Personal Diary

Two days on from my original post about Transcription Services and the like the company who I asked to email me have emailed, complaining they couldn’t get hold of me! I’d specifically asked for email as well! GRRRR

Clearly their ability to listen far outweighs their reading skills!

They charge out at £2.10 (immediate service), or £1.65 (24 hour service) per dictated minute exc. VAT. Interesting, I think I probably need to work out how much I’d say in the average amount of stuff I want done, I’m also contacting a few other people, including the original Australian company I was interested in again (who also haven’t responded!).

What is it about sales people and their urgency to call?! I filled in a contact us form today, and they’ve plagued me all day.

I recently bought a digital dictaphone, to try to speed up my life, given I can speak faster than I can type I plan to put it through either a transcription service or Dragon Naturally Speaking.I’ve had a play with Dragon and it was reasonably successfull, but I wanted to test the water with a proper transcription company.

So I filled in a contact form on the website, I should have known better really, I normally have a policy - if the price isn’t there, they are hiding it and are probably extortionate! I quite clearly said:

Please Email me regarding your prices.

So what have they done? Rung 7 or 8 times today!? I have an answerphone and they’ll continue to receive it. I may fill in the contact form again tomorrow, and the day after until they learn to read and send me the prices! I’m already interested in their service, I do not need a sales call!!!

GRRRRRRRRRR

Ok, I ignore the adverts on TV as much as you do, with Sky Plus it’s even easier, start watching everything late and fast forward through the ads  (hey I’m a genius when it comes to stopping it at 30x fast forward just as a program restarts!). So how on earth is anyone going to advertise to me?

• TV? Nope, covered that above!
• Magazines?  Maybe but I skip over adverts so fast I don’t take them in.
• Radio? Nope listen to the BBC!
• Billboards by the road? Not bad, I’m kind of a captive audience in the car.
• Friends & Colleagues - Ah, I’ve got not choice there really - I’m obviously going to listen to them as I know and trust them!

And that last one is exactly what BzzAgent are counting on! WOM (Word of Mouth) advertising is completely new in the UK, and might just take it by storm! Most people know I built up my hosting business completely on Word-Of-Mouth advertising, so I completely understand it’s value and it looks like BzzAgent might do as well.

The theory is that you get stuff from them, and you’ll take about it! You’re not paid, but you may get some nice new stuff along the way, be that a mobile phone or a pack of sausages!

Sounds a bit far fetched? You do it every day! Do you wear a shirt with a logo on? Did you tell your friend what you had for dinner last night? Lend a friend a film because you enjoyed it so much? Thought you might have, and it’s so big in the US that 43% of Fortune 500 companies adopted Word of Mouth advertising last year!
You can sign up here (will it be a mobile phone, or a toothpick!?!)
http://www.bzzagent.co.uk/go/uk/welcome_tellafriend_uk.jsp

I’ve got my Ireland shirt, on Em’s in her Wales Womens shirt (maybe they ought to field the Womens side today against England). We’re off to the pub with friends shortly and it’s guaranteed to be a day out, with St. Patricks Day as well, Cheltenham this week - can the luck of the Irish really hold through 3 games, each knowing what they have to do to beat the previous. The table is almost guaranteed to change 3 times today!!!

Italy have a fighting chance still, at least my friend tells me so, but he is Italian and delusional! Another tells me England will sneak it, whilst the Welsh contingent will be happy to have a punt at the (now) in-form England side and avoid the Wooden spoon?

Ultimately I think the whole day revolves around the French, If they trounce Scotland by enough points, there’s nothing in the offing for anyone! Maybe this is the kick up the bum Ireland need in World Cup year!

Oh, and a very happy St. Patricks Day to all our readers!

Went into town today to watch the rugby, visited CEX a kind of DVD, Electronics, Mobiles and Games swap-shop / pawnbrokers.

They have a huge amount of secondhand Nintendo DS Games, and Nintendo Gamecube games (the latter of which seems to have disappeared completely from GAME and other console game stores!), we picked up two for £14. Will give them a go tomorrow.

They buy and sell, so there maybe a bucket load of stuff I consider getting rid of via them!

I trundled off to Technorati this morning to check whether some of my posts had been indexed there yet, it appears not. However some more amusing things were to be found when I searched for things I’d blogged about recently. The Philips X53 yielded just my blog (and old posts at that - not even yesterdays!).

But a search for “red-blooded males” which I blogged last night was far more interesting!

Jeff is concerned about the number of friend requests he gets in a day from twenty-something year old girls (isn’t he the lucky one), but to be fair I can see his point! Although girls that like to make friends by taking their clothes off raises some interesting ideas!! He’s 40 and these contacts are either just flaunting themselves or are just spoof attempts to get you to join porn sites!

