Cold-calling

Yet another intrusive, uninvited phone call a few minutes ago. They run at about eight a day now. People called Gareth or Samatha calling from a hi-tech shed in the early hours, Bombay time, trying to sell us something we don't need or want.

This call wasn’t. It was from the market research company Populus. A refined English voice. And to my usual polite interjection – “may I stop you there – Telephone Preference Scheme” came the lofty response that really got my blood up “Ah, it doesn’t apply to us.”

Am I supposed to be flattered by having been ‘chosen’ to receive this phone call, irrespective of what I might have been doing at the time? What I was doing at the time, actually, was one of the seven creative, high-concentration, non-remunerated jobs that fill my waking hours (no, eight – I forgot blogging.) I am now so furious at having had my concentration interrupted that I won’t be able to finish that job tonight, which is why the unctuously persistent geezer who made the call got a strident earful.

Now Populus is a highly respected market-research organisation, with innumerable clients with fat wallets who hold market-research organisations like Populus in high esteem. Me, I’ve got farmer friends who would willingly grind up market research companies small and spread them on the fields where at last they might do some good.

Market research companies cull opinions, feed them into a computer, run a stats program on them, then get paid a fortune by a client who’s been found a niche for a Kate-flavoure breakfast cereal for cats called Kitticrunch (or something. They’re still working the clock round to refine the name.)

Populus, that most honourable and worthy company, is going to be a tag on this blog. Google will pick it up tomorrow.  I’ll settle for a grudging apology and a promise not to phone me ever again, though I’d rather cold-calling was made a capital offence as the social poison of the computer age.

In the meantime, would all you faceless people I don’t know, and don’t want to know, please stop invading the privacies of my home and my mind? And stop stealing my time? My time is precious to me, even if it’s just an exploitable commodity to you.

 

 

Soundcards & other matters

I bought a new laptop a couple of years ago and put a favourite bit of software kit on it - Magix. I've been using it for years to clean up old LPs and tapes and make CDs of them. But this expensive bit of kit didn't work on the new laptop. It could only find the built-in microphone, and as we all know, sticking your lappie next to your Dansette doesn't exactly produce high quality audio. So I gave up.
It was only when broadband failed on the PC that the lappie came back into use, because the WAN signal was still there. I can listen to sound samples on the lappie; I can watch and listen to Youtube videos, but I can no longer capture the audio signal, even for wholly legal purposes.And it has taken me two years to find out why.

The big record and film companies have apparently been twisting rhe arms of soundcard manufacturers because of piracy, and soundcard manufactures have touched their forelocks and put cards into computers whose full functionality is denied to all but the most determined, and you have to turn to third parties to twig what's going on, for you won't find it in your computer's documentation. And when you've forked out £300 or £400 for a new lappie you are entitled to feel a bit miffed when excellent software has been lying unused and apparently unusable on your hard drive for a couple of years.

But here's the good news. You can restore the functionality of your soundcard, and when you know how it takes only seconds.

The starting point is the excellent wiki provided by Audacity (digital recording and processing software - and it's free, though you don't need it to read the wiki.).

How you restore the functionality you've been cheated out of depends on your operating system, but for Windows 7 users with a Realtek soundcard it's a cinch.

In the very bottom corner of your screen, next to the time/date stuff, is a speaker icon. R-click it.and select Recording devices. Then in the pane that opens, R-click in the white space. You should see what's been disabled or disconnected by default, and you can re-enable them.

Whether you should have to do this to get full value out of something you've paid for, and intend to use for entirely legal purposes is, of course, a very different issue.

Topless photo of the Duchess of Cambridge

It's about time subs and telly newsreaders did a course in remedial English.

Here's what they've been panting for - one of the topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge.

Happy now?