I was in Scotland last weekend and rented a car from Hertz.

I had booked a “Hertz Compact 4-door car” as I would be carrying passengers, but what I ended up with was a dodgy 3-door Vauxhall Astra, although I didn’t really bother to count the doors until I got underway.

My dad tells me that rental cars usually have fewer than about 13k miles as they get pretty well shagged after that, yet mine was showing over 33K and only 18 months old.

It felt old and abused too, with some worrying mechanical noises from up front. Anyways, it didn’t break down, so I suppose no harm done.

However, today I get the invoice from Hertz, on which it claimed the mileage when I collected it was 3989 and when returned 4083 and that I’d done 94 miles.

Bollocks.

I’d actually done 280 miles according to Kate (my TomTom) and used 44 litres of fuel (about 23mpg!)

So not only did Hertz give me a gas guzzling, under-doored, ageing piece of shit, but they lied about it on the invoice.

I wonder if all car rental companies are like this?

Further to my earlier post about play.com being rubbish, I got an email from them today:

This item was only available in limited quantities and whilst we have attempted to source additional stock we have been unsuccessful. As it is unlikely that we will be able to offer the item again in the near future we have cancelled your order. The full amount has been refunded back to your card; please allow 3 days for this to appear on your card statements.

So when they said it was dispatched on 5/1/2009 they were actually talking through their arses. At the time of sale, they said they had several in stock.

Nice.

I will definitely not be using play.com again.

Update: I ordered a new one from Amazon last night, and have a shipment notice today along with a tracking code from shipping company. That’s much better.

Update 2: It arrived yesterday afternoon, less than three days after ordering. Sadly I haven’t had time to play yet.

I ordered some goodies from play.com on 26th December 2008. I chose play.com because of price, but mostly because they had what I wanted in stock and were going to deliver in the first week of 2009.

Well it’s 18th Jan now and still nothing.

Visiting play.com’s “where is my stuff” page, I’m greeted with this:

Our records show that the item you selected was dispatched on 05/01/2009. Although items are usually received within 3–5 days of the dispatch date, we need to wait 21 days from the date of dispatch before being able to trace, replace or refund lost items.

So basically, they misled about the availability and timeliness of delivery and they’re saying I have to wait three weeks after the start of 3-5 working days before I can do anything about it. Plus, they’ve had my money since 26/12.

At least with Amazon, you can complain much earlier and get a replacement sent out and even cancel the order.

I don’t think I’ll be using play.com again.

Sorry, another iPhone related post

Anyways, I’ve spotted a bit of a flaw in the iPhone App Store.

The App Store is the only way you can legally develop and distribute apps for the iPhone and you have to publish them via Apple. This introduces a huge amount of convenience, but you also lose a lot of control.

Eg, suppose you (or your customers) spot a critical bug in your app? You may be able to fix it within a few hours, but how long before Apple get it out on to the App Store and subsequently out onto your customers’ devices?

A couple of examples. Cube Runner is a great game I’ve seen on other people’s iPhones, but I can’t get it – it’s been withdrawn from the App Store. I think the developer found an issue and wanted Apple to pull it rather than leave the buggy one hanging. And the slowness of Apple means we don’t have the update.

Another example is a diet tracking app that comes with a “do not install because it’s broken and Apple haven’t updated it in the store with my fix” message.

Both developers are exposed to excessive reputational risk – I’m not sure I’d want to do the same if I was a developer. But then, there’s no other (legal) way.

Much has been reported about the debacle that is the iPhone 3G release, and I too have been a victim.

I received a text message from O2 at 08.09 on the 7th telling me the website to let me upgrade was open from 08.00. Of course by that time it was completely hosed, so I tried again at a quieter moment at work about an hour later.

Still hosed.

And quite possibly the worst website ever, with each step requiring a multi-minute round trip to the O2 server. Why did it need my phone number? or account number? It knows who I am.

Anyway, at around 10.30 when I did finally manage to get some kind of order in, the site completely went hat stand, offering me, variously, blank forms, semi-filled in forms, stupid messages, etc. I gave up in the end.

Of course, the 16GB version that I wanted was completely sold out by that time anyway, so why O2 couldn’t just say so is beyond me. There were probably only about three in the entire country anyway.

Anyways, come Friday 11th, I shall upgrade the software on my current iPhone and just get on with life.

I don’t need GPS nor 3G, so really, I don’t need an upgrade at all.

