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.

After the mess of installing v1.1.3 of the iPhone software, which ended up with me getting the iPhone replaced as the upgrade didn’t complete and I was left with an iPhone with no working speaker or microphone, I took my life in my hands and upgraded the new iPhone from v1.1.2 to v1.1.4, and it worked.

Seems that there is no additional functionality in v1.1.4 over v1.1.3 just a load of bug fixes (Including the bug you found by the look of it. He-he. Ed). It’s still a great phone and far better in everyday use than the TV ad’s look, which is saying something.

My old XP machine’s power supply or heat sink fan has been making a noise for awhile now and in the best tradition of don’t fix it till its smashed to smithereens I did squat. The other day I left it syncing between two external USB hard drives and at the same time I was ripping music from my iPod to the same machines C: drive. These two processes were running all day and soon after I returned that evening the iPod ripping finished. The syncing between the two USB hard drives was going to take a lot longer so I stopped that. Shortly afterwards I noticed that the XP machine had rebooted itself. Odd, vary rarely does it do that.

Trouble is it didn’t actually complete the boot process. In fact the Intel image was displayed and the lights came up on the keyboard and that was it. I started wondering if it could be anything to do with the noisy power supply. So I felt around the back of the PC where the power supply was and it was very hot. In fact you could barely touch it. I unplugged everything, took it outside and took the lid off. Of course the vents were clogged up with dust as was the insides. Cleaned all of that up and let it cool down. Switched it on and off a few times and it did eventually boot and eventually even stayed booted after the obligatory couple of blue screens.

I’ve been able to still use it for the last couple of days, though it usually takes about 3 shots at switching it on before it gets the message. And woe betide me if I try any multi-tasking on it, as any big draw on the power supply and it’s instant switch off time.  I am currently syncing the two hard drives which seems to work OK.

Right now Microsoft’s Synctoy is syncing artists beginning with G and H and what a whacko rekud collection I got: Garbage, George Jones, George Winston, Gorillaz, Green Day, Hank Williams, Hound Dog Taylor, Husker Du….. (What, are you out of your mind? Ed).

New power supply to be fitted tomorrow, $100.