Does the FA & England Need To Regroup?

Following England’s exit from the Euro 2016 tournament at the hands of Iceland, does the FA and the  England Manager need to rethink what league they select players from to play for England?

At the moment all the players who play for England play in the English Premier League, execpt Joe Hart who plays in Seria A in Italy for Torino, on loan from Manchester City.  Only Tom Heaton played in The Championship for Burnley, who now play in the Premier league.
My question is this.  Should the England manager select players from lower leagues such as the championship? The Premier League is the richest league in the world and attracts many foreign players from all corners of the globe, meaning that the pool of English born players is getting ever smaller.

Other home nations Scotland,Wales & Northern Ireland get their players from the Premier league, The Championship and the Scottish Premier League. England only get players from the Premier league.
England are becoming a national joke and we are hated within the ranks of Uefa and FIFA, who themselves are not whiter than white, in my opinion Sepp Blatter and Michael Platini should be be serving time for corruption.

Vodafone’s Black Friday Fiasco

Black Friday don’t you just love it?

For most people in the UK we go to the shops at about midnight and beat each other senseless just to get a heavily discounted tv which was over-priced anyway.

I sold a phone the day before and I had £150 burning a hole in my pocket. I was going to order a Motorola Moto G 2nd gen 5in, that was until I saw the LG G2 on offer from Vodafone for £150 as part of the Black Friday deal. I’ve had my eye that phone for quite a while and it would be rude to pass up on such a great deal. We spotted the deal on Saturday and went into my local Vodafone store to see if we could buy one, guess what? They were right out of stock, they said they had 6 in and they all went an hour before I arrived at the store.

We went home and this is where the fun started. I attempted to order one online and the first attempt didn’t go through because of the heavy traffic on the Vodafone website however I did manage to order one and I got a web order ref number. I duly got a text message saying they will update me on the order, that was over a week ago. Some people got texts messages giving progress reports but I must have ticked no text messages in my marketing preferences as I didn’t want to be hassled every week with offers.

Some people were lucky and got one either online or went to their local Vodafone store. I’ve heard reports that Vodafone were sending out refurbished handsets and passing them off as nearly new with earphones or manuals missing. Somebody even checked the warranty status and it had 6 months to run, so it had obviously been used and sent back. Someone reported that they received a refurbished handset and it was scratched. Vodafone had admitted there was a Quality Control issue (no shit Sherlock) and was told they could return the refurbished handsets.

 

It is now Monday 8th of December 10 whole day since I ordered it and have heard nothing. I’ve rang the Customer Services, emailed them I even mailed the CEO but nothing, they can’t tell anything. When I do get though via the web chat they have to call me back and then dumped in a queue for nearly an hour. They don’t seem capable of dealing with this issue.

 

Vodafone have acknowledged that they are having supply issues but have loads in their high street stores.

 

Why don’t they either issue a voucher to buy it at a Vodafone store or recall stock from stores to send out to waiting customers who have ordered this handset.

 

Am I going to get this handset this side of Christmas?

 

Flappy Birds Creator Gets In A Flap

Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen has pulled the smash hit game last weekend. He cited that the game is too addictive and took the game off the Google Play Store and the iOS app store.

Nguyen created the game in May 2013 and it seems the world has become obsessed with it.

The object of the game is simple, you just guide the little bird through the gaps between vertical pipes by constantly tapping the screen to keep the little bird airborne. You get medals as your score gets higher. My personal best score is 25. Some people can only get 1 or 2. It takes concentration, a steady hand and patience. Maybe I should become a heart surgeon!

Taking Flappy Bird out of the app store has only fuelled the craze and made the game all the more desirable; so much so that iPhones and other devices such as iPads, Android phones and tablets have appeared on the auction site eBay for stupid prices ranging from £1000 to as much as £10m. EBay have taken steps to remove these overpriced devices. As Ebay states when selling such devices, they have to be returned to factory settings.

©Phil Graham

Should HS2 Be Built?

Being a rail enthusiast when a mention of a new line is going to be built I go all goey eyed and start salivating. But not this time though.

The government have given the go ahead to build HS2 which is going to be a new high speed linking London with Birmingham then onto Leeds and Manchester. The reason I’m not excited is because communities are going to be destroyed for a railway line that’s only going to save 20 minutes between London and Birmingham.

Its going to cost in excess of £12m and take about 20 years to build.

I think the money could be better spent on the existing railway infrastructure.

Australia offers refund to customers who bought the new iPad

Customers in Australia who bought the new iPad will be entitled to a refund because they were told that the new iPad would work on 4g LTE, however this doesn’t seem to be the case. The UK will have the same problem as radio frequency will set to US which is different to other countries.

The new iPad has also got problems with the batteries overheating and they can burn you put the device on your lap.

