Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Copyright infringement, The Bangles, and me...

A few weeks ago, I noticed that Daisy Rock guitars had decided to link to my video of The Bangles from the Cornbury Festival.

But imagine my surprise when on one of my irregular visits to Myspace (David Ford had just posted a blog - that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it) I spotted that they had used some of my photos from Cornbury. Strange, as I seem to remember marking them "All Rights Reserved"

Going to their main website, I found that - yep - they'd use them there too.

Let's play "spot the different", kids...

Bangles site 1
Bangles site 2
Bangles site 3

Respectively

My Flickr 1
My Flickr 2
My Flickr 3

I've fired a quick email off to their manager and webmaster. You know, just to see what their justification is!

Edit - fair play to them, they said they'd been sent to them by a fan (although I assume Getty images won't be as accepting of this explanation) and are happy to take them down. I've just asked them to attribute them properly and I'm happy for them to be left up.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Why I Hate Dell Outlet

I seem always to be blogging about poor customer service, but there's so much of it about to go round!

Ordered a laptop last Friday from the Dell Outlet. So this is a machine that is built, it exists and just needs payment to be taken, the machine stuck in a box and shipped. This is not rocket science, especially for a big player like Dell.

Got a confirmation email, promising further order status updates.

Five days pass, no news.

Call Dell. Call centre. India. Now let me take a moment to say that I have previously argued against automatically tarring all Indian call centres with the same brush, but I'll be damned if this wasn't the worst customer service experience I've had in years. They told me I had no order and that I needed to re-order.

So I called the Outlet sales people who told me that I did have an order, but Dell's computers didn't talk to each other, so customer service in India couldn't see outlet orders. I'm pretty sure it isn't beyond the gift of a company that makes, y'know, computers, to have a joined up IT system. But apparently it is. Hey ho.

Anyway, Outlet assure me order is fine and that it'll be processed yesterday (Thursday) and I'll have an email to confirm this by 6pm.

6pm comes and goes.

So I call them again today. Same guy. Investigates, assures me that the order will be processed by 4pm today.

4pm comes and goes.

Even if it comes tomorrow (it won't, they haven't even debited my card yet), I won't buy another Dell machine as long as I live, because I'll always remember the poor customer service. What I don't understand is why THEY don't realise that.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

From the 'very punny' department.

Following the problems in the sub-prime lending market in America and the run on Northern Rock in the UK, uncertainty has now hit Japan.
In the last 7 days Origami Bank has folded, Sumo Bank has gone belly up and Bonsai Bank announced plans to cut some of its branches.
Yesterday, it was announced that Karaoke Bank is up for sale and will likely go for a song while today shares in Kamikaze Bank were suspended after they nose-dived.
While Samurai Bank are soldiering on following sharp cutbacks, Ninja Bank are reported to have taken a hit, but they remain in the black.
Furthermore, 500 staff at Karate Bank got the chop and analysts report that there is something fishy going on at Sushi Bank where it is feared that staff may get a raw deal.