Ouch

On my way to work last Thursday I was involved in a minor accident - luckily there wasn't much damage to either me or my motorbike.

There's a particularly bad intersection on my route to work - one road joins another at very sharp angle, and you have to turn right around to look behind you to see if anyone is approaching from the other road. It is now a stop street, but it used to be a yield, and many cars still treat it as such and are quite surprised when you stop. So what happened was that the car in front of me stopped, checked it was clear, and pulled away. I pulled away up to the stop street, stopped, checked behind me, saw a car was coming and didn't move forward. The driver of the car behind me was also looking behind him to see if the intersection was clear, and didn't notice that I had stopped, and went into the back of my bike. Luckily he was only just pulling away, so he didn't hit it with much force, but it was enough to drop the bike. I landed partly on the gravel, partly on top of the bike, and once again have had it proved to me that a full-face helmet is the only way to go - otherwise my chin, jaw and nose would have been shredded. As it was, I pulled pretty much every muscle in my body, got some really nasty bruises, as well as a couple of scrapes and burns.

The damage to the bike was mostly cosmetic, as well - the tail-light/licence plate assembly is cracked, the front indicator housing broke when the bike went over onto it's side, the back of the mirror got a bit scratched, and the main stand and gear lever rubbers got chewed up, but luckily the bodywork wasn't scratched or damaged, which is downright amazing.

The driver was very apologetic, and another guy stopped to help out as well (he's a biker himself - I love the way bikers always help out other bikers), so I got all his details and stuff and he said he'd pay for the damage. I'm still waiting for a quote, but it shouldn't be too bad. Even though I knew it was a minor accident and that the bike and I were okay, I was shaking like a leaf. Just an adrenalin reaction, I guess. I felt him hit the back of the bike, and heard the tail-light crack, and my first thought was, "You *idiot*, it's a stop street!". Then he came over and tried to lift the bike, scraping it along the ground as he did so - I was still picking myself up, but I just growled at him to leave my bike alone.

But as I said, he was very apologetic and was probably as shocked by the whole thing as I was. He phoned me later that day to check that I was okay, which I appreciated.

I rode home, phoned it to work to tell them I'd be late (although I ended up not going in at all - I figured it was a justified sick day!), and later on got my dad to look over the bike to see if it needed to go in to be assessed, or if we could just order replacement parts for the bits that looked broken, which is what we did. On a side note: I was really pissed off with the bike place. My dad went with me to the order the parts, since he knows the guy; my dad told them to phone me with the quote, so I gave them my number and then they asked for dad's too. The next day, I phoned up to add another item that we hadn't noticed the day before; he later phoned my dad almost to check that it was okay and to tell him that he'd only be able to get a quote on monday! Dammit, it's my bike, deal with me! Yes, I'm a female, get over it! It's not like I'm a kid needing my dad's permission to order parts.

Anyway, I had to file a Vehicle Accident Report with the cops to get a case number in case I needed to claim anything on insurance, which wasn't as scary as I thought it would be. In fact, it was quite amusing - they've made the report very easy for the cops to fill out, with check-box questions like "Was the accident at a stop street; yield sign; or other", with a little picture of a stop sign, yield sign, etc. "Was the road straight, curved to the left, or curved to the right?" with little pictures of a straight road, and road curved to left, etc. :-) But the funniest part was after I described what had happened, they ask all the standard questions: Was anyone injured? Was there any damage to the bike? Was the any damage to the bakkie that hit me? Err, yeah right....

I was lucky, it could have been a lot worse. I guess it's just a reminder that a bike is more vulnerable than a car, and I'd just like to remind all you car drivers that if you bump a car, neither of you will really notice and there might, at most, be a bit of damage to the bumper. But if you even just bump a bike, at the very least the rider will come off, the bike will fall, and there will be damage to rider and bike. And being sorry afterwards doesn't undo the bruises and scrapes and pulled muscles. So just remember that bikes are more vulnerable, and easier to damage, and just be a bit more aware when there's a bike in front of you.

Watch out Robin Hood!

