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If personal blogs aren’t for ranting, then what are they for?

If a payment is taken by direct debit from your bank account in error, your bank or building society is obliged to give an immediate refund:

Under the rules of the Direct Debit Scheme, should any money be taken in error, then the customer’s bank or building society must, on request, make an immediate refund to the customer’s account. [link]

We tried this with the Halifax yesterday:

1. Phone banking said it takes around three weeks for the refund to happen.
2. So, Lynn (the wife) took time out of her busy schedule to visit the local Halifax branch today. She quoted the direct debit guarantee to them and was told that would only apply if she went to a “main” branch. Would have been nice if they had told us that yesterday.
3. Lynn’s aforementioned busy schedule and my pedal-powered transport mean that neither of us can get to a main branch today, so “immediate” slips to “at least 2 days later.”

I can’t say we’re impressed with the Halifax’s handling of this. Hardly in the spirit of the Direct Debit Guarantee, is it? I wonder where we’ll be sent when we get to the main branch?

In all the excitement I forgot to record the last episode of a series the wife has been watching. I’m in big trouble.

I’ve been setting up a new laptop and had a review of the Firefox addons I want installed on it. Here’s my current list, which I’ll be maintaining on del.icio.us.

Yes, it’s been a long time since my last post, but no, I’m not dead, just dead lazy. I’ve been preparing to move house, moving house, and doing all the post-house moving stuff like unpacking, and more importantly, setting up Internet and TV connectivity. (For a while there I thought my 8 years of broadband were over, but things have improved. That was a dark, dark place I shall never visit again.)

Anyway, I got my hands on a Sky HD box today and hooked it up as soon as I got home. A quick phone call to Sky Customer Service - who didn’t seem to mind one bit that the box came from eBay - and I was hunting for the HD channels. As it happens, the very first thing I came across was the Vader/Kenobi duel in Star Wars episode IV. Nice! A moment to tell the grandchildren about someday.

I have to say the picture looks great, even on my “budget” 1080p HDTV. So good, I think even the wife will be able to tell the difference. I’m going to have to rethink my cabling plans as the 10m component cable I was going to use introduces clearly visible bands where light areas meet dark. Besides which, the TV loses sync whenever the picture gets too bright, which makes certain Forza 2 tracks on the Xbox 360 slightly more challenging than they should be. So there’s an HDMI cable trailing across the living room, too, for the moment (not sure we could stretch to an HDMI receiver as well!).

Next was Sky Sports HD1, and as I imagined, darts doesn’t really benefit from 1080i in quite the same way as Star Wars, but you could count the hairs in Dennis Priestly’s moustache if you really wanted to. One thing I noticed is that the scores are clearly scaled up from SD and look awful. But hey, I’m just someone who notices these things!

It’s a lot louder than the Sky+ box we’d been using, but a lot quieter than the Xbox 360. I’ve plans to get a cabinet to house my AV gear (because of the Xbox up until now) so it shouldn’t matter.

The last thing I need to sort out is recording - we have Sports, Movies and HD active but our good friend the Record button wants me to speak to Sky Customer Services again.

I’ll do that in a minute, but let me finish this post by giving anyone who’ll take it my advice: Don’t buy your HD box from Sky as you’ll be paying well over £100 more than you need to. Instead, get one from a Sky dealer who advertises on eBay.

But do get one!

Update:I now realise that the darts isn’t actually being televised in HD - I was fooled by the drastically toned-down compression that the HD channels have, even when they’re broadcasting SD pictures. The cricket is definitely HD, and looks even better!