THE HULME TUNE

Why did the reporter cross the street? To buy a chicken from Aldi!

I find it strange that when an alarm goes off they clear next door. Can’t they wait until I finish my shopping?

An insider at Tesco Metro Manchester informed me that the store was closed, not because of their fire alarm, but it was JJB next door.

What? JJB has a fire alarm going off at 7:35pm, by my watch, and Tesco loses sales? Good job it’s on a corner. It’s bad enough walking around the store 5 times because they’ve moved everything around, without having to leave the store minus my bread and butter. My local inconvenience, it was. Since when did a false alarm pass through brick?

I didn’t see or hear any fire crews running to the scene. Probably out shopping at ASDA Hulme.

I hope Dave Whelan, who also owns Wigan AFC, realises that his store in Market St caused Tesco to close early and this added 10mins to my shopping trip. I did get a bigger chicken from Aldi, but I had to cross the street.

DENTIST BLOG - coming soon.

Actually it’s the link below this item on MyManchester.net

or

The Hulme Tune PODCAST 24 April 2008 

You pay £100 for a modem from ‘3′. Read the box “System Requirements… Mac OS X” and “Features.. Auto installation and easy to use” All you have to do is to plug it in and away you go, right? Not if its a Mac!

It seems that ‘3′ charge £100 for PAYG broadband dongles and cannot be bothered to put the Mac drivers on a CD for the Mac users.

Wait, there’s more… inside on the instructions they say, “For Mac OS X software.. visit three.co.uk/usbmodem to download mac drivers and installation guide.”

OK, seems simple to me.. just go online and download the drivers. Errm.. hang on a minute, did I read that right.. “visit three.co.uk/usbmodem to…” They want me to go online and download.

How dumb can ‘3′ be? That’s why the modem was bought in the first place!

So now I have to find a pc and the page to download these Mac drivers. I went to three.co.uk/usbmodem and the page changes to something else.

No ‘3′ I don’t want to buy another stupid b/b dongle as I already bought one and would like to use it TODAY on my MAC.

Oh, yes.. I did a search for “e220 mac drivers” while I was there and found that ‘3′ never heard of it.

Here are your search results for “e220 mac drivers“. Some of the results may take you through to other 3 sites. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, try widening your search.

Search this site Search all 3 sites No results found for “e220 mac drivers“

No reference to it. What? So, where are they?

Orange leaflet.. “three.co.uk/usbhelp”… which brings me back to the same page.

Eventually, after a Google search, I found the drivers on a blog and Huawei’s own website. But when I tried downloading them from Huawei.. I got an unknown file. Unknown? Maybe I was using the wrong browser, so I tried it with IE. Sure enough. Not only did Firefox not allow me to login to My3, but didn’t download the .iso file.

To save you the hassle I went through, here are the drivers for the Huawei E220 Mobile modem.

Don’t use Firefox to download drivers

This is the PDF for powermacs (G4) OS X

Config Guide USBModem Mac. PDF

One day these companies will get a bright innovative idea to make life easier for their customers and thus, not only attract new ones, but keep the ones they’ve got already.

5 hours later… and i’ve gone to three.co.uk to seek out these mysterious mac drivers/software ‘whatever’. Amongst all that advertising USB Dongles there’s a button “more info” - you’d think that would be for more about the products. Then on the right, after clicking it… “mac software drivers” - I have to pinch myself. Hidden away on 3’s website are the drivers. All under the heading:

What is Mobile Broadband?

Well, I now know the answer to that one! On ‘3′ in Hulme it’s slow download speed, seeing that they boast in ‘Turbo Speeds’, and a lot of hassle with hard to find mac drivers and you need another Internet Connection to download them. Do me a favour. Up to 2.8megs .. the speed today was 0.5 MB. In fact, the upload speed was faster at one stage than the download speed. Source was www.speedtest.net & Sunrise ADSL.

They should change the term for 3 from ‘Turbo speed’ to ‘Slow trickle’.

Then i go to three.co.uk/my3 and find that they send a “text message” with my “password” on it.. What planet are they on? They know very well that the dongle on a mac cannot receive text messages. Unless they are on my3 then I’ll just have to login with the password they send me by text. Dumb, dumb, dumb..dah-de dumb.

Is this a too harder thing to ask for that ‘3′ make it easier on their customers and that we have the speed we paid for? When they say “up to 2.8MB” I at least expect it to be over 1.5MB and not .5!!!

Here is a link to The Scarman Trust Manchester website, where they have put a YouTube™ link on their page to a video I did at the recent City of Manchester Stadium conference.

Open wide your wallet, if you’re on Incapacity Benefit, when you first visit an NHS dentist. But why? Because this Government has made it more difficult for us genuine Incap claimers to get free treatment.

This is discrimination!

When I eventually found a “willing participant” (NHS dentist), they go and hit a nerve by extracting £15 from my wallet for sitting down for 2 minutes. But I’m on benefits - I protested. The receptionist told me that this Government changed the rules. So that now, us Incap claimers have to apply for a free treatment certificate.

This meant that I had to pay £15 out of very little and go without just to satisfy a Government that wants to pay £160 per MP per day for just turning up at the Houses of Parliament. In real terms that is nearly my fortnightly money and they get that a day for doing nothing. Then they get paid £60,000 p/a for closing down a primary school in Hulme after promising not to, not policing our streets at night and taking money back off drug addicts that would probably steal the deficit or have to have another sex customer at 1am.

Then they wonder why crime as gone up! Why do MP’s dream of such demoralising schemes?

Can we pay this kind of MP £200 a day just to stay at home?

I asked the receptionist could they wait until I got the certificate. People on other benefits only have to tick a box and they can walk out. “No” was the reply. I had to pay £15 and then go beg outside McDonald’s, so I could feed my Council Tax demand and 3 utilities.

Did I complain? Too right!

When I did complain to Tony Lloyd MP, his secretary was very very arrogant and rude towards me. Next time I’ll have video evidence. She raised her voice and talked over the top of me when I was telling her what the problem was with this Government. Then she said that they are not the Government. Could have fooled me? Then she treated me with contempt. Me, a floating voting mail elector in their constituency, treated like sh**. But we voted her party in. Well, someone did. I tried to vote for someone else, but had a problem with the mail-voting system - I forgot to post it.

This is how we are treated by this Government, as 3rd class citizens. No free education at all - we have to beg for it. Free NHS by redemption & certificate. That’s how I see it.

1-in-5 they say. Good! That’s a 5th of the voters that can change the Government and bring about a positive attitude towards people who are sick and even more stressed by this discrimination.

Someone get me a Human Rights lawyer - please?

- by Paul Summer

What? Me? Giving compliments to the GMSC?