Full report below.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/28/ipad-3-refunds-australia-4g

Stena Line Shoot Themselves In The Foot

Just returned from my holiday with the Mrs to Northern Ireland where my parents live. In the past we’ve flown but mostly we do Stena Line’s Rail And Sail deal where you nominate a UK railway station, in our case Blackburn, you can travel from your home station to Belfast via train and ferry.

This will be ok until the 21st November when Stranraer ferry terminal closes, and moves it entire operation to nearby Loch Ryan. This would be fine if there was a train service to Cainryan. At present the train goes into Stranraer where theres a connecting ferry to Belfast.

Now here is the problem, at present the train runs into Stranraer, when the new terminal opens passengers will have change at Ayr for a bus service to Loch Ryan that’s what everybody thinks. But even at this late stage nobody at Stena have a clue how passengers will transfer, but that sounds about right for Stena.

Before Stena became Stena it was owned by the then British Rail and was called Sealink till it was privitised in 1984 then resold and bought by Swedish ferry operator Stena Line.

When it was in the hands of British Rail they ran a through Anglo-Irish train service from London Euston through to Stranraer that left Euston at 1035 arriving at Stranraer at 1830 which connected with the 1900 sailing to Larne Habour.

All that is long in the past, Virgin Trains who now run train services on the West Coast mainline still manage to run trains to Holyhead to connect with ferries to the Republic of Ireland. If they still ran the Euston to Stranraer boat train maybe it would have kept Stranraer as a hub.

Getting to Stranraer by train used to be quite easy you could get the boat train which is direct, or go into Glasgow Central catch the Stranraer train, or even change at Carlisle for the Newcastle Stranraer service.

When you arrive at Stranraer from Belfast by ferry, the train arrives at 1356, and departs at 1443 it used to go into Glasgow but now the train only goes to Kilmarnock meaning if you want to go into Glasgow you have to change at Ayr, which by the time you arrive at Ayr its right slap bang in the rush hour, cue 2 trains worth of passengers on 1 train and you have organised chaos.

Why did Scotrail decided to run the train from Stranraer and terminate at Kilmarnock? It just doesn’t make any sense.

New Phone Hassle

It all started on Friday night browsing the internet and went to the What Mobile forum where I’ve been a member since December 2006. I post on there on a regular basis. I saw this offer Samsung Galaxy Europa i5700 for £40,  I told my partner Ursula and she said lets go for it. We went to bed.

We got up early had a shower and went for bus to Blackburn, went into O2 store and they had run out of that model of phone Samsung Galaxy Europa i5700. We had a look round the store but we couldn’t see it. We asked the sales assistant and she said it must have been an online offer by O2.

We left the store, walked round to Carphone Warehouse but it cost more than double than the O2 offer and decided we would go to nearby Accrington to see if we could buy it in-store so we got on the bus and travelled to Accrington we arrived and went into the O2 store, again asked and they didn’t have it in stock, I asked which local stores had them in stock, the assitant checked local stores but no O2 stores had any in. So we decided to go home and try and order them online from O2.

We got home I made some coffee and and something to eat, I then fired up my netbook went to look at the offer, and we saw on a different website that Carphone Warehouse would price match the offer.

This is where the fun and games started. I called Carphone Warehouse and after the operator saw the offer she asked her boss if she could price match it, they would but I would have to pay £10 topup, with the offer I didn’t need to topup, so I decided not to take up the offer because it  wasn’t really much of a price match.

So I went onto the O2 website and placed an order, Ursula attempted to do the same until her Visa Debit card started playing up, on Visa cards there’s an extra section to complete called verify by Visa and she couldn’t remember her password, it asked for example 7th, 10th 12th characters of her password.
Ursula then asked me if I could order it using my debit card, we have a joint bank account but it didn’t really matter who’s name it was in.

Ursula had an online chat with a sales advisor who advised her that the handset was completly unlocked and unbranded.

I placed my order and got a order acknowlegement by email and got one for Ursula too. On sunday I got an order confirmation with a order tracking number with DHL, I thought the other order would arrive by email too as the order was only ordered 3 minutes apart. When it became clear the 2nd email didn’t arrive Ursula went online to find out why only one of the orders was confirmed. O2 said that the email would arrive Monday. I kept going to the DHL website to track the progress of the order by putting in the tracking code. I went to bed, woke up on Monday morning and got up.

I switched  my netbook on and checked the status of my order at 1026 it was on the van out for delivery, at 1335 the intercom buzzer went off and I went down to sign for the parcel.

I brought the parcel upstairs and I opened the parcel took out the phone, assembled it and put in my 3uk simcard, and it asked for network unlock  code. So Ursula went straight back onto the O2 website to chat to an O2 Guru. We asked why had we been lied to, saying we was told it was an unlocked handset, and unless they were prepared to waive the unlock fee as it we given the wrong information. The man said it was not possible unless I was prepared to pay the £15 unlock fee-after  12 months. We were given a number to ring for returns. We also checked the status of Ursula’s phone and it turned out it was actually out of stock, despite being charged for 2 phones.

