AMLinington

Here at Smoothwall we all get personalised mugs with our Tea/Coffee order printed on it for the tea runs but I prefer conical mugs rather than cylindrical ones so I nicked one of the promo ones - the named one sits on my desk with pens in it as a sort of 'name plate'. If you're wondering what is in it, I'm currently enjoying a Brew Tea Co. Whole Leaf Tea Fruit Punch tea. I can't have caffeine you see so unlike the rest of Smoothwall (who subsist on Caffeine and biscuits) I'm hardcore and manage to make it through the workday with not a drop of caffeine!

Blergh. Thanks for that. I just threw up on my keyboard... Should have known better but morbid curiosity and all that...

I'm a bit of a sucker for the Takashi Kovacs series from Richard Morgan - brutal, weird and downright graphic in places but I can't seem to put them down. I get pulled into the world without even trying. I also just finished reading the Magicians series by Lev Grossman - very obscure and odd and I will admit the first two were better than the last but again I was gripped. I ADORE the Hunger Games trilogy and have a re-read of that fairly frequently but somehow I stumbled across the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson - thoroughly loved this too. Blake Charleton's 'Spellwright' series is good. Not even sure if it's an adult book but I enjoyed them all the same - just missing book 3 :-( Don't think it's been published yet.

Having finished reading a bunch of awesome but slightly obscure sci-fi/fantasy books I thought I'd give the new Dan Brown a try - Garbage. I'm hating it. Reading it is like wading through mud. The writing is trite and cliché, clunky and difficult to engage with. If I could get a refund on a Kindle book I would... (actually, I might check if that is even possible...)

ARGH don't get me started on the Virgin Media bills - we rarely use the phone and have a 30MB line package and the bills are rarely below £50 a month!! I don't even have TiVo - it's horrible! I want to change our supplier but Virgin are the only cable provider in our area until BT get around to installing infinity. When they do, we're swapping out faster than you can say 'Out of the frying pan into the fire'. Still better the devil you know and all that - Virgin are taking the P-155.

Aye. Although I've not found it an issue so far. The bruises are pretty epic though - they don't hurt as much as they look like they might (although repeatedly thwacking the same spot becomes very sore) but they are glorious and purple and blotchy. Also, try to pull with the back and shoulders, not the arms.

Wow. That's macabre. The water was funny. The heads - not so much...

What am I looking for here?

Luckily for me it just so happens that as a left hander I, too am left eyed. This means my 'stronger' arm is my drawing arm. On my beginners course there was a right handed-left eyed shooter and she struggled to co-ordinate and draw her bow because her left arm was comparatively weak - she got bruised a lot too on the inner elbow. Should have mentioned that earlier - be prepared for some glorious purple shiners when you start out - all Archers get one at least once XD

LOL yeah I remember that - they did that to the year above us - Year 11 got called into an 'assembly' then escorted class at a time out of the school gates. When it was our turn it was supposed to be 'secret' but we were pretty much prepared for it and when they called us into a 'leavers assembly' we knew what was going on. I wouldn't count on it being very secret if I were you... lol

LOL I am a left handed Lady shooter and when I did my beginner course the club gave me a bow that was around 20lbs ish my current bow is set to 26lbs but can be dialled up. I believe Males start around the 30lb mark? I believe there is a 59lb maximum limit as a compound archer at the previous club used to have a 60lb bow and I remember him having trouble at competitions. Don't quote me on that though... Regarding fees, to give you an idea, my local club year fees are in the region of £180. Which to be fair isn't much but since you can't pay it monthly I can't afford the lump sum :-( not having just bought a car...

