So I’m back from my holiday. As a reminder: I was walking around the Pembrokeshir Coastal Path, from St Ishamel’s, near Milford Haven, to St Justinian’s, near St. David’s. How did it turn out?

Pretty good, I reckon. Two grey days, one soaking (which came on the way home, with the wind behind me), one wash-out (which I mainly spent in The Bench with a book and a sofa), and three gloriously bright days. I walked about 70 miles, and managed to cover all the intended ground. I stayed in a variety of accomodation with some very gracious hosts and some incredible breakfasts.

Walking alone is an interesting experience. I can’t remember the last time I’ve thought about so little (in a good way) for so long. Days went by with sporadic thoughts – individual verses of songs stuck in my head for hours on end, and when my ankles were getting almost too painful to work on, I just focused on “one foot after another” for long periods of time.

The coastal trail is particularly beautiful, but at times it feels hairy – perhaps more so, on your own. There’s usually very little between you and the edge of the cliffs, and they do get higher and more sheer as you head north. It’s an invigorating experience, but it brought tinges of Vertigo back.

But pictures like the one above from Broad Haven sum up the real memories I’m going to take home; afternoons on cliffs with no noise save the birds and the sea, and no-one else for miles. It was refreshing, and invigorating; I ate well (remarkably well the night I went to Cwtch), and read a fair few books. It was wonderful to slow down for a week.

A week later, I took the train back to London, still going at the 33rpm of Pembrokeshire. Photos going up slowly admist the bustle, but I’m trying to keep a glimpse of what going that slow feels like. It was very, very refreshing, and somewhat needed.

(If you’re interested: I booked the trip with Celtic Trails Walking Holidays who, to be frank, were excellent. They sort out accomodation along the route, and transport your bag between sites whilst you’re walking. For someone like me, who doesn’t drive, it’s a lifesaver, and it’s nice to see different scenery every day. There’s a premium for the fact they arrange everything, and also for being a solo traveller, but frankly, given they arranged the whole thing in 10 days, I was more than happy to pay it. They also supplied a fantastic welcome pack – guidebook with lovely walking maps, OS maps to cover the entire route, bus timetables, tide tables, and a decent, personal itinerary. Would recommend, and it’s also a great way to find places you like so you can stay there the next time you go back, when you arrange it all yourself…)

The other pressing event on the horizon is a holiday. A much, much needed holiday. Hurrah, etc.

I am off to Wales. Specifically, I’m off to Pembrokeshire, to walk around the coastal path for six days, and then to spend a day recovering in St. David’s (many thanks to Meg for the winning suggestion in the where shall Tom go on holiday? competition). I am going armed with little other than an itinerary, some clothes, a camera, and a big pile of books. I will be very much off-grid.

I’m looking forward to it immensely. I’m going to be walking every day, which will be a bit of an adventure, and consistently in one direction. I hope to write a little more about the how and why of the trip when I get back, but it’s looking pretty good from this end.

Off tomorrow morning; back in a week. Infovore will be a bit silent in the meantime, but normal service will resume shortly.

Time to conclude the tale of woes I went through trying to repair my internet connection (previously documented here and here). I got a working connection on Friday, 22nd August – 12 days after my connectivity first disappeared – when a Pipex/Tiscali engineer came around to my house.

The solution?

A new router. Specifically, a Thomson Speedtouch, supplied free by my ISP. Both the Netgears I tried weren’t up to the job, apparently, despite having worked for four years prior.

(I think what happened is that, after a failed attempt to migrate away – another broadband provider being incompetent – that when my MAC code expired, my line became a “new” Tiscali line, which all of a sudden only works with their own modems).

Anyhow. Back online. The disappointing thing is that if I’d been able to get through to a second-line engineer on the Tuesday after my problems had occurred, I might have been able to get through to UK-based support sooned, and had an engineer around over a week prior to the 22nd.

As it was, I became stuck in call-centre hell. All the first-line support staff at the call-centre were courteous, and concerned about my problem – especially when they saw from their own (well-kept) records how long it was taking to solve.

When I escalated the issue, the team in the UK at high-level and network support were all sharp, courteous, and quick to call me back or track progress. It was they who ultimately asked from an engineer to come.

