Geek – Page 15 – stevelawson.net

June 12, 2006

stevelawson.net vs aol.com

no, I’m not setting up a rival international ISP with crap interface and ‘keywords’. the ‘vs’ in the heading refers to my not being able to email anyone with an aol.com or aim.com email address. This is almost certainly because both my stevelawson.net and steve-lawson.co.uk domains have been spoofed by some spamming wankers using them to send out god-knows-what, and after a certain number of spam emails received by aol users, they’ve just blacklisted the domain names. I think…

So I’ve emailed their customer services (or rather, got someone else to email their customer services, as they have an aol address so wouldn’t have got it!!!) and asked them to unblock my main email addresses (steve@ each of the domain names).

But for now, if you’re an AOL/AIM user, if you have an alternative email address, please include it when emailing me. If you’ve emailed me recently and were expecting a reply that hasn’t arrived, it may well be that I sent it and it was eaten by the AOL blacklist…

June 6, 2006

my beautifully flawed design work…

Spent a bit of time this morning updating and redesigning pillowmountainrecords.co.uk – it looks lovely, until you change the font size in your browser away from the default. Then it goes all weird. Must find out how to do scaleable boxes in CSS… the Lovely Rev. G gave me some tips, so will check them out.

Anyway, I like the look of the site, and it’s up to date. Will finish it at some point, I’m sure. :o)

Had a rather nice lunch today with BJ Cole, catching up on news, planning for the gig on Thursday at the Half Moon, and then finally letting him hear his own fine work on ‘Scott Peck’ from the new album. What a lovely way to spend the afternoon.

Sales update – the new CD is selling really well, thanks so much to all those of you who’ve already ordered it. The sooner you do, the greater my peace of mind over the cost of releasing it in the first place! :o) I hope y’all are enjoying ‘Lessons Learned From The Fairly Aged Felines’ (if you’ve had any trouble with the download process, let me know and we’ll sort something out…)

May 28, 2006

New server…

just moved everything over to the new server for my main site. Haven’t updated this to look the same yet… will sort it later. If any links don’t work… tough. A few things need tweaking.

:o)

May 9, 2006

Comments are back!

The comments section of the site has been down for a few days, but is now back up and running, if a little shakily… So please go back and post all those lovely comments you’ve been storing up over the last few days! :o)

May 3, 2006

Comments down…

The comments are currently not working, so save those pearls of wisdom until further notice. :o)

March 24, 2006

Yay!

Right, back on my own laptop, nothing disappeared from the harddrive, all seems to be working. I’m still in the Apple Store using their wireless, so won’t know if the firewire is back working til I get home… watch this space.

March 24, 2006

Laptop update

Phone call just now from me to them (they still haven’t called me once). The repair is apparently ‘finished’ but my laptop is in testing… so I might not get it back today. Huh? It’s 10.30am, how long does it take to test to see if it’s working? One of you geeks might be able to fill me in on this, but running some kind of diagnostic test on a laptop to make sure the Logic board is working can’t take 24 hours can it?

Miserable git on the phone – I asked roughly how long after the test was finished would I be called, given that I’ve been promised three phone-calls so far and had none of them. No help at all. A request for a note to be put on it that the repair is already overdue and it’s urgent. No can do.

Useless losers.

March 23, 2006

A week without my laptop

So much for ‘Apple Care’ – it’s been a week since I dropped off my laptop to be repaired. For the last two days I’ve been phoning, getting put on hold, been told three times that I’ll be called back, and have yet to receive any calls at all, or talk to anyone who knows anything about my laptop. Until 5 minutes ago, the support website at apple.com said ‘information not available’ about the status of my repair. As I write, I’m still on hold (38 minutes and counting), but the website has updated to ‘repair in progress’. That’s fine except that it says that the laptop was dropped off at the shop TODAY!!!! That’s clearly total shit, as it was dropped off a week ago today. So it’s been sat there, with no-one knowing where it was, or caring, for a week before some fucking jobsworth realised that it might actually be wise to locate the laptop they’ve had FOR A WEEK and fix the damn thing.

Meanwhile, I’ve been using TSP’s laptop, which is exceedingly kind of her, but it hasn’t got my bookmarks or diary on it, hasn’t got Skype or Adium or any of the other stuff I use daily. Meanwhile Apple don’t give a shit. Bastards.

If you’re getting a computer repaired by Apple, my advice is phone them EVERY DAY. Call them as soon as you get home after dropping it off, check the website hourly and hassle the shit out of them until they fix it and get it back to you. Otherwise, it’ll just end up on a pile of non-urgent jobs, and get done when the pile gets so high they can’t find their way out of the office without fixing a few.

Balls to Apple Care. 42 minutes on hold – great service.

March 16, 2006

No laptop for a week :o(

Dropped off the laptop at the Apple store this morning for its repair. No laptop for up to a week! What on earth am I going to do? Probably get some work done, to be honest… we’ll see, I shall report back on whether productivity is up or down. I think the only thing that’s likely to go down is my number of new people added to myspace. And I might even get a proper start on the new album… watch this space.

Don’t forget, Recycle Collective gig tonight – more marvellous music in London’s coolest venue, with me, Bj Cole and Thomas Leeb. you’d be nutz to miss it. :o)

March 13, 2006

broked laptop

Just been to the Apple Store on Regent Street to get my laptop seen to. The firewire port is fried, which I discovered when I tried to hook up my M-Audio soundcard last week, in order to get my new copy of Pro-Tools M-Powered working. No joy. Tried the soundcard on the PC, worked fine, so must be the Mac.

Took it in today, helpful bloke called Edd (two ‘d’s, it’s on the form) did the usual trouble-shooting stuff before agreeing that it was, indeed, fooked. The remedy, sadly, is having the Logic Board replaced, which means leaving my beloved ibook with them for up to a week. With my desktop beastie not really set up at the moment to manage my life, I’m taking the ibook home for a couple of days to get all the info I need on a daily basis transferred across, and I’ll drop this back in on thursday for the repair. Fortunately it’s a warranty repair, so it’s free, as was the replacement of my keyboard, which they did today, as most of the letters had rubbed off. Yay!

So next week, I’ll be laptopless for a week, unless I can convince TSP to lend me her lovely new ibook… fat chance – she’s got more sense than that.