Sam Davyson

Today I have released some more A2 biology content to complement to Module 4 notes that I currently offer. This time it is Module 5 notes which is the environment section. It is rather timely with the exam in just a few days now. The notes cover all the content that was covered in class in preparation for the module and take up just six sides of A4. I normally like to offer as many formats as is possible but since the notes are just scans there is not much need for alternatives to jpgs. I used the exact same interface that I took from the Module 4 notes and just changed the content because it worked well with Module 4, and of course it saved me a bit of time.

It is likely that this will be the last addition to the A2 section of the site until the exams are all over. Which is now just over a week away. When all is done I do plan to add a lot more items to the site over my long summer off. This will involve the notes for Module 7 along with a load of other new stuff.

Ze Frank is a real gem. Every weekday on “the show” he produces a short video which is uploaded to his site at around 6 pm BST. Yes it’s a videoblog. Whilst it originally focused on news and particularly politics with the growing following of “Sports Racers” that it has collected the content of the shows is becoming ever more diverse, and of course more entertaining. There is still the backdrop of the days events in news but there is also much more wacky activity up front. And he continues to come up with new clever and funny things. He launched an Earth Sandwich contest asking for viewers to lay a piece of bread on the ground (which many did) and to try to organise someone else to lay a piece of bread on the ground simultaneously at the opposite side of the world. Two very devoted fans actually did this with the second piece being laid down in Spain. Ze has asked for the viewers to write an episode using a Wiki which became Fabuloso Friday and is now set to become a regular feature every few weeks or so.

It is so popular that the comments are absolutely wild. Towards the top is just a series of messages saying “Am I first?”. It has been noted by some comment authors that these posts are written before the time required to allow the video to run has elapsed. Ze is continually amusing and almost always has a couple of really funny bits every day. I happen to think that the episode of the 16th June was one of his best ever.

I have been getting a rather large amount of comment spam which tends to waste my time, and clutter my inbox. So I am have installed a quick plugin that will ask you to write 5 characters before posting. This make take you 3 or 4 seconds, but I hope you don’t mind too much. It helps to keep everything clean. As a bonus incentive comments are now posted before moderation by myself, since most spam will be cut off my the captcha test. I am using this plugin.

On the subject of spam I was pointed today to a site that turns spam mail into art on Google Blogoscoped. The picture shows an image that I made with one of the spam messages that I got today. Very nice indeed.

This post is the second in a two part series. The first gave examples of types of emails that can be received about Hotmail closing. It is important that you note all of these are completely bogus. You can see them here.

The first article is now number 1 on Google for [hotmail closure] so awareness is spreading even though the article I would like is still not in place.

I am not a Hotmail user but with lots of friends that are I realised that many people are unaware that letters that claim Hotmail is about to close are totally fake. I found that there was no article in Hotmail’s help facility to indicate this so I wrote to them to get this fixed.

I sent this email on March 4th 2006:

I am currently not a Hotmail User. However I am friends with many people that are and subsequently I get a lot of messages from Hotmail users. I notice than some of these messages are forwards and take roughly the following format:

* Warning! You will have to pay for your hotmail account on 1st October unless you forward this message to 18 of your MSN Passport contacts in the next 24 hours.

People believe this. And they forward it. I wanted to convince a friend of mine that it is not the case that Hotmail would ever need to send messages around via forwards, and that if Hotmail ever needed to contact anyone they could do it easily as they have everyones email addresses. These emails after all often have hundreds of email addresses on and if they fell into a spammers hands could cause problems.

So I searched your help files and couldn’t find a clear statement on the subject. I am therefore requesting that you add an entry to your help about these emails and stress that they are *a* not real and *b* not to be forwarded. It may even be worth adding a link to the hotmail main page to the article like some banks have about fraudalent email circulation.

I for one would like to see this issue resolved. I have saved a copy of this message and I expect a full response from you in the near future.

Many thanks,

Sam Davyson.

And I was pleased to pick up a response just two days later, that included:

Sam, I understand the convenience if this request can be granted and this is why I am going to submit this to our Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for future site improvement and upgrade.

Excellent! I am not exactly sure how it is a “feature request” but all the same it is a response that says that they will do something about it. I wrote back:

I am very pleased to see that you have submitted my request for further review and that it could be added to the system in the future. I am not particularly pleased with the nature of the processing that you detail, as to me when only 1 extra article is being requested to be added to the help section this process should be efficient and take an extremely short period of time. However I am very pleased to see that it is under consideration.