The engineer himself was courteous and sharp, and had the decency to contact me several times when he turned out to be running late.

The gap was in “second-line support” – essentially, call-centre staff who perform more technical tasks, such as testing the line. They consistently failed to call me back when they said they would, and given I needed to be in to respond to their tests, this made it impossible to progress beyond them. Added to that, it was impossible to be transferred to them; they had to call me back direct. As a result, I frequently called to report that they had failed to call me back, only to end up back at first-line support again.

Still, we’re back online, and that’s what matters; it’s a shame it had to play out like this, though. For now, I’m just sticking with this ISP for the time being. Having a connection is better than no connection, at the moment.

(As a footnote: when I signed up to Pipex, about four years ago, they were not the cheapest, but they had dedicated, knowledgeable support staff in the UK, on the phone from 8am to 8:30pm. They’ve now been bought by Tiscali – something they never informed me of – and the quality of service just isn’t the same.)

I wrote last week about my lack of broadband service from Pipex, and thought I should write a follow-up to that post. The news is, frankly, not good. When we left matters, BT were looking into a fault on my line, and I’d emailed the whole sorry story to some very senior Pipex staff.

Friday, 15th August

BT contacted me at lunchtime to tell me the fault on my line had been fixed.

2pm: Tiscali High-level Support (or words to that effect) call me. I explain that BT say they’ve fixed an issue, but if they haven’t, I will call my contact there back first thing on Monday

7pm: Get home. Plug router in. Phone is fine; ADSL is down. I phone BT and speak to Lee. Lee runs a test on my line again; the line is in very good health, he tells me. Suggests I talk to my ISP; the modem at the exchange might need re-syncing after the fault on the line was repaired.

Monday, 18th August

I call my contact in High-level Complaints, to explain that BT found a fault on the line, fixed it, but this made no difference to my lack of ADSL. She tells me that an engineer will phone me back around 3pm, and that she will give me a courtesy call around half four.

No engineer phones by half four; I try to call high-level support but it seems like there’s no-one on Tiscali front-desk to put me through. I call the standard support line. (Update: my high-level support contact confirms she did try to call me, but called my home number. I’d like to clarify that the problem has never been the support staff, either at Head Office or in the callcentre, but specifically the engineering staff).

I speak to Ricardo in front-line support. He tells me he will do everything to solve my problem, and that an engineer will call me back.

At 1815, an engineer calls. He proceeds to do the same diagnostics everybody else has so far. I point out that all I’m waiting on is the test where the line is unloaded, and that the router is unplugged, so he can just do that and we can proceed.

He points out he thought the router was connected, and could I plug it in? I explain that no, I’m not at home. He tells me I need to be at home for these diagnostics: they need to do a test with the router connected and with the router disconnected at the same time.

I point out that every single time I have been home for a call from engineering, they have failed to call me.

He asks me when I am next in. After some discussion – in which I point out that I will gladly be at home if they can guarantee they’ll phone on time – he tells me an engineer will call some time after seven on Tuesday night. I will be in to receive that call. If I am, we can perform the tests, and hopefully get this fixed.

It is now nine days without service; this is the second time I’ve spoken to a second-line engineer, and the fourth time that second-line engineering has failed to call back when they say they would.

I make my point quite clear: I will wait for second-line engineering to call on Tuesday night. If they do not call on Tuesday night, as they have promised, on Wednesday morning I will ring the cancellations department and look to close my Pipex account as soon as possible.

Eight days. Ten phone calls. No progress.

Tuesday, 19th August

I get home at about half five.

Tiscali High-level Complaints call at half six, to see how I got on with engineering. I explain that they were three and a half hours late calling me back, and that they couldn’t do anything because I was at work. I also explain that they’ve promised to call me back at some time after 7pm tonight. High-level support/complaints explain that they’ll call again on Wednesday to see how I got on.

No-one has called by 10pm. I go to bed, because I’m coming down with something like a throat infection.

Wednesday, 20th August

It is now nine days since my broadband connection disappeared. This morning, I am calling Pipex Cancellations to acquire a MAC code (a process they’ve already manage to mess up for me once before), and I’m moving to Zen as soon as possible. I may well transfer the fault, but I’d like to transfer the fault to someone who’s got some experience in customer support.

