Unusual failure from Zen Internet

[mtbc]

With my family moving to Dundee, they had expected to stay with Zen Internet who have been competent and responsive over the years. However, installation at the new house failed miserably: after please don't hesitate to respond there was no reply at all to anything further that was sent. Eventually they gave up and went with Virgin Media instead.

It now turns out that Zen had the case assigned to somebody who was on leave so everything just accumulated unread in their personal inbox. They have now got back into work, apologized and initiated a refund but, goodness, it's interesting that their system allows this failure mode, and a surprise to us that Zen managed to lose a customer in this manner.

Virgin have the advantage of not having to rely on BT Openreach so the alternative engineer appointment was effected quickly.

Comments

[thewayne]

I just finished a fascinating book: The Four Geniuses of the Battle of Britain, David Coles and Peter Sherrard. The first genius, I can't name him off-hand, was a grandchild(?) of Watt of the steam engine fame, and the (UK) inventor of radar. The detailing of how it was used and jamming techniques were quite interesting. The other geniuses was Royce of Rolls Royce and his fighter engine development and legacy as he died before the war began, and the developers of the Hurricane and the Spitfire fighters.

I've always been a warbird buff, and I learned a heck of a lot about aviation reading this book! I'd love to read a similar book about bombers and their legacy in the air war. As I understand it, though I've only heard this and not seen it in print, the RAF had a much higher accuracy score as they considered a bomb a hit if they hit within a mile or so of the target, the US Army Air Corps within a block!

[mtbc]

Glad you enjoyed it! The BBC make some decent documentaries about some of this stuff, I think some of them get American dubbing when they're shown here, one can tell because most of the interviewees are from British universities!

I wish I'd gotten more chance to look at some of the museums in Britain already. I used to work near enough to IWM Duxford to get to see Spitfires, biplanes, etc. in the sky sometimes and. more relevantly, not long ago, got to see a Lancaster bomber low overhead, the pilot happened to live in the Lancashire village I was in at the time and was practising for an air show in the region. I've probably gotten to see more air shows and museums here, like the National Museum of the US Air Force, I did a bit of defense contracting with AFMC at Wright-Patterson AFB.

Where I live now, mostly I just see the occasional government helicopter coming over on their way to the Y-12 National Security Complex, which I pass on my commute.

[thewayne]

I was very fortunate growing up in Phoenix.  We had the Champlain Air Fighter Museum in Mesa: one wing was World War I aircraft, the other was WW II fighters!  Sadly, the museum was sold off and the planes dispersed to the four winds,, and that was when I was starting out in photography, those negatives are who knows where.  Next to it was a (then) Confederate Air Force museum that had a B-17 bomber that, for a very small fee ($5-10?), you could crawl through!  And it was air-worthy and went to shows!  We had two air bases, Luke AFB and Williams(?), which later shut down, and I went to air shows there where I met quite a number of very interesting aircraft, including the B-1.  I remember talking to the crew of an F-4 Phantom, it was from a California Air Guard unit that came over the for the weekend.  The F-4 is unique in that the back seater has a duplicate set of controls and can completely fly the aircraft!  Anyway, the plane had a unique tank-looking object under the centerline of the fuselage, but it wasn't a drop tank as those have a different aerodynamic styling.  I asked the pilot what it was.  "Oh, that's a napalm bomb.  When we fly to an air show, we have one mounted and use it as a cargo pod to carry our clothes and stuff for the weekend."  I thought that was a pretty cool peace-time use for a very nasty weapon! But the best thing about Phoenix, for a fan of war birds was being two hours away from Tucson.  Tucson has the Pima Air and Space Museum.  It has over a half dozen B-52s of various types, including one that carried the X-15 rocket plane, it has one or two Presidential Air Force One planes, it has an SR-71, a few WW I flyers, many WW 2 and Vietnam era fighters, a NASA transport that flew Saturn stages to Florida called the Super Guppy, transport and cargo helicopters, and many British and Russian birds. Also next to Tucson, 20 minutes or so South, is the Titan Silo, a retired nuclear ICBM silo turned into a museum and managed by Pima.  The missile is in the tube, very strategically deactivated and carefully watched by the Russians.  I've toured it several times, quite a sobering thing to see.  All of the other Titan silos have been destroyed.  Needless to say, there's great Mexican food in Tucson, also a wonderful used bookstore chain called Bookman's.  They have two locations in Phoenix that I always visit at least one when I'm in town.

I've also been to the Strategic Air Command museum outside of Omaha, Nebraska, which is where I photographed two of the three SR-71s that I have and met my one and only U-2spy plane.  I also met the British Vulcan bomber, sadly when I was last there it had been moved outside.  Still, I spent a lot of time photographing it - it is in very bad need of a paint job!  I understand the last flying Vulcan has been retired, I would have loved to have seen that in the air!  A friend of mine used to live in Omaha and I visited the museum twice.