is fourfold.

1. DIY server cabinets which don’t contain servers that can power off remotely are a bad idea. There’s no sysadmin to run into the room and pull the plug at home while you’re at work.
2. Always keep a spare fan lying around if that single fan is all that separates your server from self-inflicted heat stroke.
3. Don’t have a headless server hanging around without a monitor you can connect it to in an emergency. We only have a DVI monitor, and I’d been unable to find and buy the DVI adapter daughterboard for my EPIA PD-6000E, so I had to take the box to work to get console access! Very dumb.
4. If its fan’s bust and you don’t have a replacement, just leave the damn thing switched off.

We were without a mail server for a week, and mail service is now provided by a proper server in a proper server room. (Thank you, Bytemark.) Reports from friends, and mail volume, suggest that maybe the backup MX didn’t store and forward like it ought, so any mail sent to me between 15 and 22 September may well have just bounced hard. Please resend if it was important.

I’m hoping to post photos from Greenbelt and Suffolk to Flickr soon, but I’m trying to figure out a decent Canon RAW to Flickr workflow, since iPhoto seems to randomly turn RAWs into JPEGs, it looks like I’m going to have to ditch it in favour of something else. All suggestions gratefully received.