InterCable verlag

What is gonna follow, is a rather detailed account of my troubles with the abovementioned Swiss company, and the Swiss embassy in Athens (no troubles with the embassy, they were amazingly helpful).

About four months ago, I was hired to work as a programmer for a small ISV. Before my showing up there, the company had received by surface mail what looked like an advertisement by a Swiss company for FREE inclusion in their Internet Catalogue of European Businesses. A form was filled-in and faxed to them, signed by the boss...

About four weeks later, the company got an invoice for 600€. It seemed we owed InterCable money for having been included in their cdrom version of the catalogue. A closer look to the signed fax we sent them revealed that it actually said that by signing we silently agreed to be included in the cdrom version of the catalogue. If all we wanted was inclusion in the online version, we should have returned the fax unsigned.

The company immediately send an email asking for cancellation of the so called contract, only to be notified that cancellation was impossible, since more than three weeks had passed since the placement of our so-called order.

At which point the company choose to ignore them. But requests for payment kept on coming.
This was the situation when I joined in.

Google revealed a rather interesting collection of facts about InterCable. The majority of the links it produced where complaints about InterCable's misleading contracts and practices. I started reading and discovered that the best way to stop them was to file a formal complaint with the Swiss embassy in my country. So I did.

Here is the letter I initially sent to the embassy (company names and logos removed).

They were most helpful. They immediately called and told me that the matter of InteCable had come up in the past, that after the complaints InterCable usually stopped sending invoice and threats of legal action, and if I could send them an English version of the letter with all related correspondence attached.

Here is the English version I sent after their request. I then waited.

A couple of weeks later, InterCable sent us the cdrom we had supposedly ordered… :-)

Another week later I received a call from the Swiss embassy informing us that the matter had been closed and that InterCable would bother us no more. Any invoices we might get, we should ignore, cause they were probably sent before the matter was closed.

We mailed their cdrom back to them.

At Last!

Since I recently got a raise...
I thought I'd spent it on internet services...

So, I got DSL at home, At Last!
So now I'm gonna buy World Of Warcraft, start playing and never see the sunlight again.

Η λέξη της ημέρας: πληρώ

Το παράξενο του πράγματος: η έκφραση "ο ενδιαφερόμενος πρέπει να πληροί τις παρακάτω προϋποθέσεις" γράφεται με -οί και όχι με εί...

πληρώ, πληροίς, πληροί...

RAID 1

After years of depending on good luck and rarely backing up my code, I decided to invest some money on a simple raid solution. I am planing to buy 2 80GB SATA drives and a simple raid controler and set it up as a data-only partition. No OS, just a mirrored drive.

I have decided to buy the following, if I manage to get a hold of them in Greece:

Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 1210SA
2 x 80 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA ST380013AS

Any comments would be greatly appreciated...

Persistence

"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Calvin Coolidge

DDJ (Dr. Dobbs Journal)

DDJ was the magazine I could never follow as a noob. I understood one out of every ten articles that were in there, but I kept coming back to it and used to buy a copy once a year.
So, I was amazed to find out that for 20USD I could get a subscription to the online version (distributed in .pdf format), full access to past archives, access to what is left of the once great Byte magazine (and of course the articles of Jerry Pournelle) and what appears to be the remnants of an early 1990s magazine called AI Expert...

AI Expert must have lasted a couple of years or so... Not exactly sure how long, but it mustn't have been longer that that. Discovering that it still exists, albeit in a bi-monthly newsletter form, really made my day...

So, here's a link I came across while reading some of the articles there. Although old, still quite interesting. And with an impressive title, too: "Virtual Urban Legends: Investigating the Ecology of the World Wide Web"

Luba - Let It Go

After years of wondering, I finally got down to it and discovered the singer of "Let it go", a song I've been listening to far too often in the past few years. Turns out, group's name was "Luba", first name of lead singer Luba Kowalchyk, a Canadian girl from Ukranian parents.
Go ahead and try it - type "Luba - Let It Go" in your favorite P2P client - you won't run into any trouble locating it; it's quite popular.

Interesting trivia: The band got a Juno award (the Canadian music awards, named after Pierre Juneau) for the song in 1985

True Nerd

I have become a true nerd. Instead of waking up, opening up my bedroom window and enjoying the sunshine, I wake up, power up my pc, connect to the internet, and check ForecastFox to see if there is rain or shine outside my window...

Only then do I decide what to wear for the day.

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