I will upgrade at some point, but probably in a few weeks after the first batch of phones is cleared, 3G reception issues identified and other faults resolved

This Sunday, you are organising the London Marathon, a fine tradition and much loved by all.

However, on Sunday, the side road leading to my home is going to be closed. For most of the day.

How do I know this? It’s not because you put up signs, or perhaps posted a noticed through my letterbox, say, two weeks in advance*. No, it’s because it happens every year, so I’m getting used to it.

This year, however, I have a car, and actually might want to go somewhere (and come back) on Sunday. But I can’t unless I leave early, come back late, or find somewhere else to park my car.

If I choose the latter, will you, as the cause of the road closure, compensate me for my parking fees?

I suspect I’ll choose the former, a kind of reverse house arrest.

So thank you for this.

Sincerely,

soapyfrog

* yes, there is this but I had to google for it

Today, I was supposed to take delivery of my first car and was quite excited.

Yesterday afternoon, however, the dealer called me up with bad news. It arrived on the ferry from Germany into Kent somewhere, then got loaded onto a transporter and taken up to Grimsby. Grimsby! I live in London so this is not the right thing for it to do. I am concerned for its safety. Not even I would want to go to Grimsby.

Anways, this means that instead of it being checked and cleaned and delivered to me this morning (and I’ve fully paid for it by this point), I have to wait until tomorrow.

I suppose I should be thankful it hasn’t been shipped by Apple, otherwise it’ll be visiting Eindhoven, Cork and Portsmouth before arriving.

Grrr.

It would seem that I have paid a great deal of money to Travelodge over the last day or three. Seems unlikely as I was in Barcelona, but that’s what my credit card statements say.

My bank seems to agree that this is unlikely and they are in the process of sorting it out.

Here’s hoping it happens soon.

Today was my first day back at work after a two-week holiday.

I expected to spend a bit of time trawling through all the email I receive, trying to spot the important ones from the spam *, but lo, what was this?

30,000 messages.

About 380MB of email.

My mailbox limit at work is approx 80MB at which point I can’t send emails, or perhaps reply to an urgent request for assistance.

No problem, I thought, I have set up filters to put unwanted messages in special folders or delete them. Unfortunately, Outlook’s useful filters only run when Outlook is running and it catches up at about one message per second.

If I “Run filter in this folder” it zooms at about three messages per second, or 2.7 hours… but it does it with a modal (ie prevents me from doing anything else) dialog box.

I discover that emptying the trash is a bit quicker, so I abandon the 3x turbo mode and try to manually delete messages.

I then discover that Outlook cannot do anything to more than 4000 messages at once. In fact anything above about 2000 causes it to complain about lack of memory, or just crash. And it still takes tens of minutes to move a few hundred message to trash.

So I finally get my email down to a manageable size and able to send email by 3.10pm.

My first email out? “Hershey’s bucket of goodies on my desk – come and get it.”

PS. spam, in this case, includes useless messages like “service A on host B took slightly too long to do C” and I can’t do anything about that

A day or so ago, we took a bus tour to Brooklyn. This involved waiting for a bus down by the South Street Seaport.

There was a queue (or line for Americans). We were around four back from the front.

A bus showed up, but it wasn’t the one we wanted, but this didn’t stop a load of people behind us rushing forward to see if it was. Of course, these people didn’t return to their original queue position when realising their mistake.

When our bus did finally arrive, the bus door was about 4m to the right of the queue, so it became a bit of a free-for-all, with everyone rushing to the front.

As a result, we didn’t get to sit on the top deck (of the open double-decker bus)

The tour guide then gave us a talk on how people on the lower deck could go upstairs when people from the upper deck leave in the same order we boarded the bus, on our honour.

I found this quite amusing, talking of queue etiquette and honour seconds after the scrum to get on.

More amusing, about 20 mins later, when I got up to go upstairs, a woman pushed passed me, gave me a stern look and said “on your honor!” or similar. This is the same woman who shoved passed me at the time of boarding.

Ho hum, maybe Americans have a different definition of honour, in addition to a different spelling of the word.

On a related, but happier note, I was in the 5th Ave Apple Store purchasing some wares (well, my wife was purchasing some wares for me).

The queue for the tills very long, but a nice chappy came up almost straight away and processed our purchase in place. Very handy. He didn’t even waste time giving us a receipt – it was emailed to us.

Cool.