Sorry for the absence the last couple of days, it's been pretty busy.

I've removed the adsense banner from DevonLocks.Com and spent an hour this afternoon creating a replacement menu.

I also added a Lock Pick help guide and a Tubular lock pick guide.

In Local News an 81 year old women has been jailed for stabbing her husband to death as he slept. The reason for the killing was "she had been fed up with caring for him". She was jailed for 2 years... well; make that a year, maybe less with good behaviour.

I have spent the day spring cleaning the office. I used to share the office with my Dad but now he has his own computer at home he doesn't come up here anymore so I've cleared out all his paperwork and put it in bags and I now have the room to store all my documents and stationary. It's looking very clean in here :)

I also finally have a fridge and a freezer (I moved into a non-furnished building). The question now is should I store food in them or live and frozen bait.... I know, I know, I'm being silly.... it's obvious they should be used for fishing bait :-)

On my About Me page I've added some piccy's of some butt ugly low life called Simon.

I'm working on promoting a web site that sells Cufflinks and I thought I'd mention it only because cufflinks are a pretty cool and unusal gift.

Offshoring UK Jobs - Is it really working?

Ok, first off I don't know anyone who works in call centres or know anyone who does. This is just my point of view from someone outside looking in.

A large number of the biggest companies in the UK are moving all their call centres to places like India. I do know that the savings can be 40% or more but I don't think they fully realise just how bad their service has become.

I don't know if any of you are aware but I do callouts for software problems on computers. Since the larger ISP's moved their call centres to India my business has started growing. The reason is simply that when people phone the call centres for help they can no longer clearly understand the person on the other end of the phone - or the person on the other end of the phone cannot understand the regional accent of the person phoning for help. Or the most common now which is trying to explain what's happening on your computer to cause the faults when the person on the other end of the phone doesn't know what the techy words like proxy, port numbers etc mean.

Now I grew up in London and 80% of my friends were Indian and over the course of my school life I used to go round to their houses to play. While my friends english were quite good their parents often were not. Over the years I learnt to understand the words that were not quite spoken clearly and I thought I could have a decent converstation with all of my friends parents. When we moved into Newton Road, Torquay 6 years ago our next door neighbours were Indian and I could still hold up a good conversation with them (Although their English was good). But with the people working in these call centres even I have trouble understanding them and whereas I used to happily dovote time answering surveys for BT I no longer do because the converstions go on much longer than they ever did before and the stress levels rise because I keep having to say "Sorry, can you repeat that".

Now forward to these call centres. I have had to phone up these call centres on behalf of my clients and what used to take me a few minutes to solve now may not be solved at all. The main problem for me is I know exactly what the faults may be but the people in the call centres may not know what I'm talking about because they haven't been told what the words I'm saying mean. If I just phoned up and slowly and clearly said "no dial tone" they will have this written down for them. But when you've already checked all the very basic problems like is the phone line connected or if the modem working ok then you now run a very high risk on the person on the other end of the phone having no clue at all what you're talking about or what can be done about it.

I would say anyone with a computer knowledge mid-range and up will now have a lot of trouble on the phone trying to explain what certain terms means. When people phone support centres they are already stressed so surely this added communication problem can only heighten the stress levels?

Am I wrong here?

Well as per usual on a Wednesday the one day I need things to be quiet because I work at the video shop all day and it's the one day that everything happens.

Starts off with postman delivering a recorded delivery too early. What is it with recorded deliveries? They know they are delivering it to a business so they try to deliver it outside of normal working hours. Doesn't make sense does it?
Thankfully I know the people in the post office up the road really well and she is going to try and sort it out for me.

Also today I'm waiting for a few cheques to clear and I log on to our bank and the figures don't add up so I'm none the wiser if they cheques have cleared. I've got my Dad chasing up that one for me because I can't do anything about it today.

On top of that I had to post off some lock pick orders from Devon locks this morning and I had a bunch of emails waiting that needed replying today.

Only one day a week I need things to be quiet but it's always the most busiest. Wednesdays were always the most quiet which is why I choose to work in the video shop on this day. Murhpy's law strikes once again :)

So this morning instead of a nice calm time getting ready for the 11am to 9pm in the video shop I was posting off orders, sorting out recorded deliveries, working out what my bank account balance really was and replying to half a million emails.

