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Press trip season is upon us

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.

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SMD a bit of a slouch at payments

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?

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ISPs: How much for how much?

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?

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New hotel on the way to Vegas

The Wynn Hotel

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.

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RSS feeds for categories

Incidentally, I’ve now added RSS feeds to each of the categories in this blog, so you’ll know when I’ve added to them. In particular, there’s now a Highbury feed, so you’ll know whenever there’s been an update (not that there’ll be many more, I suspect).

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Welsh speakers told to breed

Well, it’s one way to get more people to speak Welsh, isn’t it?

Still, given the teen pregnancy rates in Wales, isn’t the advice a bit superfluous? This may sound like a joke, but this conversation really happened to my (Welsh) wife when she was back in Wales just before we got married:

Person: “Oh, you’re getting married then? When’s the baby due?”

My wife: “It’s not”

Person: “Oh there’s posh then!”

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An alternative to antibiotics

Interesting piece on Slate about phages – viruses that attack bacteria. They’re available in the former Soviet Union over the counter and could prove the answer to increasing immunity to antibiotics. I think I remember reading about them in a book about the former SU’s biowarfare programme, so they’re not making it up…

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Cursed Linux

Nearly killed my new iMac last weekend. I’d just got everything running nicely, including Windows, when I had a ‘bright’ idea. “Why don’t I install Linux onto that extra partition I reserved for it.

Bad idea.

Bloody Gentoo wiped the partition map and I spent about 48 hours having to recover everything. I got everything back but that was a pain in the arse in spade.

So my new resolution is this: never have anything to do with Linux unless it’s going to be installed in a virtualised environment that can’t do anything bad. I’ve never yet had a good experience with Linux and somehow I don’t see that changing…