Again, I will be emailing this some senior staff at Pipex, and attempting to be reimbursed for the lack of service I’ve had since last Sunday.

I’ve been without broadband for five days now, and the customer service I’ve received from my ISP – Pipex – is now beginning to verge on the execrable. Given that, I felt I was going to have to start keeping a log of what has been happening, if only so I can keep the facts straight. There seemed to be no better place to do this in public – given that I would like this resolved soon – and so what follows is an (ongoing) catalogue of my woeful period with their customer services team.

Sunday, 10th August

At 11.30am, I leave the house to go shopping. I have left a download running which is nearly complete. As I walk down the road to the bus stop, I notice some BT engineers fiddling with some cabling in the street. This fact may, or may not, later become significant. I return from shoping at about 12.40pm, and discover that I no longer have an internet connection.

My router (a Netgear DG834G) is working fine: I can log into it. My phoneline is also behaving correctly. The only problem is the ADSL: the ADSL link light on the router flashes orange for a while, and then goes blank. A few minutes later, it starts to flash orange again. This repeats.

Pipex customer support isn’t available on Sundays, so I have to call them on Monday. This is annoying because I was meant to be working on a GDC pitch on this day, and would have to do so “blind” – and then submit it first thing on Monday at work.

Monday, 11th August

I call Pipex customer support shortly after eight, when they open. I am on hold for ten minutes, at 10p a minute. When I speak to a customer support operative, they are helpful: we quickly run over a few simple diagnostics, and they ask me to use the “test” socket inside my BT socket (which requires unscrewing the socket) to confirm things aren’t working. I hang up, and do so. I spend another seven minutes on hold, and speak to a different customer support operative. I explain the situation. He tells me that he now has enough to pass my information on to a second line engineer, who will call me in the next 48 hours.

I head into work, late, having spent about twenty-five minutes on the phone to Pipex support.

Tuesday, 12th August

An engineer calls me at about 10am, when I am at work. We run over the same diagnostics that I have already performed. I am then asked to unplug the router so they can perform one final test on an unloaded line; they won’t be able to call BT until I do so. I explain that I’m at work, and can’t do that. When, I ask, is the earliest they can call? They tell me they’ll call me at 8am the following day, which I agree to, as it’s the most convenient time to call me.

Wednesday, 13th August

By 8.55am, nobody has called from Pipex. I phone customer support, and speak to a first line support representative. I explain the situation. He apologises, and looks at my file. He tells me that he’s seen that his colleague has already logged on, and actually I *don’t* need to be at home: they have all the information they need and they have already started proceedings with BT. I confirm that this is correct, and he tells me that all is fine, and that I should go to work, and they’d keep me posted. I’m annoyed I’ve waited for so long, but pleased that progress is being made.

At 2pm, a second-line Pipex engineer phones me.

I answer the same diagnostic questions for the fourth time. They ask me to unplug the router. I explain that I can’t, because I’m at work. I tell them I will be home from work by about 7pm, or they can call first thing in the morning. I also explain that I was told by their colleague, five hours earlier, that I would not have to be home to perform the unloaded line test, and that proceedings were afoot with BT.

She tells me that they cannot talk to BT until they have performed this test.

At which point, I posit that either she is lying to me, or that her colleague this morning has lied to me. Either way, I’m pretty angry. I wouldn’t have minded this morning if I’d been told to leave things unplugged at home, so they could perform the test in my absence; instead, I was fobbed off with positive remarks, and we are back to square one.

She asks when a good time to call is. I suggest the first possible opportunity – 8am tomorrow? She tells me they don’t start til half nine, and so perhaps 10am would be good? I grudgingly accept.

Oh, wait, she says. I’m not in tomorrow. Can I call you on Friday? She explains that she would like to solve this issue personally.

I am now very angry. I explain, as reasonably as I can, that I haven’t had any connectivity for four days – for which I am paying them – and that asking me if I can wait another day really isn’t very acceptable. I would like to speak to somebody – anybody – at 10am on Thursday, if only to try to resolve this sooner. I also point out that they have made me late for work every day this week – on the week when I have a fairly significant deadline and a lot of work – and that waiting for them on Thursday morning will make me late once again.

I am, of course, unable to work from home because I have no internet connection.

