Hoke’s Ramblings

Just mosied over to Nu Metro's coming soon page, and realised there's a lot to see in the next month or two, not least of which is the next Potter (Have ticket's for Thursday's premiere at the Il Grande – w00t!)

Candidates for this Christmas' cinematic excursions are (in order of appearance):

- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (1 Dec)

- Doom (9 Dec)

- Oliver Twist (9 Dec)

- King Kong (16 Dec)

- Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (23 Dec)

- The Brothers Grimm (6 Jan)

Hmm…notice how all of them are adaptations of one kind or another?

Since Gaz reminded me of my earlier plight with Take2 I thought I'd better post an epilogue to that story…

Seems like what they sent me actually was what I ordered, but Nu Metro just couldn't be arsed to make decent DVD box covers. The same thing happened to me with the Count of Monte Cristo (also Nu Metro, I think) – Got loads of goodies on the disc, but doesn't say so on the box. I'm sure their sales would leap if they just put a little effort into the covers – I mean how can you make an informed decision buying a shrink-wrapped DVD if the right info isn't on the box?!

But I'm still never buying from Take2 again because they're rude and obnoxious.

Ra Ra for Kalahari!

[Side Note: News of my expedition into darkest Mozambique to go snorkelling with Whale Sharks to come, once photos have been compiled...stay tuned]

[S.S.N.: Telkom called while I was away to say my ADSL installation was scheduled for 29 Dec - bloody useless! Have had to delay till 9 Jan when I'm back from hols...at least it's one less month to be paying Telkom ]

Damn, cursed Microsoft Internet Explorer!

Apologies to any of my readers who use IE (are there any besides Edgar?) … seems like when I added the “Dubya Says” block the whole blog got shifted off the screen.

I promptly fixed it by adding a break “
” after the table and quite literally broke eveything. So Dubya's been suspended for a while.

The legendary James Doohan, aka Montgomery Scott of Trek fame is going to be blasting off into space early next year. He unfortunately probably won’t enjoy this trip to the Final Fontier because he is actually dead.

But if you want to be part of this tribute, you can leave him a message that will be part of the payload on the launch.

Seems nothing actually happens unless you phone and harass these people. But this sounded pretty positive. Let's see.

Since at least two people are seemingly vaguely interested in my plight with Telkom, here's an update:

My order was stuck at the “commercial department”. I was given the number to call, and after two days of nobody answering on the 031 number (?!) someone picked up, sounding mightily harassed.

After rebuking me for not knowing that my order number should have “/44″ at the end (?!) she said “ok, i'll release it – call 0800 blah blah tomorrow to arrange installation”

Dunno why it couldn't have just been released in the first place, but there you go.

I called the 0800 the next day, as the tired, grumpy Durban lady suggested only to be told, “I see you called yesterday. He is following up and is doing his best to sort this out. There is nothing more we can do right now”.

I'm led to believe that the tech guys are trying to figure out if my exchange is DSL enabled or not.

More to come, if it ever does…

I hate to join the thousands of other frustrated ranters around the country, but anyway, here goes…

Against my better judgement, my rubber arm was twisted into signing up for ADSL. Now, I'm still waiting, even after the '11 working day' waiting period, but I fully expected that to happen – that's not what this rant's about.

My rant is about the new 1 November HARD CAPPING story introduced by Telkom, forcing their reseller ISP's to cut you off, after your pathetic 3Gb limit has been reached (easily do-able, even @ 192kbps). My SUPER-rant is that Telscum aren't playing by their own rules!