Devblog

I’ve been having no end of problems recently due to delivery companies and sat navs. We’ve started ordering our shopping online which is great because it means we don’t have to drag two kids around the supermarket, plus the delivery charge is about the same as what we’d pay in fuel to get there. The problem is that because our house was only built two years ago and essentially nicked the postcode from a farm in the middle of nowhere we normally have to wait until the driver gets lost and then phone us up so we can give them directions to wherever their sat nav might have taken them to.

The problem isn’t just the sat navs (or the owner updating them either) since I’ve just bought one myself and even though it’s brand new, it hasn’t got our postcode in there. This is no great loss as I just told it we lived near where the house is and usually I can find it from there! Mine doesn’t have the postcode in because the sat nav data is based on that released in 2007 by the mapping company and this shows where most of the problems are coming from – utdated mapping data and reliance on the postcode.

Delivery companies are getting to be really bad at this – I’ve had companies where I’ve told them that the house is new and to ring me for directions but they ignore the delivery instructions and just get lost. It happened again with the worst of the bunch – DHL on Friday with the most important delivery of all – my new laptop.

DHL outsource small deliveries to local white van men and while I was at work waiting for my laptop, I’m pretty sure that I saw one of these white van men driving round in circles looking lost and ringing someone on his mobile. I don’t know if that guy did have my laptop and if he did, I don’t know who he was ringing (not me) but once again my delivery never got to me.

If ParcelForce and Royal Mail weren’t so expensive I would try and use them whenever possible as they tend to know exactly where the addresses are and if they can’t deliver something (usually beacus you’re not in) they at least tell you and you just nip to the sorting office to pick it up. You don’t spend the next week trying to get your “next day” delivery sent again.

Firefox is awesome. As I use the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts more than I use the mouse, the Firefox search box is more accessible to me than the Google Toolbar. Problem is that it uses Google.com as the Search Provider and not Google UK, which is useful for some searches, and pretty much the same as .com for the rest and unfortunately FireFox doesn’t provide a way to edit it to .uk.

After years of just doing my search and then clicking on the .com bit of the search URL and changing it to .com, I finally decided to do something about and found this post on Chaos Zone which has a link to let you add Google UK as a search provider. Don’t forget to move Google UK up the search provider list so it’s your default. Simples.