Czajkowski

In aid of the Charity Water, a global non-profit seeking to bring clean drinking water to developing countries. Twitter Festival Dublin took place in Dublin on the 12th February at The Sycamore Club and was one of 175 festivals taking place all over the world.  A great night was had and the excellent photos were taken by Event Ireland, which were a lot of fun!

It’s great to see more and more technical events here in Ireland and Northern Ireland, finally events like these are becoming more and more regular.  But I have noticed a distinct lack of female speakers at these events.  Talking it over with Martha we said we’d love to do a training public speaking work shop.  This may be because they are shy, or just thought they never would be able to give a talk or “that there is someone else better than they are” at giving a talk. Actually most people male and female including myself hate public speaking!

With this in mind, Ireland Girl Geek Dinners group are going to organise 3 sessions to help folks with some key pointers on how to present and maybe gain a bit more confidence in taking part in events.

We have to say thanks to the folks over at Echolibre who are very kindly letting us use their workspace, so thanks for that!

Speaker Night 1:               Thursday, February 26^th from 6pm-7:30pm

Topic: What Am *I* Supposed to Talk About?

o Finding your voice

o Coming up with topics/content/titles

o Building a story from your content

Speaker Night 2:               Thursday, March 5^th from 6pm-7:30pm

Topic: The Nitty Gritty of Technical Talks

o Demo-ing with code

o Useful tools for technical demos/presentations

o Things everyone hates

o Failure recovery

o Your failsafe list

Speaker Night 3:               Thursday, March 12^th from 6pm-7:30pm

Topic: Grooving and Improving

o Handling Q&A

o Techniques for self-improvment

o Critiquing your own performance

o Finding your honest feedback crowd

Speaker Night 4:               Thursday, March 19^th from 6pm-7:30pm

Topic: TBD – we’ll either repeat a session or do a special request like slide-building?

Please register on the Girl Geek site, places are limited to 10!

The Global Bug Jam is happening this weekend! So what is a Bug Jam – it is a world-wide online and face-to-face event to get people together to fix Ubuntu bugs – we want to get as many people online fixing bugs, having a great time doing so, and putting their brick in the wall for free software. This is not only a great opportunity to really help Ubuntu, but to also get together with other Ubuntu fans to make a difference together. sign up here if you fancy coming along.  You don’t need to be a coder to come along! Everyone is welcome and will be shown how to log bugs!

We’ll be jamming on Saturday, the 21st February  in the Annex building of the Kevin St campus. Room KA-3-005 (creative computing lab).
The Easiest entrance is from Church Lane. from 10am to 6pm

Last Monday 10th February, our NTL broadband went. Got home a bit late from Brussels so rang the next day to the ever helpful NTL <sarcasm!!> to as them nicely to fix it!  So once I got through the will you turn it off and on again ! and still the router wasn’t working I had to arrange for a engineer to come out.

So now it’s Tuesday and people in my house use the internet to work from home, the next available day was Friday 13th.  I asked them nicely to arrange for the engineer to come after 5 as people were working or not in the house.  Seemingly the working hours for a call out 9-1 and 2-6 Monday to Friday! Not very helpful if you work during the week and have to try and arrange a call out or take a half day from work.

Either way I asked could it be for after 5 as I knew someone would be home then or close by that they could get home. At 5:45 on Friday evening no sign of even an attempt of NTL showing. I give them a call only to be told, they tried to ring my phone during the day and also they had called to the house at 4pm but couldn’t leave a card to say they called due to security gates, which while they are there, had they gotten hold of me I could have gotten them in.

When the unhelpful NTL support engineer told me this, I was less than impressed! I explained to her that people work from home and need the internet. Her reply was I should get a business line and then I’d get next day repair! So basically if you’re an ordinary customer you get next available day which I’m now having to wait till February 18th! So no net till then!

I asked could you not tell the engineer to come late and specify a time, the ntl customer support engineer said no they could not tell their engineer to do that………… why the feck not! Surely it would make sense for them to come do a call out when there is someone there rather than call out nobody there, leaving a customer pissed off and have to organise another call out!

In this day and age it seems crazy that they don’t work weekends for call outs or longer days to accommodate their customers!Or you get told to get a business account, not very helpful or ideal, when you only work from home a day or two a week.

Yes while I have in the past praised their uptime and service of NTL, when it breaks it sucks donkey balls and is atrocious, and quite frankly has pissed me off no end this week and I’ve still no idea what time the engineer will call out on Wednesday even if once again I’ve requested a late call.

SERVICE WARRANTY

If you are not satisfied with services received from UPC, please call freephone 1908 where we will work to remedy your issue quickly.

I’d call a 9 day wait from the time I reported it to the 2nd call out not very quickly………..