June 2006 Archives

Now there's something you don't see ever day: good news from Iraq. In this case, the Garden of Eden has been re-flooded.

I wouldn't have predicted a Swiss lakefront as the theme for the next big Vegas hotel, but it's on the way, due to appear in 2009 right opposite the Wynn Hotel (Isn't the Fashion Show Mall, opposite, though?) where the New Frontier Casino now is. Sounds impressive, too. A London Eye in Las Vegas... Wow.

I switched ISPs a couple of weeks ago. I was using Zen but now I've migrated to Be. The whole process was surpisingly simple and I lost Internet access for all of about 15 minutes.

I would have stayed with Zen since they were reliable and competent, which really carries weight in the world of Internet access. But they were charging me £29.99 a month for uncapped 1Mbps Internet access. I could have gone to their capped 4Mbps service, but the cheaper option had a limit of about 2K or something while the reasonable option (50GB per month) is about £35. So I decided that while they were good, they weren't that good and migrated to Be.

So far, Be have been pretty good. I had an outage on the first day, but since then they've been fine. But Be's selling point is they're an ADSL2+ service - they advertise with the tag of "£24 per month for 24Mbps". It's uncapped (hooray!), but there is a "fair use" policy (aka "If we want to cut you off for any reason, we will and there's nothing you can do about it.") There's also a tiny bit of small print - you won't necessarily get 24Mbps since the exact speed depends on your distance from your telephone exchange.

I've checked around a bit and no one I know who uses Be has ever got more than 5Mbps or so. I'm getting 4.7Mbps now, which is a hell of a lot less than 24Mbps, but much better than the 1Mbps I was getting with Zen.

Nevertheless, I have a question: If it's £24 per month for 24Mbps, since I'm getting 4.7Mbps, can I pay £4.70 per month instead?

Now, they've only been in business a little while, so you have to give them some slack, but SMD appears to be a little bit tardy at paying freelances, according to at least two contributors who have emailed me. Typical of many British publishing companies? Yes. Worrying all the same? Yes.

Just wanted to drop you a line and say thanks for blogging about the whole insane Highbury/SMD situation! I'm a relatively new Hotdog freelancer, though I lost money to Highbury and am having hell of a game getting any money out of SMD (five phone calls in three weeks -- I was told in the initial one that the money would be with me within 4 days!)

And

I have three Invoices outstanding and they're stalling on paying. This has been going on for two months. I think something's going on there.

What's up SMD?

May has come and gone, spring is here and summer is almost upon us. That must mean it's press trip season. I'm off to Monaco tomorrow, thanks to Dell, who seem very fond of whisking journalists off to foreign climes for a day to announce things they're going to press release the next day. Not that I'm complaining: you just don't get this on consumer IT mags - God bless trade mags!

Anyway, probably no blogging tomorrow, but I'll bring you back pictures of airports, train stations and probably not much Monaco on Wednesday. Assuming my camera doesn't get nicked like it did in Zaragoza.

Since it's nearly a year since that particular event took place, I'm finally able to cancel the contract that I took out with Orange when I got back from that press trip. Despite really wanting to like Orange, they've been nothing but rubbish and I'm paying out about £30 a month on a contract, even though I work from home and barely use the phone. So adios Orange, hello Virgin Mobile, I hope.

I say/write 'I hope' because getting an address to send my request to is particularly hard now they've merged with Wanadoo and redesigned their site. I've already tried speaking to a customer service rep, who apologised for Orange being rubbish at customer service and then told me to contact the company nearer the time. He really wasn't getting it, was he? I'll keep you updated on my progress.

We've already learnt about one new Las Vegas hotel and casino this week. Now here comes another one. But it's the weirdest one yet. It's based on the magazine Maxim.

On one level, you can see where they're coming from: Las Vegas isn't called the “city of sin” for nothing. But a hotel designed primarily for teenage boys without much experience of women? Is that going to pay back the $1.2 billion needed to build it?

Still, maybe it'll be like the Excalibur: there are plenty of people who stay in the Excalibur who aren't there for the dragons and knights, but because they need a relatively cheap place to stay on the Strip that isn't too shabby. I imagine the same might be true for Maxim Hotel and Casino. It's actually going to have a reasonable nice location - close to Circus, Circus – since the north end of the Strip doesn't yet have any of the top-grade hotels that the south and middle have been accumulating since the start of the 90s. Unless you count the Stratosphere, which I don't.