If you could let me know when the help article is question goes live, or when it is rejected as a proposal I would be very grateful.

And on March 7th I got another email:

I have checked with our Hotmail Product Development Team and Christopher already submitted this item for review. I would like to impart that Hotmail Product Development Team might consider this item for future releases.

Please continue sending your feedback or suggestions by clicking on the “Feedback” link located at the lower right part of your Hotmail account.

This is from a different technical helper by the way, and he has missed the fact that I don’t use Hotmail. And has also failed to tell me that I will be emailed when it goes live. So I pressed the point:

Yes, there is one more thing. I would like to be notified when the help article goes live on your website or when you review and reject the proposal. This would be very useful to me as it would save me having to make special visits to continually check the Hotmail Help topics, as Hotmail is not a service that I myself use. You will find an explanation of why I am therefore contacting you in the first email that I sent.

And they agreed:

Yes, we will gladly inform you when your proposal will be added to the Help topic links.

A few days passed. I got another forward. I wrote back to the team to ask why they hadn’t managed to get it up yet. 15 days had gone since my original request. The fourth different Hotmail correspondent wrote back:

Please keep the following rules in mind when receiving and responding to mail that seems to come from Hotmail:

- Hotmail does not forward messages to you (example: “From” line contains “FW”).
- Hotmail never sends you chain letters.

Finally! This was the quote that I was looking for, and it was the sort of text that I wanted them to put on a page for everyone to see. You shouldn’t have to email in 4 times to see this. I asked to speak to someone more senior to start getting things done, since we were coming up to a month since I first emailed.

I ask this time that you refer me to the member of staff immediately your senior. After dealing with three seperate Hotmail representatives with no visible effect, now I would like some action.

They insisted they were working on it:

Sam, we may not be able to commit in providing you an exact date when this article will be added in the Help topic links, I would like you to know that our team are working round the clock to have this article to be added in an acceptable time frame.

Working round the clock! I thought I’d do them a favour and write the article for them. That would say them time. So I did, and I put it at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail and emailed them to tell them.

I understand that production of an article may take time. But the length of time so far taken that is from the 4th March until the present day (almost 1 month) is quite unacceptable in my view. It might be a busy time for you though so I thought I would try to help you out a little.

I have therefore written, formatted, and published (and am now hosting) and article which explains that Hotmail do not send emails by forwards. Obviously I don’t expect you to use it on your site (certainly not in its current state) but it might give you some ideas into how to make your page to explain it.

The address is…

I got a terribly automated response. With no recognition even of my article. But it did say at the top that they normally answer emails within 24 hours, which I found amusing. Since of the six emails I had got from them only 2 had been within this time frame. I wrote an angry response, and got nothing back for over a week. So I wrote again.

If you provide me with an email address I also have lots of feedback about my experience with the customer service team. I would love for you to learn from what I have had to deal with and not make the same errors again. As I say if you pass me an address I will willing send you some information.

No response either. So on the 25th of April I wrote again:

I will be in touch again, from now on I will be writing weekly on a Tuesday evening whether I have a response from you or not. In the case that you do reply I will write back earlier. I remind you that I am keeping a record of all my messages to you and all of your responses.

And nothing again, so 2 months after my initial request I wrote:

I realise that my situation is not improving. I am now writing my tenth email to you. The last three of them have received no response at all. I am not willing to explain the points again if there is no indication that my emails are even being read.

On the 5th of May I got a message including this:

As for your propose article, I will submit this item to our development team as a feature request. We regularly review customer comments and feature requests and use them to plan new Hotmail improvements.

What? This is what I had been told happen 2 months ago! I was not happy. This time I will quote my message in full, since it serves as a nice summary of my dealing with the team.

Jimmy B,

Thank you very much for replying to my message. I can only wonder what happened to my three other messages to you since you last wrote but that is not too much of a problem — at least now you have been back in touch. The fact that this is about 30 times later than your apparent target of a 24 hour turn around which Vendrelli R claimed you “normally” reach (Email Mar 30th) is an irritation of course but I think it is probably more important for you to think about this information and use it to improve your customer service.

