"Quis backup ipsos backups?", as the Roman poet Juvenal didn't say but might have if they had had computers in the first century AD.

Like most geeks I pride myself on being able to maintain the computers I use on a daily basis. Just like real men don't eat quiche and real programmers don't use Pascal, real geeks don't call for professional help or technical support.

But then the day comes when one of your hard drives goes crunk, you go through all the tricks of the trade you know, you exhaust searching for possible solutions on the web and you realise that maybe, just maybe, while it's not time to eat quiche or starting coding in pascal, it's probably time to call for some professional help.

Like a lot of people, I've amassed a not inconsiderable amount of digital media over the years, in the form of apps, songs, movies and photos. Most of these live on my laptop and are religiously backed up with SuperDuper! and with Time Machine to external drives, with one of these drives holding the overspill. This aforementioned external drive had given solid, reliable service over the years but had started to act ... quirkily. Fearing a critical mass of bad sectors I decided now was a good time to backup my backups.

Delicious is dead! Long live Delicious. Like a lot of Delicious users, I recently received a mail urging me to authorise the transfer of my Delicious account and bookmarks to the new service once ownership transfers from Yahoo! to AVOS.

The reception to the news of Delicious's new owners has been ... varied. Marshall Kirkpatrick has written a post in favour of the transfer, but Violet Blue is not so sure. If you do a little bit of digging, you'll see that the new Delicious has the potential to be far more restrictive on what you can, and what you can't bookmark, especially where potentially offensive content is linked to. Offensive is a horribly vague and subjective term; one which means many different things to many different people.

Next time you head out of London's Waterloo station keep your eyes peeled as you come through the ticket barriers; if you're lucky you'll see one of the small display screens that are usually covered by an opaque lid. At first sight these seem to be a mirror of the larger departure boards on the main concourse but these screens tell the drivers which platform they need to be on for their train before the main concourse screens update.

Why is this interesting? Well, tonight the trains in and out of Waterloo were severely disrupted by something going on at Clapham Junction, no one seemed to know what exactly but the general consensus amongst the station staff was that it was probably related to a train.

Train departures were still displayed on the main board with a platform number, but after it became apparent that the service wasn't going anywhere, each departure cycled through on time, delayed and finally cancelled.

After my train home suffered this fate I trudged to the end of the platform where a member of the SouthWest Trains was looking at one of these driver's display screens and was actually dispensing useful information. Admittedly the information seemed to be "catch the Tube if you can" but that was still useful.

It's probably due to the amount of time I've spent in the States this year but I seem to be more and more incensed by the crap customer service that companies in the UK seem to think that their customers should accept. I may have blogged about it once or twice or, as Guiseppe Sollazzo commented on Twitter recently "your blog today looks like a customers' rights advocate".

To be fair, it's not just me; there are other people I know who are equally strident about this, be it directed at the Apple Store or O2. Most of the time, the companies concerned just ignore complaints but sometimes, they try harder and given my recent experience with Avis at Heathrow, trying harder is rather apt.