Here are the facts:

1. Attempted delivery. Left card asking to rebook. Rebooked.

2. Attempted delivery at the same next day (doh). Left card asking to rebook. Rebooked.

3. Didn't delivery. Phone call to Harlow is met with "we don't deliver 3 times, irrespective of the calling card we leave you".

OK, so they don't deliver even though they say on the calling card that they will. There is NO mention on the calling card of the 2 delivery maximum.

So they SAID you would redeliver (on the calling card), and ACKNOWLEDGED the redelivery request. There is NO MEANS of knowing that they will not redeliver.

I have an improved wording to put on Fedex's calling cards:

Sorry we missed you

What would you like us to do?
To arrange redelivery please visit uk.fedex.com/redelivery or call us.
We will then do absolutely nothing in the reassuring knowledge that you are patiently waiting for your parcel which we will quietly never send .

Update May 7: Spent many days now with C++ Builder. There are bugs in the IDE - no doubt about that, and the compiler is actually surprisingly fussy. But it's the ONLY way to do forms based RAD in C++. Yay for that! For many years I have been looking for something that would recreate the feeling of excitement I got when I developed an economics program in Turbo Pascal back in the 1980's.

I think that Borland's succesor, Embarcadero, may finally have hit on something with RAD Studio XE2. This comes in 2 flavours - Delphi (ie Turbo Pascal), and C++. Their pricing has returned to sanity with their Starter Editions aimed at "Indie" developers and students.

They have a new GUI library that comes with it called Firemonkey - you use it to make all your dialog boxes and windows etc. Whats exciting about it is that it is not tied to Windows. These are vector drawn controls that work just as well on the Apple Mac and maybe, in the future Linux. This could be true platform independence which has been elusive for so long and has for me always been less than satisfactorily addressed by Mono and Real Basic.

Another thing is that this compiler, system, RAD environment, or whatever you like to call it, enables you to do rapid application development with C++. Thats very exciting for me - I love the speed and flexibility of C++.

Finally, of course, its all native code, so its fast. No frameworks, virtual machines or runtimes.

RAD Studio XE2 ought to meet with a wave of success. Let's hope its gets a decent market share.

Parentmail's published email addresses 'info', 'support' and 'enquire' don't work - they all bounce.

The phone line doesn't get through to a real person and instead you are eventualy given a premium rate number (77p per minute). They don't even answer the premium rate number.

So that's it then - uncontactable.

Does this sound like a company that’s good with communications?

I have just started up a site for patch ice users at RomfordPatch.com. It’s pretty simple, but it should be a good noticeboard for the latest information for patch ice users at the rink.

I was just scooting up the back of the car when I went down the kerb, fell over and decided to break my fall in a novel way: point your fingers directly at the ground and attempt a hand stand using only the middle two digits.

From a prone position I saw some schoolgirls who shouted out "are you alright" and I happily waived my contorted hand at them "fine!", I said.

The sister in A&E licked her lips "ah, not one, but two perfect dislocations, please lie down, I like my men that way". I obeyed.

The tone of the radiologist's voice lowered as he urgently asked for his boss to come in to see my hand.

Sister said "They are going to have to be put back" she said "I know", I sighed, gently screaming internally. "And who's going to do that?" "Me" she replied. "Oh that's just great then", I exclaimed, trying to get in her good books.

A total of 4 jabs directly into the nerves (ouch). Then the sister called another nurse in and said "stand over there", whilst she shut the door. She was ready. She took the first finger and pulled. All the elastic of the few remaining ligament fibres pulled as the finger end moved first out, then she released - crack!. Ah perfect. Did that for the second one and suddenly I felt great. The anaesthetic finally kicking in, oh well, better late than never.

Then she said "make a fist" and lo and behold I could. X rays confirmed that my fingers were back in place!

Anyway, nearly a week later, my fingers can type but then don't bend too good. Hence the naissance of Fatbelly Gutbucket, Slide guitarist. Cats should wear ear defenders.

Some things I'm working on:

• Tu Tienes?
• Bransle Double
• Fun For 3 G3
• Malaguena
• Granados Spanish Dance G2

Me helping my 9 year old with his homework...

I am going to crow a bit here. Look, I'm a bit of a duff programmer. This doesn't normally hold me in good stead, but with the upgrade to PHP 5.3 it certainly did.

PHP 5.3 has broken nearly ALL PHP shopping carts (eg OSCommerce, Zen-Cart). They have released patches but these may or may not work. Several weeks after the release of 5.3 the shopping cart builders have not caught up, the changes are numerous, and if your server has recently upgraded you have a bit of a disaster on your hands.

I've always built my own shopping carts, which is why they are so rubbish-looking, don't have log-ins and are a pain to build in new features. But all I want to say is: without any changes, they work under PHP 5.3. I know I'm weird, but I'm actually very proud of that!

Everyone should check out Microsofts Small Basic. I was looking for a computer language to teach my kids, and Small Basic is like Basic used to be in the early days - anyone can write a program. Here is a program I wrote to test him on his guitar. Simply paste it into Small Basic and run it:

Note[0]="A"
Note[1]="A#"
Note[2]="B"
Note[3]="C"
Note[4]="C#"
Note[5]="D"
Note[6]="D#"
Note[7]="E"
Note[8]="F"
Note[9]="F#"
Note[10]="G"
Note[11]="G#"
NutPos[6]=7
NutPos[5]=0
NutPos[4]=5
NutPos[3]=10
NutPos[2]=2
NutPos[1]=7
StringName[1]="E"
StringName[2]="B"
StringName[3]="G"
StringName[4]="D"
StringName[5]="A"
StringName[6]="E"

TextWindow.WriteLine("John's Fretboard Test")
TextWindow.WriteLine("=====================")
start:
StringNumber=Math.GetRandomNumber(6)
FretNumber=Math.GetRandomNumber(12)
TextWindow.WriteLine("What's the name of the note at fret "+FretNumber+" string "+stringnumber+" ("+stringname[Stringnumber]+")?")
response = text.ConvertToUpperCase(TextWindow.Read())
If response="BB" then 
  response="A#" 
endif
If response="DB" then 
  response="C#" 
endif
If response="GB" then 
  response="F#" 
endif
If response="EB" then 
  response="D#" 
endif
If response="AB" then 
  response="G#" 
endif
NoteName()
If response=mynote then
  TextWindow.Write("Genius!   ")
else
  TextWindow.Write("Bozo!     ")
endif
TextWindow.WriteLine("The note was a "+mynote)
TextWindow.WriteLine("Try again ....")
Goto start
Sub NoteName
  NoteNo=NutPos[StringNumber]+FretNumber
  If NoteNo>11 Then 
    NoteNo=NoteNo-12
  endif
  MyNote=Note[NoteNo]
EndSub
  

Well I liked it, anyway!