In terms of what you said in your message back to me which I have waited for over a month to receive I am totally dissatisfied. Here is why. You start by saying that you have read over the previous emails with the representatives — this is good to hear. However at the end of the email you thank me for using Hotmail and say that I am a valuable customer. I do not use Hotmail. Let me repeat: I do not use Hotmail. If you had read the previous discussion then you would have seen that I stated this particular point four times before on March 4th, 19th, 30th and April 25th. If you have inadvertently lost any emails I will gladly send you copies or you can read them in the quoted text that follows this email.

Ok. That is perhaps a minor quibble that highlights that you didn’t read the contents of my messages with the care that your message might suggest. You then go on to say this:

MSN has been very aggressive and proactive in protecting our more than 170 million users from spam and hoax e-mail. We prevent more than 2 billion messages a day from reaching the inboxes of our users. We protect our users on many levels, from the server to the client.

What is this an advertisement? Why on earth are you telling me how many customers you have? Why would I care how many messages arecaught each day by your systems? What is the relevance of any of this to me? Perhaps if I was a Hotmail user I might find this in some way reassuring, but even then I think I would feel that it was perhaps a little too irrelevant to the matter in hand. Maybe you have this paragraph in your template for responding to requests to your customer service team.

The next paragraph is really what irritated me about the customer service though. It reads:

AS for your propose article, I will submit this item to our development team as a feature request. We regularly review customer comments and feature requests and use them to plan new Hotmail improvements.

Christopher said on March 6th:

Sam, I understand the convenience if this request can be granted and this is why I am going to submit this to our Hotmail Product Development Team as a feature request for future site improvement and upgrade.

And the Christain M said in the next email on March 7th:

I have checked with our Hotmail Product Development Team and Christopher already submitted this item for review. I would like to impart that Hotmail Product Development Team might consider this item for future releases.

Christina said:

This is Christina and I have read your e-mail exchange with the previous support representatives about your proposed article will be added in the Help topic links.

Although the sentence here doesn’t actually make any sense I think it suggests that the article will be added to the help section (that is certainly the implication of its context).

And now, over 2 months since my first email, you decide to tell me that you are going to submit my suggestion to Hotmail product development as a feature request. It has already been submitted. Has it been deleted from your system? Did you get round to reviewing it and decide that it was not worth your whilse in implementing it?

If it has fallen out of your system for this reason then I wonder why I have not been informed. I agreed with Christian N on March 8th that I was to be informed of when a decision was reached. He said:

Yes, we will gladly inform you when your proposal will be added to the Help topic links.

So I am left very confused. What is going on in your support team? Christina tells me you are working around the clock to address issues. I have asked repeatedly to be passed on to a more senior member of staff. This request has never been commented on. I have created the help article for you (and published it) to save you time but this has never been commented on either.

This is now my eleventh email. I am not going to stop. To repeat: I am not going to stop. I think a lot can be gained from my experiences with your customer support team and I recommend that you take some time to review the entire affair. I am not at all satisified at this time.

Please pass this email to someone more senior who will be able to write a message outside the customer support templates. I remind you that I am keeping records of every message that I send and receive relating to this episode.

Yours,

Sam Davyson.

Again a request for someone more senior. And I got back a “subject matter expert”, although I am not sure if they just changed the footer of their message. Anyway the text was much better than the normal messages that I had been getting:

I understand that you are totally not satisfied with what is happening.

Sam we would like you to know that we have taken note of your comment, suggestion and efforts on educating Hotmail users, through the article you published, regarding the hoax messages that are roaming around the Internet.

I apologize but we still cannot give you a definite date when the article be published. We are still in the process of reviewing every comments and suggestions we are getting from customers.

So this is now May 7th. I didn’t write back immediately, and I havent yet since I thought I would give them some room to work with it. In the mean time I published the entire full messages between myself and them online at http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story. There is not much in their extra from what you see in the quotes I have used in this article, but it is just there for reference. I will not give in with this, and I will get back to writing to them shortly. I invite you to also write in to help. Just send this email to Hotmail Support:

Hello,

I am writing because I am concerned about the lack of interest you have given to the point that Sam Davyson has been making on a repeated basis. You have still yet to deliver the requested article.

I therefore worry about my privacy by using the email service that you provide.

I would grateful therefore if you could give me an update on the situation.

Yours,

[ ]

P.S. If you are unfamiliar with the case then please look up case ID SRX1010202287ID or visit http://sam.davyson.com/hotmail/story where you can read about it in full.

