Month: June 2006

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EasyPizza versus EasyPizza

You know, you set up a blog as a journalist and before you know it, everyone’s pitching story ideas to you. I’ve had about 15 emails from one guy who wants me to explain his continuing life story to the world.

Last week, I got an email from Karl Khan, who (assuming this isn’t someone claiming to be Karl Khan) has been involved in some legal struggles with the easyJet people over the use of the easyPizza name. According to him, the full story has yet to be heard, although it’s been on the Beeb and other sites.

Now, I’m completely the wrong sort of journalist for this kind of article, but if someone would like to investigate the story instead, I’ve provided the details below.

Note to the libel lawyers: I have no idea if any of this is true – this is purely what Karl Khan’s sent me. It may all be completely fabricated, but I’m putting it up here so that others can make that determination for themselves.

Continue reading “EasyPizza versus EasyPizza”

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This man got elected

It’s scary to think Lynn Westmoreland got elected to Congress. This isn’t random politician-bashing on my part. I have video evidence. Among other things – and believe me, the list of problems will grow in your mind as you watch this – he wants to display the Ten Commandments (ah, but which set?) in the House and the Senate. It would help if he knew what they were…

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I’ve let my Salon Premium membership lapse

Salon, everyone’s favourite whiny liberal American news and comment outlet, has an interesting scheme. Pay $30 (or something similar) and you get to read all the articles without adverts. Don’t pay the cash and you only get to read the intros to the articles – except if you click on a logo and watch an ad, in which case you can read every article on the site for free that day.

I’ve let my Premium membership, as it’s called, lapse. The trouble is there just aren’t enough good articles on the site anymore for me to bother paying the money. The ads really aren’t that irritating and if all I have to do is click a logo once a week or so, then I’m not that fussed.

Premium does offer other benefits, including access to the Table Talk chat room (like I need to pay to have arguments on the Internet) and various free magazine subscriptions. The trouble is you have to have a US postal address for 90% of those subscriptions. Not much use for me.

Salon did have a survey a while back, in which I pointed out these shortcomings. When my membership was about to expire, I got an email begging me to stay and giving me two free offers – valid only if I had a US postal address. Clearly, they weren’t listening.

Anyway, I’ll just stick to Slate and Greg Palast for my diversionary political reading for now. When I fancy a laugh, I’ll read Spiked. Good job that’s free, mind.

Incidentally, what do you think of the Slate redesign? I hate it myself. I can’t find anything on the front page anymore. Thank heavens for RSS feeds.

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Moving to Virgin

So first there was the singular problem of getting Orange to actually accept I wanted to leave. Then there was the problem of having to pay Orange £20 to use my phone on another network.

I’ve overcome those two issues. Last week, I got an email with the unlock code for my phone. I typed it in and my Virgin SIM card now works just fine in my phone. Hooray.

The next step was to change all the settings on the phone so that it can use Virgin’s 3G/GPRS and MMS access points rather than Orange’s. Turns out Virgin has a handy little web page for doing just that: just select your phone model, type in your number and if it’s sufficiently modern, the phone gets a text message that will add the correct settings to your list – no fiddling with menus required.

Of course, Virgin’s MMS services are a bit pants, it turns out – certainly, messages from Virgin to Orange take two days for the message to arrive and when it does, it’s just a text telling you to view the picture online. I’ll have to wait to see if what Virgin to Virgin and Virgin to networks other than Orange are like.

But I’m nearly free of Orange. I’m a bit worried by this bill I’ve just received saying I’m paying for services until the 21st July, when I actually gave them notice on the 14th, but hopefully that’ll be the last thing I have to sort out. In about a week, I’ll ring up Virgin, give them my PAC code and get my mobile number switched over – if I’m going to be paying Orange anyway, I might as well use up as much of my allowance as possible before the contract expires. Once the five to ten days necessary to migrate the number have elapsed, I’ll swap the SIMs, delete the Orange settings and that should be that.

How do I know it’s not going to be that simple? Again.

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Pay more for a green PC?

The BBC is reporting the results of a study that say that people around the world would pay more a greener PC. Personally, I don’t believe any of them. However, there is an urgent need for some way to recycle electronics, judging from the number of TVs and PCs dumped on the roads around recycling banks in my local neighbourhood. At the moment, it’s the tip or nothing for most people, until the EU-mandated buy-back schemes come into force.

I note, however, that ‘green PC’ here only means a PC that contains fewer hazardous chemicals, rather than a fully green PC that uses far less electricity for instance. Would you buy a PC advertised as costing “£100 less per year to run than other PCs”? I’d certainly think about it, particularly after seeing our last scary electricity bill…

You can read more about Green IT in what looks increasingly like a visionary article of mine for Information Age, “Green economics?”.

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Friendlier Claris It! add on

I’ve a new beta script that’s an add-on for Friendlier Claris It! It’ll be available to anyone who’s registered once the final version is released, but if you’ve already registered and would like to give it a try, email me and let me know.

In case you’d like to know what it actually does first, it allows you to modify the attachment links at the top of messages so that if you’ve moved the attachments, the links will point to the right path again.

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Fairview? Really?

Block at NightWent flat-hunting at the weekend. Took a train all the way down to Orpington, which turns out to be very nice indeed, with good transport links, loads of buses, shops, etc. Sarah had spotted an ad in the Metro for the alto apartments from Fairview: two bedroom flats to buy for £156k – not too bad for London.

Suffice it to say, you get what you pay for. There were two things in the ad that should have warned us in advance. “This exciting restyled development…” and “many of the apartments on the upper levels enjoying panoramic views across open fields…”

What the ad actually meant was “former council tower block, stuck in the middle of an estate with the remnants of burned out cars nearby, given a patchy paint job and tarted up with some nice furniture but not much else”. It was indeed a spacious flat with a lovely view of some trees – in fact, all you could see was road and trees, not sky or fields or anything else – but you know some expenses have been spared when the show home’s doors have been propped open with bits of cardboard.

Plus what was it with councils in the 70s? Separate toilets without their own basins? What’s going on there? Would this not have been a good opportunity to fix this oversight?

Anyway, Orpington looks good. And more to the point, it looks like there are better, cheaper flats around than the alto apartments, so if you’re tempted, spread your net and you should see something more interesting.