The unwanted Nanny

At the end of last year I finally replaced my seven year old phone with a shiny new HTC Desire Z. I really enjoy having mobile Internet access. And writing text messages is no longer fiddly thanks to the keyboard of the Desire Z.

Unfortunately I suffered a setback when Silke, Vader and I visited Germany last week. My phone stopped working: no calls, no text messages, only emergency calls. I searched through all the settings but couldn’t find the cause and finally had to give up.

When I was able to use the Internet via WiFi the next day I found the cause of the problem: my mobile phone provider T-Mobile disables international roaming for their customers by default. They claim that they do that to protect their customers from high phone bills. I’m sorry but I find that a rather unconvincing argument:

  1. Whenever I switched on a mobile phone in a foreign country in the past I immediately received one or more text messages telling me how overpriced phone calls, text messages and especially mobile Internet usage are. If T-Mobile really doesn’t believe that their customers are able to understand such an obvious warning it would be somewhat insulting.
  2. If T-Mobile were really that worried about their customers’ bills they could just reduce the horrendous roaming charges. Their roaming partner in e.g. Germany is the Deutsche Telekom, the owner of T-Mobile UK. I’m quite sure the two of them could agree on more customer friendly conditions if they only wanted to.

It was quite a hassle to get this fixed. I used a friends phone line to call T-Mobile support in the UK who enabled international roaming for me. After I power cycled my phone on their request it finally registered with a mobile network in Germany. I was relieved until I found out that I still couldn’t make calls to the UK or send text messages. I once again looked over all the phone settings but didn’t manage to find a solution. I sent T-Mobile an e-mail, they called me back (which I probably have to pay for with my next phone bill) but it still wouldn’t work.

When I was back in the UK I finally found the problem by comparing the settings of Chris‘s and my phone: mine had call barring enabled for international calls. I tried to disable it but it asked for a barring password which I didn’t know. I tried to enter the SIM PIN but I only got a Network/SIM error. I called T-Mobile again with gritted teeth. At first their support blamed the problem on my hand set and claimed that I could find the barring password in my phone’s manual. When I told them about the error message they finally changed something on their end which after another power cycle of my phone got rid of the call barring. I hope this was really the end of it because I won’t know before I travel abroad the next time.

Overall T-Mobile’s disproportionate customer protection caused me a lot of trouble that I really could have done without.

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Movie of the Week: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

I was looking forward to the latest Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 for two main reasons:

  1. The original novel is one of the best of the series. Its story is dark and except the lengthy camping part very exciting.
  2. For the first time the producers decided to turn one of the books into a two-part film. I was hoping that this way the story wouldn’t be mutilated as e.g in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie.

Last Sunday Silke and I finally managed to go to the cinema. The film definitely picked up the dark mood of the original. It featured only small modifications to the book’s story, some were even for the better. The camping part seemed less long-winded than all those chapters in the novel. There were however some small inconsistencies mostly because previous movies left out too much of the plot.

All in all it was one of the best Harry Potter movies. But the final verdict will have to wait for the release of the second part.

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They destroyed our pub

Friday evening Silke, Vader and I usually meet up with a bunch friends in The Carlton Arms to celebrate the fact that we survived another working week. But it looks like we won’t be doing that for a while because our pub caught fire yesterday. 🙁

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