I, too, am a toxophiliac and have my own basic recurve kit. @JOrdan01070 is pretty much spot on although they neglected to mention the club fees, GNAS fees and County fees. If you wish to join a club and to shoot for sport you MUST MUST MUST have a current GNAS membership - this is your liability insurance in case (touch wood) you should ever accidently shoot someone. To get GNAS Membership you must be a member of a club. Some clubs allow members of other clubs to shoot as a 'Guest' but you must be affiliated with a club to shoot (unless you are shooting at specific facilities or events where insurance is provided). The fees you pay are all rolled together and usually there are county fees to pay - it varies from place to place but most clubs charge a yearly subscription which includes Club fees (which cover maintenance of the grounds/hire of facilities, maintenance and purchase of club equipment such as bosses, arrows, club bows etc), County fees and GNAS fees and your club will register you with GNAS. I do not believe you can register yourself with GNAS although I have not looked into it as no clubs in our area would take me if this were the case. My bow is a Sebastian Flute Premium and that was about £200ish in a sale I think. If you choose to join a club, a good club will require a beginners course and will only allow you to shoot when an instructor is present until they deem that you are competent enough not to require supervision. The instructor will go with you to choose your bow and it is worth trying several - I really liked one particular bow another Archer at the club had but when I tried it for myself it felt unbalanced and was difficult to handle but the SF bow which I wasn't as keen on felt lovely and fitted me beautifully. It was well worth shopping with an instructor/coach as they know far more about what you are buying than you do at this point and will steer you away from the high price, high performance gear that looks nice but isn't really suited to a beginner. Sadly with everything going on in the house I don't have the money for my fees so I've had to stop shooting for a while. Don't be tempted to shoot in your back garden with these 'beginner packs' you can get off the internet either - very dangerous and really only suitable if you live on a farm or have a few hundred acres.

The Online help itself is not currently under revamp (to the best of my knowledge) although I know our documentation team are starting to include more screenshots. The bit I'm working on and the bit I'm super-excited about is our online resources - the knowledgebase, youtube videos and other searchable resources customers can use to get quick answers to questions. I was in a meeting about it today and every time someone talks about it I get really excited.

This is correct. All registered vehicles received a new Red coloured V5C and were told to return/destroy the blue one. If you are buying a car, ask to look at the V5C. If the header is Red, it's legit, if it's blue, flag it with the DVLA/Police. Photocopies of the V5C are not legit - you need to request a proper one or contact the DVLA as legally I'm pretty sure they cannot sell a car without a genuine V5C

The solution to preventing cats turding on your lawn is not to poison or maim them - these are beloved pets of families who probably have a litter box indoors sitting unused because the cat makes its own decisions. The best option is just to discourage them from using the area. Citronella oil is one option although anything that the cat may potentially lick off their fur during grooming should be considered a no-no. Water is a good deterrent and is friendly to your garden and other wildlife. Half the time the problem is scent - particularly with dogs (Foxes are a breed of dog for example) as they will follow scent clues and repeatedly use an area as their toilet based on the scents - the only way to stop this is to remove the scent. This is easily done on paved areas, not so much on lawns. The most appropriate and least cruel options are to purchase something specific from a garden centre - Lion dung, cat repellent, Movement sensors whatever. There are no short cuts. Please stop posting advice related to poisoning cats - if my own beloved cat was poisoned it would break my heart. I'd love to neg rep anyone posting about cat poisons because you are essentially facilitating cruelty - I didn't know Starfish poisoned cats, and if I were a nasty individual I could now use this information to do harm. It would be far better if you kept information like that to yourselves. Where foxes are concerned, you might like to try planting Rosemary - apparently dogs don't like the scent. Doesn't work for cats though - my cat is fine with our rosemary plants.

LOL I love cats too but I've got no problems spraying my own or others' cats with harmless water to deter them (although mine will take several squirtings before he decides enough is enough) and that video is genius. Love it.

A backdoor would be handy and you can configure one under the External Access rules if you want to give us direct access so you can configure this yourself but the biggest problem we find with this is upstream firewalls blocking the connection - LEA firewalls and the such then it's a pain for you guys to have to log a request for ports to be opened and so on. Might be worth popping that idea into Uservoice though as it's certainly something our support engineers have been mentioning for a while. I, too am not sure of the feasibility in writing a back door into our product as I suspect there may be security concerns associated with that that having the customer manually configure it themselves avoids.

LOL Only if she's a breeding queen. Get her spayed and it should be fine. That being said, when Enzo was a Tom he boffed a spayed cat (at least I hope she's spayed). Our vets wouldn't neuter until he was 6 months old and he was booked in all ready when he got hold of the neighbours tortoiseshell female and mounted her at 5 months old....