I'm sat in the shop now with a can of redbull (No time for coffee this morning) and Im about to go have a smoke :)

New Email Con floating around...

I received an email this morning which is looking very much like a new con because this same email has been sent to a few people I know:

From: Lisa LaFortune
Email: ontrackinc@aol.com

Email Message:

"My check card was billed on Saturday for 612.98. When I saw the billing on my bank account yesterday I thought it was a fraudulent charge. However, when I got up this morning and checked again there was a credit for 612.98 to counterbalance the charge, thus I got my money back. The information on the chargee was a company name of WP-Hosting-Torquay. What I need to know is how did you get my check card number to start with and why was my card erroneously charged. People make mistakes and there was a happy ending but if I don't find out the particulars I will launch an investigation through Bank of America. I will also launch an Internet campaign to let the world know what happened - if I don't get some answers. But, like I said, mistakes do happen and if you will get back to me and let me know what happened, I'll be happy. I just need to know who is being sloppy with my check card.
My name is Lisa LaFortune, my business name is OnTrack Professionals, Inc. I have never any done any business with this particular web site which makes me even more concerned".

If you received this email be warned!

Tide time updated

This weekends Tide times for Torbay have been updated.

One of our web design rivals are really making me laugh at the moment, I'd love to tell you why but it wouldn't be fair using this as a means to do so..... It's so very, very tempting though because I couldn't stop laughing at their site.

If a certain web design company who is obviously keeping a close eye on us, Clear Blue Media, reads this (Someone there is watching what we do closely and then trying to follow) Please look at your site carefully. Some of the things you say are wrong and should you really be pushing web accessibility when just about everything you churn out fails even the basic grade A? ;-)

So... so tempting :-)

**UPDATED**

I can't stop myself, they have left themselves wide open but I still won't mention their name

*Quote*
The law has changed in recent years, and despite many web designers ignoring this

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA like erm...... you perhaps?

This is just too funny!

The Simon Day Nerve Centre

I've never done this before but I thought it would be cool if people could see the room where I do all my updating etc. Well here it is:

THERE IS BIG NEWS!

Well ahem; I'm looking at an empty inbox :)

That may not sound much but I get between 30 and 60 emails a day I have to reply to and more often than not the less important ones get left until I have more time to answer them (Normally meaning they expect me to write the equivalent of a novel in my reply hehe).

It is in fact Soooo Rare that my inbox is empty I just took a screen shot of it:

I'm going to sit here look at my inbox now and time how long it takes to get the next one.... Damn I'm sad :)

My tum was still feeling rough yesterday and I needed some air so I went fishing with a client. We went to Babbacombe pier first but it was packed so we went down the Hopes Nose instead.

I haven't been there in years but the place was actually a lot cleaner than the last time I went there. It looks like the other fisherman are being responsible there now.

We didn't stay there long and headed back to Babbacombe pier but there were still half a dozen of them fishing there and they said they hadn't even had a bit in 4 hours so after that we gave up and went to the Cary Arms for a pint and a relax.

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Still no new happenings with Google and this wait for the next deep crawl, PR boosts and backlinks is now long overdue.

I got my 2nd shipment for the lock picking section of the Devon Locks web site.

Apart from that it's been pretty quiet the last couple of days. Nothing even worth mentioning in the local news.

Well I managed to get a couple of hours sleep this afternoon and was all ready for a nice early night when I suddenly realised the Grand Prix was starting at 2am. Now I'm drinking redbull trying to keep awake because I don't want to miss it :)

I really hate all the so called normal sports like football but there is something about the grand prix that I really enjoy.

If you've never seen a movie company say to themselves "I know, let's make a movie out of a TV series that flopped big time" you will do in 2005. Joss Whedon is directing a film called Serenity which is a feature length adaptation of the TV Show Firefly. Firefly (rightly) got axed after only 15 episodes and those were bad enough. I find it amazing that a movie company are going to make a film based on a huge flop, way to go Fox!