She tells me that she will inform a colleague of hers that they are to phone me at 10am on Thursday morning. I accept that that is as good as I’m going to get, and hang up. I tell my work colleagues I will be late on Thursday morning, and there’s nothing I can do.

Thursday, 14th August

It is half past ten and nobody has called. I give them half an hour.

11am: I call frontline support. Explained the whole situation and they confirmed that the secondline support team have not passed my concern to BT yet. This agrees with both secondline engineers; it also means that the frontline support person I spoke to on Wedensday at 8am was lying.

They put me on hold and try to speak to “Helpdesk” and then a Second Line engineer.

Second line support will call me back in “an hour”, they tell me. I explain that I will unplug the router, to remove any load on the line for the final test, and then I will go to work, for which I am about three hours late.

As I write this, I am at work, it is nearly an hour and a half since I called, and they have not called me back. Par for the course.

My next plan of action involves calling BT themselves, to see if they can do anything. Oh, and emailing this to Steve Horley, who appears to MD of Consumer Products and Marketing for the UK, and Mary Turner, who is the CEO. If I can’t get any service going in at the bottom, I can surely try going in at the top.

I will keep you posted as to my progress. I am convinced it’s fault with the line between my house and the exchange – as, to be honest, are most of the Pipex engineers – so it’s not an ISP-specific problem. The quality of support I have received is, however, very much an ISP-specific problem.

I think “execrable” is a reasonable approximation of it so far.

It’s been a crazy few weeks, so it’s only now that I’m getting around to mentioning (again) that I’m going to be speaking at Develop Online today. The talk is called Playing Together: What Games Can Learn From Social Software, and it bears a marked resemblance to the session I gave at NLGD a month or so back. I’m looking forward to it, even if it’s a bit nerve-wracking to be talking to a slightly different audience to normal.

Once I’ve given the Develop talk, it’ll be available online. I’m looking forward to sharing this talk with people outside the circle it was initially written for.

I’ve also got a few more talks to put online, which I’ll be organising over the coming week or so.

The first is my session from Skillswap Brighton (and LRUG before that) entitled Settling New Caprica: Getting Your Pet Project Off The Ground, which is all about shipping for yourself and making spare-time projects into reality. I think I mentioned that earlier.

The second is a session I gave to some students at the Polis Summer School, run by Charlie Beckett – a summer school on international journalism and its future. Charlie initially asked me to talk having read an an article I wrote for the New Statesman in 2007. I gave a session entitled “Journalism in a Data-Rich World“, exploring what journalism on the web of data might (and does) look like. From the feedback they gave, they seemed to really enjoy it, which was good.

So those will be coming online very shortly. Then I can stop writing about the past, and look to the future again. Looking forward to that.

Just a quick note to say that I’ll be talking at Skillswap Brighton tonight. The talk is a re-work of a talk I gave at LRUG in London a month or two back; it’s called “Settling New Caprica“, and it’s about how to get that pet project off the ground:

Pet projects: everybody’s got them. But how many of them never see the light of day? In this talk, Tom Armitage looks at some of the obstacles that impede such projects, and how to get over them. The talk also considers some ways to streamline the process of releasing software when you’re your own client, and perhaps might give some ideas to improve not only your personal projects, but your work projects as well. There should be plenty enough time for a healthy Q&A session after the initial presentation.

The talk isn’t hugely long – about 30 minutes – but I’m hoping there’ll be some healthy discussion after it, on topics as diverse (to give you an idea of what’s coming) as personal project management, version control, deployment, and building Twitter bots for fun and profit.

Once the talk’s done and dusted, I’ll try and get a copy of it online by this weekend. Many thanks to Nat and James for the invitation to talk!

My del.icio.us links, as visualised by the lovely Wordle. Looks about right to me, which is always a good sign of the accuracy of a visualisation. Very pretty. (Click through to see it bigger).

Productivity and work tips are big with geeks. No idea why; probably some inadequacy complex we have about the fact we still haven’t finished our novel and we’re already in our late twenties.

Ahem.

Anyhow, one tidbit that I’ve been trying this week to surprising effect comes from a sentence fragment in Dan Hill’s review of his time at Monocle magazine, namely:

“coats in the cloakroom not on the back of chair”

And so, this week, I’ve been putting my coat or jacket on a coatstand in the corner of the office, as a very deliberate action, to see what difference it makes.