I am using the email address: support_x_EN_SY@css.one.microsoft.com, but filling out a form on their site does the same. Let me know in the comments if you do this, and I will be glad to quote any responses on the story page and in later blog posts. Eventually, with enough people doing this, we should get what is needed. Why it takes over 11 emails from me is another question, and one that Hotmail need to ask themselves I think.

In late June I will be updating the Hotmail page, and making it into much more of a campaign, and try to get as many people as possible to email in to tell Hotmail to get their act together on this.

This is the first is a series of articles that I am publishing on this blog to detail in considerable detail what is involved in switching from the Windows platform to using Mac OS X. I will discuss what is different, what is hard to get used to, what I miss, what is better and what I could now never do without. If you have been a regular mac user for some time then this is probably not of interest. I am really targeting people who may be considering a switch and would like to know first hand what the need to be aware of to use Mac OS X. I must admit that I am a new user of the operating system and I do in no way intend to present myself as an expert on the matter. I know very little, but it just happens that I think I know the little bit that is important to Windows switchers, since that is what I am.

Nothing Too Drastic

The first key point that I think needs to be made is that there is nothing drastically different between the two operating systems. What you exclaim? Why is any of this necessary then? Well yes there are differences, millions of them but all in all the basic structure of the way things work is pretty much as you would expect. You have a desktop for instance, and you have a window to browse through your files too like Windows Explorer. Applications appear in windows which are draggable around the screen, just like in Windows. You have a mouse that appears as an arrow on the screen. Right clicking gives more options to the user to preform regular tasks or change settings. There is a control panel like area where user options can be enforced. There is a clock in the corner. Lots of things work just like you’d expect them too. These few things may be consistent in all operating systems, but as a Windows user for life how am I meant to know that. What I mean to say is that in the same way as a Ford and a BMW are both cars and both have tonnes of familiar bits to them, Windows and OS X have lots of similarities. You will not have to rethink the way you use computers.

Lots Different Though

Although there is so much that is near identical in both systems, you are much more likely to notice the many striking differences between the interfaces and the ways of doing things when you run OS X. The interface works differently. There is no start menu to get your programs from. There is this bar across the bottom of the screen instead. There is no place that lists all the open applications like the task bar in Windows, although this bar on the bottom (the Dock) will take up windows when you minimise them. Another huge difference is that when you first start up you will have a blank desktop except for one icon, your hard disk, in the corner. On Windows you are much more used to loading up the computer for the first time to see a smattering of free AOL trials, and other bundled programs or offers. That isn’t to say that you don’t have bundled programs on a Mac. There are plenty. But they don’t appear on the desktop, they are in this dock thing which is always visible so there is no need for them to be on the desktop itself too. There is no recycle bin or equivalent on the desktop either. Instead the trash can is again tied to the dock. And another big difference is that all the menus for your programs don’t appear at the top of their associated windows. Instead they all appear right at the top of the screen. This is a pretty big change and it takes time to get used to. There is also no maximise, a slightly different (and confusing) way to close programs and to top it all off these buttons all appear at the top left hand side of the windows. The opposite to what you’d expect. In dialog boxes the Ok and Cancel appear the other way round with Ok on the right. And there is a prominent search box enlodged in this bar along the top.

They are just a few flavours of the little differences between the systems which hit you first. There is much more to be said about each of them, and I will discuss them in turn as I proceed through this series. Continued soon!

Yes, I’d call it “design”. At a push anyway.

Why is your blog ugly?

Because I made it that way. I provide readers with full RSS feeds for posts and comments. There is never any need for users to visit the site. They can apply whatever themes they like to the feed once they get it off the site.

That doesn’t answer the question. Why did you make it ugly?

I used to have a beautiful theme, Blue Horizon if you want to go and track it down. But I found that reading over my own posts when checking for spelling errors and the like was a very poor experience. The text was small, most of the page was wasted, it had novelties like tags, bookmarks, flickr photos and other nonsense. Basically it was not focused. I still use the very same theme I just removed the whole of the CSS file to replace it with:

body { margin-left:25px; margin-right:25px; font-size:16pt; text-align:justify; }

.feedback {border-bottom:1px black solid; padding-bottom:10px; }

img { margin:10px; }

I also deleted a few things I didn’t need anymore, but that was it. Simplicity. And I find it much easier to read now. I can see which links I have clicked (they go an ugly purple), I can see the links a mile off (they are bright blue), and I can see the text a mile off, it is pleasantly large. It is functional. I don’t care if you think it is ugly or even if it is ugly. This blog is all about the content, and like I say full feeds are available if you prefer something a little more pretty.