Dan on the other has sussed that half the of the UK’s population are male, and as Males love Females - he’s changed his photo to Female for 24 hours to make more friends! He assures us he is NOT Female!

I loved the story about Eric Engledew on Phillip Howell’s blog, discussing how The Mirror were complaining about BOAC’s “immoral” tour offering, only to find Eric’s daughter near naked on the centre spread! Classic! His daughter Kate has obviously done more modelling work that has raised more than an eyebrow - check out why on Phillip’s blog. Eric Engledew died recently, but reading Philip’s dedication to him, I get the feeling I would have quite liked the guy!

Vic Voyeur is an interesting character. He states that his blog is for over 18’s only, as he wants to swear and post pictures of naked people. It appears these people would fit in with Jeff’s problem of the naked girls wanting to be his friend! Here he discusses his personal brief (and thankfully condensed - without pictures) history of internet porn!

Shortie’s on a full scale investigation into friendships between hetrosexual men and women, that looks quite interesting, but I don’t think I have the brain power to go through it. I’ve got male and female friends, and would always have said that I was closer to female friends than male friends - I guess that’s true of most people. I appear to have got closer to the boys since the whole testicular cancer thing, it’s kind of a bonding process maybe - if you can talk about that with someone, you can talk about just about anything!

Adi Singh doesn’t have a digital camera and is a bit miffed about it I reckon. That’s about it!

Australian Politician Mark Latham appears to have got J-Seid’s back up with his comments in his new book:
Plain speaking Australian politician Mark Latham ridiculed contemporary Australian male culture this week, complaining beer swilling macho men of old have been emasculated by feminists and neo-conservatives.

“Australian mates and good blokes have been replaced by nervous wrecks, metrosexual knobs and tossbags,” the former opposition leader declared in his new book of political philosophy ‘A Conga Line of Suckholes’, “It’s the revenge of the nerds.”

J-Seid has written an open letter in response that explains the psyche of Aussie males?! I think!??!?

And we round up with Lou, back in the UK, who had an interesting couple of days in Greenwich - Dorm party’s, traffic cones, and the girls decided to pole dance. The two red-blooded males (NOT!!!!!) continued to cook eggs! Very odd and not particularly red-blooded at all.

So that concludes our round up of red blooded males in the Technorati blogging world. A merry bunch (or at least some of them were!!).

Well the Migraine still hadn’t cleared completely this morning, so I dragged myself out of bed early (I say early, but Emma had already gone to work) and emailed the guys at work, asking them to inform the relevant people for me. It’s easier to email then I catch the first person in the office.

I trundled around the house for a bit before reading the BBC News and finding out about “History Matters :: One Day in History” (when I finish this post I may well post it there as well, so you may find it’s a little more detailed than ususal!). I sorted out a few emails and then crashed on the sofa for a bit.

I’d got work on the brain when I woke up, so logged on to check a few BetterWebSpace emails - sorted out a few customers, and then loaded up the new laptop a Philips X53, after 10 minutes of use the touchpad packed in. A system reboot and a rollback to a restore point didn’t resolve the issue - so off I trundled back to PC World on the other side of town!

Thankfully I got the same Sales assistant who sold me the laptop on Saturday, I think he was more thankful after seeing the customers his colleague served whilst he was with me!!! Everything from dropped (allegedly) Digital Camera’s and the Sale of Goods Act to a woman that wanted a keyboard to plug into an S-Video port because she’d used all her USB ports!

Needless to say, their tech guys wanted to do another system restore before they’d believe the laptop was deceased, I had a wander. I have to admit to witnessing just how “geeky” most PC World staff are! I work in the tech industry but this takes the biscuit, there’s nothing wrong with the guys and they know their stuff but this was just funny! A pretty young lady came in looking for something, bless her she hadn’t got a clue what she needed as she tottered around the store in high heels, but she watched one guy talk to a customer for a good 20 minutes, wandered around the shop twice before grabbing hold of the duty manager. Only then did she get any sense, PC World obviously needs more red-blooded males!

Emma rang whilst I was negotiating the murderous traffic in Swindon rush hour, I agreed to meet her at Sainsburys, and I stupidly admired (with my sadistic humour) the stupid amount of traffic coming away from Sainsburys.

We wandered around Sainsburys for 20 mins, neither of us wanting to get into the car again after looking at the traffic. By the time we came out it hadn’t improved and we even joked about just leaving our cars there (it’s less than kilometer to home)! I wish we had! Have you ever spent 45 minutes in grid-lock in car park!?!?!?!?!?! They were even giving it out on the local traffic news!

So we’ve settled down for the evening, watched Spooks and now I’m chilled on the Sofa, playing with the new replacement laptop - yep the other one was stuffed! I’ve almost installed everything and am thinking about buying a domain to do with the laptop to blog everything seperately there! Enough smart ideas for one day methinks!