The Beeb is reporting that everyone's favourite potential PM, Gordon Brown, is trying to win the “psychotically racist” vote by suggesting that not only should all potential immigrants to the UK have to learn English, if they refuse, we should force them to learn it.

Wow. Whose exact benefit is that for? The immigrants? Could be, but why force them if it is? They'll do it of their own volition, surely.

If it isn't, who wins from this plan? TEFL teachers and precious few others, that's who? And how do you force people to learn a language?

“You! What's that called? Tell me... No? It's a ”loaf of bread“. Are you going to remember that? Are you? If you don't get 100 out of 100 on your next vocab quiz, I'm going to send you back to where you came from! Now here are your flashcards.”

Brilliant.

But here's a question: why are we stopping with immigrants to Britain and English? How about people who relocate to other parts of Britain? Should we make Glaswegians who move to the home counties practice a slightly posher accent to make them more intelligible to the sheltered shire classes? Should we force surfers who move down to Newquay to learn Cornish? How about anyone who buys a holiday home in North West Wales being forced to learn Welsh? And let's not get started on forcing the Northern Irish to learn Gaelic...

So I'm at the gate, ready to board the flight back to London from Nice from my press trip. I've been impressed by Nice's clever plan of having two lines for boarding – one for rows 24 and upwards and one for everyone else. Certainly speeded things up a bit. When what should happen but the person checking my boarding pass frowns. I'm not coming up on her system. She passes it to her colleague, who searches her system and delights me by informing me that I've been upgraded from “Euro traveller” to “Business class”.

“Excellent,” I think to myself. “I've never been business class with BA before. I wonder what it's like.”

Well, I'm writing this on the plane right now and I'd have to say, not much different from economy.

Does it have more leg room or more space? No.

Does it have WiFi access? No

Does it have power sockets in the arm rests for laptops? No

Surely it must be quieter and more conducive to work in some way? Well, that screaming baby on the other side of the plane isn't making it seem very conducive to work.

In actual fact, the only differences I've spotted so far are that I could have used the under-equipped lounge if I'd known that I was going to be upgraded (I actually did get to use the lounge, but only because Jeff Kimbell at Dell smuggled me in on his card); and you get better cutlery with the meal. The meal itself isn't that much better, particularly since they substituted the usual functional block of cheese they provide for the biscuits with some icky blue cheese that they can probably smell in China from this altitude.

Maybe it's better on the long haul flights, but for the short hauls, economy is as good as business class, I reckon, and a damn sight cheaper.

I bought my laptop about three years ago. It's a PowerBook G4 12“. There have been things wrong with it since day one, including an odd tendency to crash at random intervals, no matter what operating system I'm using, if I happen to have moved it recently – obviously a useful feature in a laptop.

However, it's been getting worse. The ”7“ key keeps falling off; there's some great big black marks on the wrist-rests, either caused by fused toner cartridge or by the G4 superheating its outer coating to the point where it starts to carbonise. The battery life has also dropped off, and until a couple of days had dropped to about an hour and half during normal usage and less than 40 minutes if I'm playing a DivX. I had bought an extra battery at the same time as the laptop, but about a year ago it started to refuse charge.

Miraculously, though, I tried charging it again yesterday and it works just fine. I've now gone from under 40 minutes of battery life to over three hours. The moral of this story, then, is always to buy a spare battery, but to avoid using it until your main battery has gone pear-shaped. And also, never trust Apple to produce a battery that has any kind of longevity in everyday use.

UPDATE: Incidentally, finally having battery power again meant I was able to test the Notebook feature of Word 2004, which allows you to type notes as Word records via your Mac's microphone. It's actually pretty good. The quality was fine, the file didn't get too large and you're able to play back the audio at (almost) the corresponding points to your typing. I'll be using that feature again, I think.

Here are a few pictures of Monaco. Average temperature yesterday was 25ºC. As you might expect, since I had approximately 15 minutes to explore Monaco during my whole time there (deadlines is deadlines, as they say, and although I could have stayed the night, there's an article I need to write today, and a few interviews that need conducting), most of these are from within 100 metres of the Meridien hotel in which the press briefing was being held. All the same, I think you can see that Monaco's really, really nice, particularly in June.