A friend of mine is coming down to London in the summer for a week with his family and tried booking a hotel for his stay via the web.

He tried several on-line web hotel search engines and for the week that he wanted every one said there was no room availability. I wasn’t convinced as my partner had done a similar search in January and also been displayed no availability and this was six months prior to the date required. I tried phoning the web hotel search engines and they confirmed  that there was really no rooms available in any hotels in that town for that week in July. Really? Well that town is my home town so I personally went to 5 of these hotels with no availibilty and checked at reception whether this was the case and it wasn’t the case at all. I wasn’t asking for a single room for one person for one night. I asked for rooms for a family for a week, and prefereably a family room.

A couple of the hotels had a family room available and all had double and twin rooms available for the whole week. The staff in several even volunteered that they had loads of availability and offered me special rates to book right there and then. I mentioned to them what I had found on the web and they were all surprised.

If I was them I’d be checking their own known availibilty against what the hotel search engines are saying to the world, though the outcome to that probably doesn’t bare thinking about. What are you going to do when the penny drops and you realise that these hotel booking web pages that you think you are dependant on are actually steering customers away from your hotel? Is there anybody they can call and get it sorted out? Maybe. Would the caller be taken seriously? Probably not.

My friend did actually manage to find hotel availability for his family but in a chain hotel in a lousy area by the airport about 20 miles from where he really wanted to stay. He so dislikes the thought of staying there that he has actually curtailed his week long stay to 3 days. This is either a buggy system or its been tweeked to someones advantage but whatever it’s causing all sorts of lost business to smaller hotels and driving everybody to large chains. No doubt in about five years time we’ll all get to hear about this nonsense.

My XP machine, which I had recently restored to initial XP Home state and had had to apply 2 years worth of XP updates to, was running a bit slow so I ran SFC on it so that I could Windows repaired.

Within 15 seconds it asked for me to insert the XP disc, so it could refresh some windows files, and which I expected. I couldn’t find the XP Home disc so instead inserted my XP Professional disc which SFC didn’t like. Hmmm…. what should I do? I decided to upgrade XP Home to Professional and did that take a long time. When that had finished I ran Windows Update and that found 91 updates including IE 7 which were all downloaded OK but all failed to install. Not only that but IE v6 ran very badly. If you clicked on a link two IE windows started to open but would not finish opening.

I retried the updates but they refused to install. I stuck a relevant string into Google and eventually found that the Windows Update Agent had gone bad. I downloaded an installable version of it from here http://download.windowsupdate.com/v7/windowsupdate/redist/standalone/WindowsUpdateAgent30-x86.exe and stuck that in a new folder. From the command prompt I then ran that file with the /wuforce command line parameter and bingo XP updates now work.

We have terrible mobile phone coverage where we live and it’s unlikely to get better for a long time.

I rang the mobile phone network people and told them about the lack of coverage. The support person went away and had a look at their system to see what sort of coverage I really had and confirmed that we have good coverage. Hello, no we don’t. She dug a bit deeper and found that there are areas of black spots where we live. Yup, that’s the one and I’m stuck firmly in the middle of it. The trouble is that their network engineers don’t do any of this digging through their systems to see what the coverage really is, they just look at the system that says we have good coverage.

So I know we have lousy coverage, the support person knows we have lousy coverage but the network engineers don’t know we have lousy coverage. The support person said that there was nothing that could be done to improve coverage in the foreseable future. I said naively ‘can’t you just tell them it doesn’t work?’. Of course the answer was ‘it’s not as easy as that’. Why isn’t it? No doubt there’s some foul office politics involved or some statistics system that they don’t want to upset by pointing it at some real data and upsetting half a dozen apple carts. Hence fat chance of any network improvement until a sea change occurs and another generation has come around.

I found a way round the problem by using the iPhone’s call forwarding option, which works really well. The caller isn’t even aware that he’s been rerouted to another number. I just have to remember to switch on call forwarding when at home and switch it off when I go out.

When Heathrow’s shambolic terminal 5 opened a fews weeks ago you could see the departure and arrivals boards on one of the BAA web pages. Whenever I checked the departures for the lame new terminal in it’s first week of opening every single flight was delayed and many were cancelled. I’ve just had another look and you can’t see live flight departure times right now. Instead there is a page apologising for the missing data and a whole load of telephone numbers for the poor hapless flyers to ring to see if they are destined to go anywhere today. This is either a system that has genuinely busted (Again? Ed) or if flights from t5 are still delayed, then maybe it’s been taken off line as it was providing too many horrible statistics for the great unwashed to check too easily.