The Jens Teislev Place

Are you Spanish thinking you have problems with Telefonica? Well at least you speak Spanish. You should try to be a guiri. They will hang up on you 50% of the times you call, 25% of the times they will accidentally disconnect you or transfer you to a person that speaks neither Spanish nor English. I mean – I suspect they have a button that says “Annoying Foreigner” and which brings you to a person that ONLY speaks Dutch or Arabic!!

The remaining 25% where you are actually able to get through to Telefonica you will be met by a person that is the personification of supreme power. A person that commands respect that not even Franco or the King himself. What they say will be LAW and any suggestion you might have will be met with a negation.

On the other hand you have to just bend over and take it up the a..; cause there is NO REAL competition. If you should have the nerve to go for a competitor like YA.com, Orange or Tele2 – they will either make sure that the connection is not going to work or they will simply make an anonymous

call to your new operator and tell them that you have decided to switch to Telefonica. That will effectively cancel your service for a minimum of 14 days – unless of course you should decide to go with Telefonica.

Finally the price you are given by Telefonica when they sell or advertise is not the same as what you end up paying. The first months you will surely get bills that just plainly do not make sense (either VERY high or in negative). This is to make you confused. Then after 6 months your bill will flatten out on “what they feel like charging”. I pay 90 euros per month for TRIO. I have a client that pays 40 euros per month for DUO, one that pays 60 euros for DUO and one that pays 80 euros for DUO.

Telefonica is an embarrassment to Spain! Si, España es diferente!

Background

After a successfull install of Ubuntu on my girlfriends Dell 1300 Inspiron, I took the big leap and decided to install this Linux distribution on my own 2 year-old notebook.

Preparations

Taking the step from Windows to Linux is a big step. I have been preparing myself for this the last year, by using open source software where-ever I could. The Mozilla solutions Firefox and Thunderbird took over the role of Internet Explorer and Outlook, Open Office took over the role of Microsoft Office and I ported my static websites to Joomla!’s open source content management system.

Then as my Windows Vista installation started to go sour (my experience with Windows is that it has to be re-installed every year) I took the leap Friday the 13th of March 2009.

Crash and burn

While I obviously do not expect the reader to be as stupid as myself, I feel obliged to let you know what an insanely dumb thing I did when I started the process of installing Ubuntu on my notebook.

As my Pioneer DVD/CD burner is having some severe problems reading burned media, I had to download Ubuntu and install it as a slave to the Windows system using WUPI. That worked fine and as I could see that the LVPM program would be able to move the partition from the NTFS folder under Windows to a separate partition; this did not worry me too much. Having tested that all seemed to work in my slave version of Ubuntu I decided to set it free and move it over to another partition.

Now I had of course checked my NAS via USB to see that I had access to this before I did anything, and that worked fine (Targa NAS from Lidl!). As I started LVPM i made 2 mistakes. Firstly I forgot to create the partition under Vista as had been advised. Secondly I forgot to click the off button on my NAS. Never having seen a Linux filesystem I had no idea what sda and sdb was, and since the control box reminded me that sda was my current root and that I shouldn’t install there, I of course chose sdb. Next screen showed “Formatting” and I leaned happily back in my chair. Leaning back I realized that the NAS was flashing quite unexpectedly and making sounds. I wriggled my eyebrows, opened my mouth and uttered “SShiitt!!” Then I quickly killed the power to the NAS.

The result of this idiotic procedure was that my NAS (which held all files from the last 15 years) was seriously messed up. Being a real computer nerd, I of course had no back ups of ANYTHING, so I was looking at having lost around 300 GB of data – pictures, papers, customer information and accounts! However after a few days of extreme panic I managed to find a brilliant program that only cost me 55 euros, and which solved all my problems. Let me advise you that www.recovermyfiles.com has a very good product!!

Anyway back to the installation.

Installation

After having ported Ubuntu to it’s own partition and having Vista on it’s own with a dual boot through GRUB I was ready to enjoy the spoils. However GRUB crashed on start and was unable to boot my newly moved partition for Ubuntu – Error 15. I searched through the papers, and in the end fuond the information I needed just on the screen. The partition location that GRUB was trying to mount had not changed and was still listed as an NTFS folder under Vista. I changed this to the simple (hd0,1) and (hd0,0) for the Vista system. Then when I entered the system I edited the menu.list file through Terminal and forced these changes to remain.

What works and what doesn’t?

I was surprised to see how much worked on my system. Here follows a list of peripherials etc:

64-BIT Dual processor: Working out of the box!
Integrated webcam: Working out of the box!
Wireless network (not Broadcom): Working out of the box, but seems to be given a problem causing the notebook to freeze and Caps-Lock to flash. Solved with fix found on Ubuntu website.
Fingerprint reader: Not reacting. Might need some software installed. But after having seen Mythbusters on Discovery I have no need for it!!
Nvidia: Functions perfect, but you need to install free/gratis proprietary software to get the monitor to work perfectly.
Blue quick-play buttons: Seems to be working, but the sound mute button does not turn orange when the sound is off..

Sony Ericsson K800i: So far not managed to sync. contacts and calendar. However it plugs in perfectly via bluetooth and lets me browse files on the phone and on the memory card!
HP Officejet 6110: Works out of the box – INCLUDING the scanner.

Conclusion

All together the installation has been a tremendous success. The only real thing that might have caused a problem is the fact that I chose to install the 64 BIT version and not the standard 32 BIT version. A lot of the programs that otherwise should work out of the box (f.i. Java, Skype, Google provider, etc) have taken some extra tweaking to work on the 64 BIT version. Apparantly there is not that much to gain by having a 64 BIT version installed, so if you are not a mega nerd or even a junior nerd; you might want to consider taking the 32 BIT version instead.

Otherwise I am now a very happy Linux user with a brilliant operating system!

Beauty!!

For the greater glory of the collected webhosting I have just moved all my domains to a new hoster and designated the teislev.eu as the main domain. Otherwise the summer is moving ahead with disturbing heat and indoor temperatures in the new casita of no less than 25 degrees at night and around 30 degrees at my work station. Maybe we should install an extra air conditioning unit! That’s it..

After having now lived in our house for close to 4 months we have finally been blessed with a stable internet connection in our home. Initially we did try to go for Tele2, but they turned out to be incompetent and as they were unable to deliver the DSL line we decided to switch to Telefonica. In this connection I dare not say anything about bullying or unfair competition as that might cause our carrier to mess it all up )

As many mega nerds have known for a long time; there was something dodgy with Bill Gates and his evil empire. Now it seems that the truth behind the Microsoft New World Order is finally out in the open.

Have a look on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2GyGv-RqFM

No offense meant… okay just a little..