My current phone is a SonyEricsson P900, which I got nearly a year ago on an Orange contract. Before that I had a Nokia 7650 on SinglePoint. Last night while running a bath for the kids I got a phone call from someone at Vodafone. They asked me if I wanted to return - the guy said that they weren’t dealing with SinglePoint any more as it had cost them too many users. I questioned him further and he said that they’d bought out SinglePoint and immediately got rid of 50% of their staff. It seems that SinglePoint had such a bad customer services reputation that customers were leaving in droves. I’ve just had a gander at the Vodafone website, and there is a press release confirming that they have bought out SinglePoint for £405m. However it’s written in fairly glowing terms and doesn’t even hint at any problems with SinglePoint. I didn’t really mind the intrusion, the guy was quite pleasant, and it was useful information. For the moment though I’m quite happy with Orange.

Well would you believe it. Another power cut last night. This one lasted from 21:30 to 23:55, with a couple of one second long attempts at reconnection at around 22:30. Making a note of it here in case I need to claim compensation.

Another power cut. I went to bed late last night after spending all evening catching up with various things (OK, browsing del.icio.us). I was just taking a leak at about 2am, on my way to bed, when all the lights went out, and I heard the sudden silence of my servers powering off. The servers are on the landing outside the bathroom at the moment because my brother has the spare room. I found my way upstairs using the feeble light of my P900 and found a torch in my bedside table. I then used my P900 again to find my way to the kitchen where I knew I had some batteries. Once the torch was working I went to check the distribution board in the basement and everything was still switched on, so it was definitely a power cut. I checked outside and the street lamps were still on, as were some lights in the houses opposite. I did the only thing left to do - I went to bed. Unfortunately I then heard Matthew (my 3 year old son) getting up to see why his night light had switched off, then crying out when he found that it didn’t come on again no matter how many times he toggled the switch. In then end I went to get him and he got into our bed. An hour later and he still wasn’t asleep, so he got put back into his own bed, which he wasn’t very happy about. The power came back on at about 05:30, which woke me up (briefly). I’m now at work, desperately trying to stay awake.

This is so useful (to a developer) that I'm blogging it so I have a record of it when I need it in the future. You know how you can test a webserver by opening a telnet connection to port 80? Well by the magic of OpenSSL you can do the same thing on port 443. openssl s_client -connect example.com:443 -state
Then you just type away the same as if it was a normal telnet session to port 80, i.e.
GET /some/url HTTP/1.0
Host:example.com

server response here...

I'm gutted that this book is currently out of stock.