Yesterday I went for my first archery lesson :-)

It was a lot of fun, and while it was difficult it wasn't quite as difficult as I thought it might be - I actually got quite a few golds, and only missed the target entirely 3 times (two of which were before they actually showed me how to aim, so that wasn't my fault).

Today, though, my arm muscles are really sore, along with all the muscles down my side, and the left hand side of my neck & arm & face is totally sunburned - since it's not like cricket where you change ends halfway through, my right side didn't get a chance to get sunburned - and since you wear a leather guard on the inside of your left arm, which has straps going around the outside of your arm, my arm is burned in stripes!

But it was great, and I plan to go back next weekend. The people are really friendly and helpful - for any Capetonians who are interested, I went to the Protea Sport Club in Retreat (just opposite Zwaanswyk on the main road, you can't miss it); it costs R30 for visitors, and that includes coaching and the rental of all equipment. Beginner's classes are from 13:00 to 15:00 on Saturdays.

There were four people in my beginner's group, and we really all showed great improvement over the two hours - but still, I'm glad that these days we don't have to hunt for food, otherwise I'd be going hungry :-)

Hot Wheels Flashdrive Mod

I saw this over at BoingBoing ... that is so cool, and I'm seriously tempted to rip apart my flashdrive, buy a car, and do it myself ;-)

It does suggest a range of possiblities - flashdrive keyring-sized teddy bears come to mind, but I'm sure the principle could be applied to pretty much anything.

Update: I think I'm actually going to do this. I bought a little car today - I'd upload a photo via my camera phone if we had a decent comms infrastructure in this country :-(

Local Mirror For Microsoft Update?

Prompted by my Dad getting a new PC for work, and me telling to him to get all the latest windows updates, I decided that I should actually do the same thing for my laptop. But there are a lot of them, and it's reeeaaallly slow, even just the bit where it checks to see what updates you need. And of course with the lack of reasonable broadband in SA, most people are on dial-up ... so suddenly I had a great idea: maybe the local microsoft site has a local mirror! Couldn't see anything on their site, so I e-mailed them, and after going through various departments they came back to me saying that I could download updates from http://www.microsoft.com/southafrica/athome/security/update/default.mspx, or for R20 I could pick up a CD containing the latest updates from their office (on the other side of the country from me), or for R60 they could courier me the CD. Which isn't bad, I guess, but won't solve the problem for future updates. And just how up to date would their CD be, anyway? (a question to which they have not yet replied).

So I went to the link they sent, despite the fact that it's still at microsoft.com and presumably hosted in the US, and surprise! the windows and office update links just link straight back to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/ and http://office.microsoft.com/officeupdate respectively. Which is pretty useless.

So either I'm stuck spending hours and hours downloading from the US, or I have to struggle to find a microsoft employee who actually knows what they're talking about, which may be even more difficult. It would just make so much sense for microsoft to have local mirrors in countries where they have a web/physical presence. But this is that whole USA-centric, broadband-centric approach that I was complaining about before.

And on that note, an update to the problems I was having with MicrosoftELearning, transferring offline player content from one pc to another: it turns out that if you download even just a single section of content on the second PC, it then sees all the content that you have transferred as well. I assume that if you download new content (for the same or new courses) on the first PC again and transfer it again, that it will then see that too without having to any further downloading on the second PC, but I haven't tried it out yet. Really, they could have just told me that in the first place!

Update: Microsoft SA have admitted that there is no local mirror. Which I think is downright pathetic. We don't all have broadband. I wonder if they realise that this is probably a major contributor to the number of unpatched windows PCs?

Storm At Home - Not So Good After All

So I've been using Storm@Home for two months or so now, and I was fairly happy with them. I had fewer problems than I'd been having with Telkom - no login problems - and their e-mail customer support was pertty good - they'd generally get back to me within a couple of hours of e-mailing them.

This changed. A couple of weeks ago I started getting disconnects after being connected for only about 5 minutes or so. It'd start with DNS errors, then I'd get the message box "Link to Storm failed. Reconnect Pending ...", and I'd have to dial in again. It'd always reconnect first time, only to disconnect again a few minutes later. Naturally, this is annoying and expensive, since Telkom charges a minimum call fee.