We rang the returns dept who said we could send the phone back because we hadn’t activated the phone via the O2 simcard.

We were given an address to send the phone back to, but were also told that the Post Office would give us a jiffy bag to send back, but the Post Office said no we had to pay for a jiffy bag. We returned home, again back onto the 0844 number, so we asked a bag to be sent , and they said they would send us one.

What really annoyed me was the way we were lied to and why did they deduct the payment before despatching the phone?

Zynga Need a Good Kick Up The Backside

I think Zynga have lost the plot a bit. I used to enjoy playing Farmville and Cafe World. But the games has grown too big they became a monsters. The games started out as simple browser games played through Facebook and other social networking sites, in which you only needed a low powered pc, now you need a fast gaming computer to be able to run the games without it running too slow to be of any use.

In my opinion there should be 2 versions of the games, one which is full a blown version where you have your co-op and mastering challenges and another where you just simply plant-harvest-sell on portable devices like netbooks and tablet pc’s.

If you have an Apple iPad, iPhone, or a iPod Touch you can get the Farmville app from the Apple store. If you have an Android device stop reading now!! as there are no plans to release an Android version of farmville even though there’s actually more Android users than IOS users.

The charity that Zynga support Help Haiti is admirable raising loads of money for the children caught up in the Tsunami through the special in app purchases is all well and good, but what about the band of millions of Android users, yes I understand Android devices come in all shapes and sizes from a extremely low powered processors and being relatively cheap right up to the high power devices that cost more a conventional PC. However Zynga should be able to sort something out for Android users the Android system is fairly standard.

SORT IT OUT ZYGA.

Do 3 really have the worst Customer Service?

According to Which magazine 3 mobile came bottom of the pile when it came to mobile phone’s network customer services coming in at 69th place. The winner was O2.

But we really need to examine as to why 3’s customer service is really that bad.

I personally have been a customer of 3 for 5 years and Ursula my partner has been a customer almost since day one.

The problems we’ve had have been everything from reception issues to faulty handsets to trying to obtain a PAC code.

On occasions we’ve been lied to maybe unintentionally, or the operator wasn’t aware of the facts.

The main problem is that although it is a UK company the call centre is based in Mumbai, India. There is sometimes a language barrier because the operator speaks very little English as I would imagine English would be their 2nd language.

They used to offer good value for money but these days they’re just like any other network.

Another thing that 3 do is lock the handsets in way that affects the operation of the handset. The 3g to 2g switch is disabled meaning if you live in a borderline 3g area your handset will not work. It will reboot the phone and sometimes you can’t even make call or send a text message. The operator will blame the handset and tell you to send the handset in for repair, but you know its not the handset – well it is kind of, its usually the firmware in the handset which has 3 branding, I always try to get the handset unlocked and get the generic firmware installed.

This last week we were in the last 30 days our the contracts.  We rang up to get our PAC codes which was a intention to leave the network and port the numbers to another network. It was like the Spanish inquisition why did we want to leave the network, we simply said we wanted an 18 month contract with a free handset (LG Optimus one) or (htc Wildfire) they said we could have either but would have to pay £80 upfront so we promply told them where to go, this went on for the past week.

We finally got a new contract a better deal than we’re already on. The girl in my local 3store used her own discount to get us the deal an HTC Wildfire which I am actually writing this blog on.

If 3 moved they’re much fabled call centre to the UK, who knows it might win an award for their customer services. But I would very much doubt it somehow.

Apples’s Big Annoucement

Yesterday I visited the Apple website and there was a blank screen with 4 clocks with the time they would make a big announcement at 3pm UK time.

I visited various forums and started a thread on the What Mobile Forum everybody who posted on my thread had different things to say. I saw in some forums it was to do with cloud storage where you subcribe (being Apple it wouldnt be cheap) where you either put you entire music collection onto the cloud based storage system or a Spotify where you pay a fee each month and have it’s entire catalogue at your disposal, basically you stream music to your phone but unless you buy the music off the site the music is only yours until you stop your paying it.

A lot of pundits said it was something to do iTunes acquiring the countries most famous group the Beatles back catalogue, I thought god I hope not, all that hype just for that.

Anyway 3pm came and went on Wednesday in the UK, at 3.12pm a picture of the fab four appeared on the front page of iTunes.

Imagine my and everybodies elses disappointment when we found out what all the hype was about.

iTunes/Apple on Facebook and on the forums got absolutely slated as the Apple said this would change everything trouble is they always say that.

What a bunch of Numpties Apple are.