The Blackbox

The Student Loans Company is possibly one of the most useless establishment that I have ever had the pain of having to communicate with.

I am now battling them due to a loan value being placed against a student loan account which had been completely cleared of any outstanding amount. The SLC claim that the money has been paid, the supposed receiver says no money was due or has been received – yet the whole the debt is being paid on a monthly basis when nothing is owed!

There is no choice in the matter because it comes out by PAYE and payroll won’t stop it until HMRC advise them to, which they won’t as the SLC says they are owed money – it is a horrendously inefficient and bordering on fraudulent system when it comes to mistakes being made by the SLC.

After numerous phonecalls, a letter was sent to the SLC, including all the requested information and we were assured it would be resolved. 1 week later we receive a standard letter response, with the issue not having been looked into.

We have replied once again and have now attempted to use the “official” complaints procedure to see how that goes, but seeing as it’s still internal to the SLC, I am not expecting a great response. Watch this space…

Posted a couple of weeks ago, is this “Shopping online for blind people” article on the BBC News Technology pages. As per usual, the BBC’s technology team have done some excellent research to use in this article.

The first site we see, confuse.com (not to be confused with confused.com – hah), is shown as a price comparison site….. which it blatantly isn’t. It’s an ad site, which has the same standard layout as all other ad sites, and if you click on any of the supposed comparison links, all you see is a page of adverts. Excellent work BBC.

In the latest patch for Left 4 Dead, Valve have decided to fix the difficulty under Versus mode to Normal.  I didn’t think much of this, having played on Expert and finding it ridiculously difficult, until I played it a few times.

What is now evident, is that people are just trying to rush through each level, instead of having to take it slow and steady and think about what they are doing.

Last night, 8 of us experienced gamers, on our own server, had to play it on Normal…. and it was boring. Too easy to fight off a rush of horde, too easy to kill Hunters, too easy to kill a Tank. Expert was too hard, Normal is too easy.

From the various threads I’ve read elsewhere it looks as if this is because people have been voting to change the difficulty mid-game – well here’s a novel idea – why not just disable that functionality?! Once a campaign has started, the difficulty can’t be changed. Let it be specified at the Lobby. That way all players know what they’re about to play. Don’t completely restrict the setting. I hate to think what an organised clan/team match will be like on Normal setting. It will be more like a sprint than a tactical team game.

I do wish people would stop spouting rubbish about AJAX. Clicking a link and making a div appear/disappear is not AJAX – how many times do I have to explain this to these people?

AJAX refers to not interfering with the display and behaviour of the existing page, whilst communicating with the server in the ‘background’. Once it’s received a response, then the page can be updated.

Yes clicking a link and making things appear/disappear might be done with Javascript, but it is not making an asynchronous call to the server for anything, which is quite a key part of the whole concept of AJAX!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7745324.stm

In Summary….

a causes b, b causes c, therefore a causes c.

Do you know what causes your bosses stress? Stupid employees. Stupid employees cause the Manager to be grumpy, which is why the employees become stressed. Therefore it is the employees fault that they are stressed. Study complete.