So I e-mailed them to ask if they'd been having problems, and they said no, but it would be best to phone tech support next time it happened so they could see if they were having problems at that exact time.

Worst suggestion ever. Last Friday I tried that, and I sent them this e-mail on Monday:

I tried calling tech support Friday evening (about 19:20), since again I was being disconnected a couple of minutes after connecting. It was a thorougly unpleasant experience.

The first time I called, I got a recorded message saying that all the operators were busy, but my call would be answered. After about two minutes, I got an engaged tone.
The second time I called, I was cut off after about a minute.
The third time I phoned, the call was answered - I said that I had just called twice and been cut off both times, and was told that I couldn't have been cut off! I said that, yes, I was, and was again told that I wasn't! Eventually, we managed to get past that and I was asked what the problem was. I explained that I had e-mailed a couple of days ago because I was being disconnected shortly after connecting to storm, and that I had been told next time it happened to phone in, which I was now doing since it was happening again.
After telling the whole story, I was asked when I had phoned before. I said that I had e-mailed, not phoned, but it had been Wednesday. I was then told that you had only started answering calls today (which made no sense to me!) and was asked what the problem was! So I described the problem again ... and was then asked it it was a problem with my website! I explained the problem again, and was told that she would get Craig to phone me back. Luckily, as she was saying goodbye I managed to tell her that she needed my phone number, which she had apparently forgotten to ask for!

I understand that your phone calls are recorded "for quality control" - I suggest you go through the logs and do some quality checking, because I am not at all impressed with your customer support via phone; which is odd, because your e-mail customer support has always been excellent.

Craig did, at least, phone me back, and he was quite helpful although he couldn't actually help much - he asked me to try and dial up again, and this time I stayed connected for 10 minutes (at which point I disconnected, since that was longer than I've stayed connected recently).

On Saturday, however, I was disconnected after being connected for about 10 or 15 minutes (I'm not sure of the exact time). I understand that intermittent problems like this are difficult for you to trouble-shoot, but it really becoming inconvenient, as well as expensive!

Do you not maybe have logs which you can examine for this type of thing?


I got the automated reply saying someone would get back to me within 2 hours (which they normally do), but by Thursday I had had no reply. So I e-mailed them again, and still have had no reply. I sent another e-mail off today, as a new issue rather than reply to the old messages, but I don't know if I'll get a reply to that one either.

I suspect that if their system is busy, it drops connections, because this morning I stayed connected for over 45 minutes without a problem. This afternoon, though, I was disconnected after 10 minutes or so. And because it's sporadic and the length of time before the disconnect varies so much, it's obviously difficult to test, but I suspect that it isn't happening on my win98 PC, only on my winXP laptop. So while I don't think it's likely, it's not impossible that it's my modem settings, or something like that. But I don't really care where the problem lies, as long as I can get it sorted out, which they aren't helping me do.

I still have 3 months "free trial" with them, so I'm going to stick with them for now - the cost of redialling is (currently) less than the monthly charge of another ISP. But when the free months are finished, so are they - I understand that there can be technical problems, and I know that this may be a difficult one to sort out. But there is no excuse for treating customers badly and flat out ignoring them, and I will not pay any company that treats me that way.

Update: I actually got a reply from Storm tech support today, apologising for no-one replying to me and assuring me that it would be looked into. They suggest that it may be a modem issue, and recommend uninstalling and reinstalling the modem drivers. I don't know if that's likely to be the solution, since sometimes I do stay connected for a long time, but it's certainly worth a try!

Update 2: After reinstalling the drivers, and installing the latest driver from msupdate (which wasn't easy, since I kept being disconnected while trying to download), I still sit with the same problem. I spoke to tech support again, who have reached the last resort of suggesting that my phone cable isn't properly plugged in, or that the there is noise on the Telkom line. The cable is definitely plugged in securely. Noise on the line is not impossible, I guess, but seems unlikely. Trying to get anything more useful out of tech support also seems unlikely.