David North

Sifting through the digital debris on my hard drive, I came across an old favourite from my university days. So now it can be told – the story of how I (with quite a lot of help from Andrew and Martin) wasted many hours of my precious youth on a joke wakeup calls service…

The place: Magdalen College, Oxford. The time: October, 2008. The setting: a party. The topic of conversation: my awful sense of humour and propensity for bad puns. Someone jokingly said to me “you could run a wakeup calls service with your joke of the day … you could call it PUNctuality”. And the name was so awesome, we actually sat down and built it.

Magdalen had (still has!) internal phones in every student’s room. Calls within the university were (are!) free, and armed with this and a VOIP adapter purchased off eBay, we set about building the system.

We had one phone line, an ATA and a copy of Asterisk. The first problem we encountered is that Oxford University’s dial tone is not the same as BT’s, so we couldn’t tell when our callee had picked up or hung up. We ended up throwing a 30 second chunk of (out-of-copyright) music before the calls to give people time to pick up before we played the joke

Our second problem was that we had just the one phone line. So having everyone request a call at 0730 wasn’t going to fly – we’d have to stagger the calls at least 1 minute apart.

Armed with this and a GCI to make Asterisk make the call, I put together the world’s simplest web interface in 400 lines of PHP/MySQL:

The PUNctuality front page

I obviously wasn’t taking any chances on the legal side:

And, a mere term after the idea first came up, we’d made it a reality:

We had a launch party – complete with a USB big red button to make the phone ring with the first ever call. PUNctuality ran successfully for the whole of Hillary Term 2009, even waking up my parents in a college guest room one weekend. We had just one day of downtime caused by the ATA crashing. In the end, the reason I never brought it back for another term was mostly the sheer effort of coming up with a fresh joke every day. Andrew and Martin set it up so I could dial in on my mobile, enter a PIN and record the next day’s joke, but even when your friends all collected the innards of their Christmas crackers for you, being funny on a daily basis isn’t easy!

I was chuffed to see that the latest issue of Private Eye (number 1337) had printed my letter about the university’s controversial Port Meadow development here in Oxford.

Hats off to the Eye for always being willing to print criticism as well as praise – it’s well worth the trivial cost of an annual subscription.

I got a new bike this week. After six years in Oxford, riding around on £100 cheap and nasty bikes with inadequate lights, I decided it was about time I stopped pushing my luck and spent some real money on my primary mode of transportation. Happily my employer participates in the Cycle To Work Scheme (and unlike some, administer it all in-house with no middle-man taking a cut), allowing me the use of a decent road bike for a relatively modest deduction from my next twelve pay slips. Here’s a fairly poor picture of it propped up in my hall:

Impressions so far? I know nothing about bikes, but spending real money definitely makes for something which feels much smoother, safer and easier to ride. Having a really good (£100) set of lights makes a major difference too, and panniers are really useful to prevent your back getting all sweaty with a backpack.

Incidentally, various friends who’ve been burned in the past chipped in with some helpful advice:

• Never forget to take your lights off when you park the bike, or someone else will take them off for you
• Register the frame number with these websites, and there’s a good chance you might get it back if someone steals it and it’s later recovered. Obviously, a solid lock and a dose of paranoia should prevent that…

I can also recommend Beeline on Cowley Road to Oxford residents – very pleasant and helpful, and a couple of free services post-purchase thrown in too.

Today, I put my wallet through the washing machine. Needless to say, this was not intentional.

Let’s start with the good news: despite being made of paper, the wallet itself looks as good as it did when it went in (which is not very, after three years’ hard duty):

The £10 note is still very recognisable, if a bit crinkly.

The plastic cards varied widely in appearance after a good wash at 40. My UK driving licence takes the top prize for being completely undamaged, with Oxfordshire Libraries a close second (slightly bent, but barely noticeable). The rest weren’t so well-built. My debit card became interestingly bubbly, and my credit cards all bent to the shape of the bit of washing machine they ended up wedged against. A bit of a bodge involving the iron and a towel has flattened most of them out again (and they do work – chip and PIN isn’t fazed at all by a good wash), but I fear it’s time to order replacements.

Whoops.

Those of you who know me will be aware that the happy coalition of housemates I assembled for the year July ’11 to August ’12 ended up being For One Year Only. So, just over 12 months since I last had this problem, I was moving into a new place and in the market for an Internet connection.

On paper, the choice here in Oxford is obvious – Virgin Media have cable everywhere, and it significantly outperforms ADSL over copper phone lines.

However. That’s what I thought a year ago, and our year with the cheapest Virgin Media internet package was pretty poor. Although it ran at a healthy 10mbps most of the time, it slowed to the point of being unusable quite often, especially at peak times. Sometimes it cut off altogether. Whether this was a problem of poor infrastructure, the not-so-superhub (which I had to chain another router off to get decent wifi coverage, even in a tiny terraced house), or something else, I don’t know. And I don’t care. I was resolved not to go back to Virgin.

Being an unbeliever isn’t easy, though. For starters, my new place didn’t have an active BT line. For sure, it was riddled with a dozen or so phone sockets dating from the 80s and 90s – at least one of which looked like it might be a master – but none of them had a dial tone. At this point, most ISPs want you to fork over £120 to BT to get a line with a number before they’ll do business with you. This saved me quite a lot of research, since it bought me inexorably to the door of The Post Office.

The Post Office’s ADSL offering is just a re-branding of BT’s service, but it looks like it covers all the basics – no usage limits, and the maximum speed your line can support, for £27/month (including rental of the BT line you’re not going to use). Most importantly, though, if you take broadband and the line rental from them, they’ll waive that installation charge in exchange for a 12 month contract.

 I made the call on the day I moved in – 3 September – and after some preliminary stuff, the lady informed me apologetically that they couldn’t get an engineer round until the 9th. Of October. I almost wavered at that point – Virgin have plastered our street with posters offering same-day installation – but I held firm and decided to tough it out.

[Digression - try living for a month without the Internet at home. It forced me to go outside and talk to people a lot more, which was very healthy].

I should point out that the month delay is in the hands of BT Openreach, the division of BT which runs the infrastructure other ISPs can rent for resale. Whichever way you go for your ADSL, you can’t entirely escape the BT monopoly.

The 9th of October rolled round soon enough, and I was given a time band of 1pm to 6pm during which the bloke would come round. After a tedious afternoon of working from home and burning through my mobile data allowance for a month in a few hours, he knocked on our door at 17.56. Hats off to him for bothering to keep the last appointment of the day rather than get off home.

Our line was installed and became live the next day. As new ADSL lines tend to, it started out at a fairly feeble 2mbps, but over the next ten days it worked its way up to about 6.5. That’s not spectacular, but it is (on the evidence so far) rock-solid stable and completely consistent. And, according to the BBC’s own figures, it’s enough for all three of us in the house to watch different iPlayer shows simultaneously. Which, if we’re honest, is what we’ll use it for.

Other thoughts? Although the slightly flimsy Zyxel black box router supplied didn’t exactly inspire confidence, it does give a decent WiFi signal. And it obtains the username/password magically when you plug it in, which is a neat touch.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on things, but on the basis of the first few weeks with this connection, I’d much rather have a slow and consistent ADSL line – and not have to deal with Virgin Media ever again.