I don't think it's harsh or cruel to use a naturally occurring deterrent on a cat - if the pepper or chilli irritates their nose then they learn to keep away. I don't think that's a bad thing tbh. Just like it's not harsh or cruel to soak a cat that is turding on your lawn (as long as it's not the middle of winter as they could end up with hypothermia). I don't think nerf gunning them is a bad either either - as long as its not close range. The only drawback to this is that the projectiles are likely to end up as cat toys - they do in our house: When LeBoyfriend and our Nephew start a Nerf fight Enzo is always the winner with the most chewed and shredded Nerf darts... BB and air guns are a no no though. Or if you have a stupid cat like mine who seems to enjoy chilli.... It's not just the Garlic plants he has a fetish for - he chews the budlea, my Acer, the Chilli plant in the kitchen, the grass... I've caught him with his head in our Chilli con carne before now.

And it's good for the garden too! I've heard that Cats hate citrus peel but my cat doesn't seem to be bothered by it at all. That being said, I have some baby Lemon trees struggling to survive in our climate and I can't say that I've ever seen him anywhere near them... He does like to mutilate the garlic we have growing in the veg patch though... He's a smelly little turd!

I hope this was a joke - giving poison to someone's beloved pet and letting it die in agony is a horrible thing to do. Far better to scare it than to hurt it surely? As a Cat lover and owner of a cat, I no longer have the issue of cats using my garden as a toilet (when we bought the house it was disgusting) although my OWN cat likes to turd on the lawn... There are plenty of ways to discourage this - spraying with water is a totally fine and harmless deterrent but you might not always be there. Short of buying motion activated sprinkler systems plenty of garden centres sell cat and dog repellents that won't cause the offending animal to die in agony! Someone joked about Lion Poo but there is in fact a product our local garden centre sells that is impregnated with the scent of Lion dung. Take a trip to a proper garden centre and take your pick from a wide range of repellents. I had an issue where dogs would poo on my driveway - the problem with this is that dogs smelled the leavings of other dogs and used the area accordingly - the only way to fix this was to eradicate the scent markers which I did with a healthy dose of Jeyes fluid and bleach. Funnily enough I've not had any poo on the driveway since.

Well you'll be pleased to hear that 3 of the 4 are under my sphere of influence and are already focus points for the work we're doing - without giving too much away, some of the things we working on will mean that we can embed our YouTube resources directly into articles so you can search all the resources in one place! Setting up filtering is never going to be a quick thing, but we are hoping (over time) to develop various parts of the KB and the product itself to make this easier. This is definitely on our radar. Help documentation with pictures? I'm certain we can manage that - this is one of the big things I've been pushing in this project - adding screenshots to clarify instructions. I can't comment on changes to the actual 'Help' within the product itself as this would be @tom_newton's sphere of influence, but we will certainly be including much more of this in our knowledgebase articles and self help resources. I'm so excited about this project and I can't wait to get the first phases in place and unleash it on you all.

@tom_newton is right when we says that there are huge changes afoot in support. Things in that department are undergoing radical changes all with the view to improving the customer experience. In addition to this, we are currently working on a hugely exciting project involving self-help resources to give our customers better access to our detailed and comprehensive Knowledgebase - Did you know that during April, we found that over 40% of cases raised by our customers could have been resolved quickly and easily by one of the Self-help Solutions in our Knowledge base? We are invested in improving this resource and I'm really excited to be a part of that project so over the next year expect to see some changes there. I'm really passionate about this project and could go on for hours about it! LOL Our Triage team have been doing a brilliant job and really hit the ground running. We don't believe in the 'phone monkey' model as our product is far too technical for the usual scripted 'Have you tried rebooting it?' type of questions. If a ticket is very complex it will be escalated to an engineer for further diagnostics. I am always keen to get feedback regarding the Knowledgebase and Self help resources and would love to hear your thoughts as I will feed these directly into our project so please feel free to ping me a PM.

Have you whitelisted and added the iTunes category to auth exceptions? Also, are you transparently intercepting HTTPS?

Check Firewall port rules - facetime is a bit of a pain for wanting ports open. Have a look at this: Using FaceTime and iMessage behind a firewall If you're behind an LEA firewall it might be blocked upstream so you might need to do some traffic dumping.