Richard Walker

This is becoming habit forming. Once again, it’s been an unforgivably long time since my last post, and quite a lot has been going on, and I simply have no excuse for my absence! In the last 6 months:

• I left a venture I was a part of. With my workload mounting up, it simply wasn’t viable for me anymore and I was putting too much at risk.
• My old work buddy Carl, in cooperation with a colleague of his, launched Dealush – a service designed to connect consumers with great local deals, and to help brick-and-mortar business participate in the online coupon deal wars.
• I moved back into my old New Farm office, where I was renting a desk from Salt Print. I am subsequently about to move out again, as the loft apartment above my garage is now vacant, and is 50sqm of perfect office space.
• I continued doing large amounts of work for Firstfolio, my biggest client.
• I started lending a hand in earnest to Holistic Page, who are about to take the book sales market in Australia in an exciting new direction.
• Egypt, Tunisia and Libya exploded into widespread revolt, apparently because the youth of the Arab world are, quite frankly, sick of their elder’s sh*t hangups baggage childishness. Perfect.

I’ve also found a brilliant new application (which has been around for a while now) that I use every day – Coda, by the brilliant folks at Panic.

Coda (image used without permission - hey, it's a free plug!)

Frankly, it’s brilliant. It combines the ever-so-indispensable usefulness of Transmit with the power and beauty of a top-notch text editor. Sorry, TextMate… you’re brilliant, but after 5 years, you’ve been trumped.

I’m also eagerly awaiting news on the next iPhone and iPad. As long as it comes with Angry Birds, I’ll be happy. If you don’t know what Angry Birds is and you have an iPhone or iPad, I strongly suggest you click this.

So, moving on… the new office. It’ll be fantastic to have so much space available again, and I plan on turning over a bit of a new leaf once I have all my hardware in there and set up… namely, fixing a few minor oversights with backups/redundancy, and adopting some solid (yet agile) development methodologies, specifically continuous integration. The problem is, I need a CI solution that’ll allow me to handle development, testing and deployment across a few different languages – namely PHP, Ruby and Python. I’m working with two frameworks in there as well, CakePHP and Rails, both of which have their own unit testing/deployment goodies, so I need something that’ll help everything work together as One Big Happy Family.

Anyway, once the new office is all set up, I’ll be refreshing this site with a new layout, and a section dedicated to my office setup and hardware/software deployment. It’ll be fun! I promise.

Dear Telstra,

After much deliberation (about 7 seconds) I have decided to shift my voice services to iiNet, in addition to my data services. This is for a few reasons:

1) They’re cheaper.
2) Their support is great.
3) When I called, I spoke to Adrian from Perth, not Raj from Mumbai, and Adrian had an Australian accent and could understand what I was saying and vice versa.
4) I didn’t get cut off halfway through the call (I can no longer count on one hand the number of times that has happened with Telstra in the last month).
5) They understand what a “generous quota” actually is and don’t use the word “Liberty” in the same context as “10gb/month”.

In addition to that, Telstra also failed to note that I canceled my *original* wireless service within the cooling off period (over $300), and that Telstra’s lack of accurate information led me to make a purchase of a SECOND wireless service, for which Telstra now expects me to pay full cancellation and hardware costs (over $400). To add insult to injury, Telstra have just billed me for another month of wireless access (~$165) despite the fact I no longer have a wireless service.

In yet another display of blatant ineptitude and disorganisation, getting my voice service connected in the first place was a struggle as Telstra was not in possession of up-to-date cabling records, and insisted that my home address does not, in fact, even exist. A Telstra representative also convinced me that I would be waiting “years” for additional ADSL ports to be supplied in my area, but that could be shortened to “months” if I switched to a business service, because that sort of build-out tends to be expedited. Less than 2 weeks after getting my landline connected, after Telstra finally sent a technician out to install the line anyway and just not bill me the installation cost if he did, in fact, find an active line (which he did), I was able to order ADSL through iiNet and had it connected in less than a week… despite the fact that Telstra insisted there was no way I was getting ADSL anytime soon. So essentially, I was sucked in to hopping on a Telstra Wireless plan by a combination of outdated information and outright lies, omissions and exaggeration.

Rest assured I have no intention on paying a single dollar of the ~$1,240 aggregate bill you’re about to hit me with, save for any costs incurred by *actual usage of service*, i.e. phone line rental, and the minute period of time during which I actually used your wireless service.

I wish to receive an updated bill which takes into account the waiver of fees for the first wireless plan (which was cancelled within Bigpond’s cooling off period, as confirmed by the representative who processed the order, and for which the associated hardware was returned), and the waiver of cancellation fees for the second wireless plan and associated hardware costs. In return, I am prepared to post back (at Telstra’s expense) the Bigpond Elite network gateway.

In essence, this leaves the line rental, call costs, and actual pro-rata usage of data services. I am happy to pay for these, as they represent what I actually used.

A copy of this letter is also going to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.

Kind regards,

Richard Walker