I love the service that Deep Quote are offering. You highlight some text in a page, and click a button and they generate a URL for you with the text highlighted, and with the start location of the page set right at where your quote text is. Check this link for an example highlighting “this text here” on this page. You can get it in various levels. There is their website where you can manually enter your text, and URL, there is the bookmarklet for which they make the following amusing comment:

And there is an extension which unfortunately doesn’t work in Flock at the moment but I have sent them an email to ask for this. But even without the extension it is useable with the bookmarklet. No word on how they make money out of this. Although they have got step one right, making a useful service.

Update: Email back from Ron of Deep Quote. He will work on the extension

And Again: Flock fans can get the extension here.

Netscape today try to go Web 2.0. Which I guess is a smart move, for me at least Netscape is almost the definition of Web 1.0, so they do need to update. They are doing this by launching a Digg style user voted news site. Which is a very Web 2.0 thing to do, in fact there are loads of Digg clones out there already, and when Digg lauches its new content areas these two services will directly compete. But put simply Netscape don’t know what they are doing.

I wanted to get into this new Netscape service (which is in Beta at the moment) to give it a quick whirl, expecting that it would be show signs of never quite leaving Web 1.0. So I clicked “Sign Up” and I am presented with this form. The space immediately to the right of the dashed line on the far left is totally blank, as you can see in this extended screenshot. I instantly notice that it is a pretty long form, and I am less inclined to bother signing up. Why they need my birth date and postal code I am not sure. But as you can also see they have missed out number 2. I don’t know if this is just pure rushing by these web designers or if the number 2 block just doesn’t show up in Gecko browsers. Either way it is pretty shocking. Netscape as supposed to be highly professional.

Anyway, I fill in this form and hit the complete registration button which is for no reason in particular surrounded by an orange border. And I wait. Finally the screen changes and I am presented with this. A page that says absolutely nothing. I try again, but it doesn’t work. Hopeful that the registration may have gone through anyway I tried to sign in with the account I had been trying to open, but that failed also.

So I haven’t been able to use the service. But from the outside bits that I have seen it seems obvious that it isn’t going anywhere. TechCrunch comments that:

According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views – far more than Digg today.

I can’t help but wonder how many of those are stacked up by users that have Netscape set as their homepage by default and have never sought to change it.

Thanks, No.

When I first found the Odeo service around a month ago I was amazed. I could record a basic podcast straight on to the site, and in the same place I could get all my favourite podcasts aggregated. And of course because it is a web service I can then get all of my podcasts from any computer in the world. Not only that but it also serves as an answerphone where people can send me audio messages.

A very nice idea. But Odeo fails.

I love the user interface in general. I think that the pink design that they have opted for is lovely. Look for instance at what happens when you click the button to login. You get this beautiful panel appearing for you to enter your details and log in. Very, very swish. And this is just one example there are lots of pleasant things in the interface not least the player which I find to rarely stumble when playing audio which is a big boost for using Odeo rather than collecting the audio from the original source.

But despite all of the good bits Odeo falls down in just a few areas, and these few holes make it unusable. This mainly center around its repeated ability to choke on RSS feeds which is how all content is streamed into the service. Look at this screen capture for an example. The feed doesn’t have two episode five’s but Odeo thinks it does. And it will stream two copies into your “inbox” as a result. The number of episodes that there have been will also be inflated on the Odeo counter. The number one gripe is the slow speed at which it recognises new episodes and updates feeds. It is terribly. You can navigate to the feeds page and ask for it to check again (it will periodically check by itself) and time after time it reports back that you haven’t got anything new to listen to. However if you pick up the RSS in a normal reader you can see the latest episode, and iTunes picks it up etc.

So if you want to stay in touch with the latest from your podcasts then you have to be prepared to be a day or so behind if you’re going to use Odeo, which in the world of tech is really not something anyone wants to be. I must admit though in the expanded service there are little bits that work brilliantly. The virtual answerphone works great and I see buttons all over the web for “Send me an Odeo“, I wonder if they should have stopped at that. The studio where you make your own podcast is not that bad either. It is pretty crude but it works and you can easily get content out. But right at the backbone of the service the break down of RSS means that as a whole service it is not a patch on iTunes for podcast management. Nice try, but no thanks.