strange_complex | Entries tagged with questions

Two weeks ago, I had an eye test, and last week, I went to pick up my new specs.

I really like the way they look. But there's a problem: the prescription for the right lens is too weak.

Double trouble: I had the glasses made up by a different optician from the one who did the eye test.

My problem now is that I've been sold something which doesn't meet my needs, but I don't really know what rights or liabilities I have in this situation. The fault clearly lies with the lady who did the original eye test - but I only paid £5 to her for that privilege. Meanwhile, I spent a lot more money than that on having spectacles made up from her prescription, but the opticians who made up those spectacles did so on perfectly good faith, and I have no reason to believe they did anything wrong. Getting the £5 back for the original eye test won't really do much to off-set the cost of having the incorrect lens replaced, but it seems to me that I can hardly expect the second optician to absorb the cost of replacing it either.

Did I accept liability for this situation when I voluntarily chose to go to another optician to have the glasses made up? Or do I have any kind of protection against the consequences of having paid rather a lot of money for an incorrect lens? I surely can't be the only person who's ended up in this situation, but I haven't been able to bring up any very suitable advice by Googling. The best I could find was this, which is someone reporting the same situation - but I'm not at all clear that any of the people advising him(?) have any real expertise in the matter, or indeed whether their comments would apply in the UK.

( Further stuff about it, no longer really relevant to the issue of whose fault this was )

Anyway, if anyone has been in this situation, or knows anything about what my rights are, please do comment. And if not, I guess I've just got more inconvenience and another hefty bill coming up...

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I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself on the technology front today. I have:

Finally got my DVD-video and Sky-box to talk to one another. It turned out that I'd got it all set up right in the first place, but just needed to choose the A1 channel on the DVD-video machine instead of letting it sit on channel 1.
Convinced my BT Home Hub to supply full wireless coverage to my entire house, rather than just a 2m pool immediately around it. Those people who said that the key to doing this was changing the channel it was broadcasting on (dakegra first, I think, confirmed by kernowgirl's husband) were really right. Setting it to channel 6 completely transformed it from basically not really working at all to working absolutely perfectly everywhere I could want it to. Amazing.

However, I still have a technological question:

Having recently bought my laptop from Dell, I want to take advantage of their partnership with ReCOM to recycle my old desktop PC to charity. I've checked that it meets their requirements, and established what I need to do to get it collected, but obviously it's crucial to ensure that it is data-safe before it goes out of my house. So far I have:

Uninstalled pretty much every piece of software I ever installed on it, with the exception of harmless ones like Adobe Acrobat
Told both IE and Firefox to clear all my personal data (passwords, browser history, favourites etc.)
Manually deleted all internet cache files, cookies etc. just to be sure
Wiped all my old documents, pictures and music (after copying them to my new machine, natch) and all temp files
Emptied the Recycle bin
Defragmented the hard drive

For the record, I never used anything other than web-based email accounts from it, so there shouldn't be old emails stored anywhere on it.

Is there anything else I should be doing before I let someone else have it? Or is rendering what was my primary personal and work computer for a total of six years truly data-safe so difficult to do properly that I'd be better off smashing the hard-drive with a hammer and taking it to the tip?

...just a big list of questions. If anyone has thoughts or theories, let me know. Otherwise, this just acts for my own reference, so I know what I'm looking out for in the next two episodes.

( 'Utopia' and other Doctor Who and Torchwood spoilers under here )

Very enjoyable. I think overall I slightly preferred Wintersmith, mainly because its story-arc felt better crafted - some the scenes in the Queen's domain dragged a little for me. But I like Tiffany all the more now, and I warmed to the Nac Mac Feegles over the course of this book in a way I hadn't with Wintersmith.

I'm also now in a better position to appreciate the genesis of the unity of setting which I noticed in Wintersmith. People who've read Hatful of Sky can put me right if necessary, but it looks to me now as though all the Tiffany / Feegles books do the same thing. And this is great, because I've always felt that Terry Pratchett is extremely good at writing landscape - not just as some hills or rocks, but as a quasi-living entity which shapes the people who live on it. The whole of the Discworld benefits from this, but focussing on the Chalk in the Tiffany books really gives him the opportunity to bring it out to a new level - and I think it is actually the thing I like about them most of all.

The motif of the picture on the front of Jolly Sailor tobacco packet has left me with a puzzle, though. I'm sure I've read some other children's fiction book in which a rather isolated near-adolescent girl derives solace from a similar rugged tobacco-pouch sailor, coming to think of him as 'her Hero'. He may even have appeared as a real person in some form towards the end of the book. But I can't for the life of me remember what this book might have been. All I can say is that it probably wasn't by Diana Wynne Jones, because feel that I read whatever-it-was quite some time ago. That rules out all but the Chrestomanci books, and none of them have the right kind of isolated female character at their centre. I've browsed my shelves, but can't see any clues - and might not anyway, as quite a few of my older books are in storage with my parents. Can anyone else enlighten me on this?

Julius Caesar answers are on hold until Monday, I'm afraid. I've half-written them, but was too snowed under to post them on Thursday, and then Mum arrived for the weekend so I'm busy doing stuff with her now - shopping, house-hunting and the opera this evening.

Just time to post a quick question relating to her visit, though. She's come up in the car, so we thought it would be nice to drive out to a local village tomorrow for a pub lunch. Does anyone from this part of the world have any recommendations? For example, which direction out of Leeds would we be best advised to drive in if we want nice scenery and pretty villages-with-pubs? And does anyone know of any particularly good places for a nice pub lunch?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

I can take screen-caps using the DVD player on my computer, but in order to do so, I have to disable something called 'hardware motion compensation'. This means that whenever I think "Ooh, must get a screen-cap of that!", the thought is almost always followed by "Ah, but I'd have to do that disabling thingy, wouldn't I? Gah, maybe I don't really need that screen-cap after all."

What I'd like to know, therefore, is how important hardware motion compensation actually is, and whether I could get away with just leaving it off all the time? Can anyone advise?

BTW, my computer is a desktop, and I never move it around anywhere. If that even has anything to do with hardware motion compensation...

Ooh, how nice! Warwick have the heating on. And I hadn't even thought about it until my subsconscious registered how particularly pleasant and toasty my office was feeling.

Have the powers that be at Queen's cracked yet?

EDIT: And, in other news, I have just turned my work calendar over to the month of October, and I am treated to a picture of a guinea-pig nibbling apprehensively at a pumpkin. Meanwhile, outside, trees are displaying a mix of green and shocking red. Oh yes, it's Autumn. :(

This is one for my computery friends:

I use an AVG virus checker, which I update once a week and which runs automatically once a day. I've been used to it taking about 20 minutes to run its daily test (of the whole C drive), or more if I am using my computer at the same time.

However, for the last couple of days it has suddenly been taking only about 10 minutes to run the same test. Nothing significant has changed about my C drive, so why might this be? And should I be worried: could it means there are parts of my C drive which now aren't being checked for some reason?

Everything else seems to be in full health, by the way.

Hope someone can help!