I’ve rather enjoyed it, to be honest. There’s something nice about not feeling like you’re in some transition state between indoors and outdoors – feeling like you’re about to be called away somewhere. There’s also something nice about the ritual of having to pick up your coat if you want to go outside. There’s probably a noticeable social effect from everyone doing it, but still, I’ve been surprised by how much I’ve been getting from it. Yes, it’s nice to not have anything resting on the back of one’s chair… but it turns out the net effect is more than that. So I think I’m going to try to stick with this habit. It does, somehow, feel more civilized, and has helped me shift from “outside mode” to “work mode” a little bit more smoothly.

Here we are in 2008, then.

2007 was, I think, hectic. The first half was largely uneventful; busy at work, mainly. Everything ramped up from about May, though: another trip to Copenhagen to attend and talk at Reboot, which was fantastic as ever; then a short natter at Interesting 2007.

At the end of August, Alex and I eschewed our usual city-breaks for a week in Whitstable, escaping to the seaside with books, beers, and a camera. It turned out to be one of the best holidays I’ve ever had. A few weeks later, we went to the End of the Road Festival, and had a fantastic weekend amidst great music, lovely weather, and a bunch of peacocks.

And then, in October, I left Nature after 18 months. I enjoyed my time there by and large, but found myself clashing with the corporate culture far more than I’d expected. Working with a non-colocated team (the majority of whom were on GMT -5), in an environment that didn’t exactly support multidisciplinary interests so well, turned out to be tough at times, and it slowly wore me down. I made many good friends there, and learned a lot, so I was sorry to go, but I think I made the right choice for me. I left to join Headshift, returning to being in a smaller company, and which seems to be working out OK, so far. I’m still working out what I want to do; Headshift seems to be a good place to do that.

I liked 2007, all in all, although I found the hectic nature of it quite tiring by the end. I hope that this year will be no less eventful; I also hope to be able to manage it better.

On to the year to come, then. A new year is traditionally a time to make resolutions. Some will always be private, but I think it’s time to make some in public, if only so I can hold myself to them. And so: here are some things I want to be able to hold myself to:

• I’m going to write down what I read. Alex does this very effectively, and I’m annoyed that I haven’t got good records, because I’m convinced I read way more than I think I did. Still, I think I’ve done OK this year.
• Actually, I’m going to write down everything I consume much better – films and games, especially. This might involve a spreadsheet; it might involve an existing service like All Consuming. We’ll see.
• I think I might actually launch a web app, for real. I’ll keep you all posted on this one, but it’s not far off now.
• I’m going to write more about what I do, if only because I want to work out what I do. I write code; I design interactions; I think about things. When people say “what do you do?“, I say that “I make things on the web“. This is deliberately vague. I’m still trying to work out if that’s really what I want to do, or if I have some higher-level goal in mind. Right now, I’m finding it hard to juggle an interest in programming with a desire to push my design/product thinking a bit harder.
• I’m going to write more about what I enjoy. I want to write about photography a lot more, and my games-writing here has tailed out a little bit. That should be redeemed a bit.
• I’m going to write more, full stop. There’s too much to keep in my head and to the pub forever. I need records.
• I’m going to lose weight – get rid of some flab, try and vaguely acquire some tone. This is going to be hard, but more frequent runs and less snacking will get us a long way.
• I’m going to keep a better notebook. I’m always embarrassed by my scratchy handwriting, my shapeless layouts, my mucky scrawl. I envy my friends their tidy notebooks, often embellished with bold illustration. I’m always too afraid of making a mess, and I think perhaps too afraid to make the notebook an artefact in its own right (rather than an transition artefact). This fear also means my notes are, sometimes, either too brief or too illegible to be of real use, and I think if I took more care over the artefact itself, it’d be more useful to me.
• I’m going to learn to drive. About time.

I think I’m going to end up rambling if I don’t stop soon, so maybe that’s enough resolutions. I’m not sure I can keep to them all, but I want to have them here, in public, to be held to and to return to at the end of the year. We’ll see how we did then.

I hope you enjoyed your 2007. Here’s to 2008.