What's my blog all about? It's a mixture of what I've been doing online, the latest technologies that interest me, my latest web development experiments and anything in general about myself that I decide I want to share online. I'll also post links to articles around the net that I feel are interesting and may be useful to others.

03-Feb-2008

A word of warning

Last Thursday I was involved in a car accident and subsequently had to get my car repaired. The garage which my insurance company got me to use were UK Assistance based in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. After a little digging around on the internet I could find very little about them only a few disgruntled customers complaining, so decided that when I received my car back I would write a few words about them for anybody else looking for information in the future.

UK Assistance phoned me within an hour of putting in my claim to arrange collection of my car and to deliver a courtesy car. As promised they turned up 3 days (Sunday) after my accident and delivered a very nice Renault Clio and took away my car for repair.

As promised, within 24 hours (Monday Evening) I'd received a phone call to discuss the repairs and was given a return date for my car for the following Wednesday.

To my surprise, yesterday (Saturday) I received a call to say my car was ready - 3 days early. I was pleasantly surprised, despite having only an hour earlier filled the courtesy car with half a tank of petrol.

This morning I received my car back and on first inspection everything appeared fine. The car was washed, waxed and valeted and looked as good as new. Then I begun to notice the problems.

They'd replaced my radiator, but kindly forgotten to put any water in the car. Luckily I spotted this before it had chance to overheat. Then, looking at the front bumper, noticed part of it was missing. The mud guard that ran along the front of the car under the number plate was nowhere to be seen. I checked underneath in case it was a new bumper design and didn't need one, but there were the slots where it should have been clipped into.

As I was under the car looking at the bumper, I noticed an electrical cable that ran into the radiator trailing on the floor - if I had have driven the car no doubt this could have been caught on the road and ripped out from my radiator leaving it without power. Also, whilst in UK Assistance's possession my car aerial has disappeared leaving me with no radio signal.

All in all I was pretty disappointed with these mistakes, and had I not checked the car so thoroughly I could have been left with an overheated radiator with no power, no radio, and excess mud underneath my bonnet.

As soon as I'd spotted these things, I did what any normally person would - ring and complain. Instead of receiving an apology and a offer to fix the problems, I was told the radiator was my responsibility to fill up, they couldn't attach the cable to anything so I should 'just tuck it back in' and they'd ring me back about the aerial and mud guard.

All in all, what started as a pleasant service after my crash turned into poor repairs and bad after sales care. I will of course be passing these comments onto my insurance company, and hope others do not experience the same poor service I have received.

posted by Kelvin Travers at 16:15 | 0 Comments

04-Dec-2007

Last.fm on the iPod Touch

Since I've had my iPod Touch the one thing that's been missing was the ability to scrobble tracks to Last.Fm. Yesterday a new application appeared in my iPod Touch installer called 'Mobile Scrobbler' which basically does exactly what I needed. It does require an active WiFi connection to be able to scrobble my recent tracks, but this usually isn't a problem.

posted by Kelvin Travers at 14:26 | 0 Comments

Gallery Pop Ups

New in Experiments - Gallery Pop Ups

A gallery pop up window overlays an image on top of the current page without the need to use traditional browser pop ups. Each image can be displayed on it's own, or by hovering over the image the user can move between the previous and next images of that gallery. See the Gallery Pop Up

All future blog posts which contain thumbnail images will now link to the larger images using this pop up method.

posted by Kelvin Travers at 14:14 | 0 Comments

20-Nov-2007

New hosting

Kelvintravers.co.uk and all sub domains have moved to a new hosting platform today resulting in some downtime whilst the DNS records propagated. This included the blog feed and all web services.

My new host - Streamline.net, will offer improved hosting stability along with some other features that will enable me to enhance my site and services further.

posted by Kelvin Travers at 16:42 | 0 Comments

05-Nov-2007

iPod Touch Photos

I've had my iPod Touch for almost 2 weeks now and thought I would post some photos, including a couple of it after I'd done the Jailbreak on it.

posted by Kelvin Travers at 10:55 | 0 Comments

26-Sep-2007

Services Refresh

I'm currently working on refreshing my services page to reflect my skills better and make it easier to understand the sort of design & development work I offer.

As part of the refresh I'm breaking my services down into 7 sections: