My patience has finally run out with Tiscali… and changes at Sky
Ever since I found out that Sky Broadband was available on my exchange I've been procrastinating horribly in not moving to them. Given that their service is much cheaper than my current Tiscali broadband, and it's physically impossible for the service to be worse, it was a no-brainer to move.
The current email fiasco surrounding Tiscali (which, it is now revealed, is because they have been blacklisted as spammers), combined with their ever-worsening evening performance, just pushed me over the edge today. I've signed up for Sky's Max broadband which gives an up to 16Mb connection (realistically 5Mb on my line) for £10 per month, as opposed to my £18/month Tiscali 8Mb line, which is worse than dial-up for downloading anyway.
Also, I've taken a hatchet to my Sky TV package, given that, as of 1st July, there is no additional charge for having Sky+ with a low cost package. I've gone from 6 mixes and the sports channels (at £37/month) to just 4 mixes (at £18/month), removing the kids, style and culture channels that I'm fairly sure I've never watched ever! It made sense to remove the sports channels too now that they're not a requirement for free Sky+, because all I ever watch now is motorsport that isn't even shown on those channels… and they cost £16/month on their own!
So all in all, I've gone from £55/month for TV and broadband to £28/month, without actually losing anything I use. The only question - why did I wait so long?!
A few days ago facebook added the "applications" feature to its site. This allows third parties to develop add-ons that users can tack on to their profile page, adding either additional information or functionality.
For example, I added an unofficial last.fm plug-in which displays my recently played tracks, just like those displayed in the left hand column of this page. Others include X Me, which allows you to expand on the ubiquitous "Poke me!" button with more personalised options.
However, all has not gone to plan…. if there was a plan! A majority of these applications, which rely on third party servers, have crashed and burned under the weight of users, which has run into the tens of thousands in a matter of days. With a user base which must run into the millions, it seems many of these application authors worried more about getting their offerings out on day one than they did about how they would deal with the sudden influx of users!
This little fiasco, which could seriously damage the reputation of facebook, reminds me of the UK Public Records Office's attempt to launch an online version of the 1901 census data - that site totally crashed and burned within hours of being launched and took nine months to make sufficiently robust for a proper relaunch!
As a rather avid Facebook user myself, I was particularly interested in this story at The Register, detailing how Keele University has issued a blanket warning to students to avoid making derogatory comments about their university or members of staff or risk legal action. Perhaps its something that the more unruly elements at every university should be looking out for…
Particularly amusing is the footnote to the story from Durham University:
Meanwhile, at Durham University the IT services department has taken action to reduce the amount of bandwidth swallowed by social networking. Our correspondent reports that action to deprioritise Facebook between 8.30am and 5.30pm "has lead to a rather remarkable drop off in the number of students in any of the university libraries".
I found myself over at JibJab watching their comical video for Weird Al's Do I Creep You Out? when I spotted a link to a classic I haven't seen in a looooong time… now it's going to be stuck in my head for days again
Recycling is headline news at the moment - everyone is trying to do their bit for the environment by reducing the amount of our waste which is sent to the landfills. Of course, there is one option on the waste disposal hierarchy which is even higher than recycling - reuse.
The opportunities for reusing old items around the house is quite limited however, and that's where Freecycle comes in. This is a simple idea which serves the purpose very well.
There are Freecycle groups all across the world for cities and regions. This operates simply as a message board where people in the locality can either advertise items they're looking to dispose of, or place a wanted ad. If you find something you want, post back to the group and, if you're selected, collect the item for no charge.
It seems like an excellent idea, since it is very local and there is a lot of activity, giving it the edge over a few classified ads stuck in the back of the paper. Plus it's free!
This last weekend was a bit of a busy one! On Saturday I went to Manchester Airport with Marie to do the Concorde tour.
They have one of British Airways' Concordes, G-BOAC, on display at the Aviation Viewing Park. You can pre-book tours to get a much closer look around the plane, including right underneath, in the cabin and on the flight deck!
If anything, having been on board, I'm now more disappointed that I never got the chance to fly on one of these beautiful aircraft. Decommissioning them has been a huge step backwards for the aviation industry.
On Sunday I had the dubious honour of standing in a field in York getting wet at the NEUAL Outdoor Championships. As I mentioned in a previous post, the competition was a shortened Metric I, consisting of 30 arrows at 70m (122cm face), 60m (122cm), 50m (80cm) and 30m (80cm). My 70m score improved dramatically from the Bronte Canadian 1200 to exactly 100, but some idiotic wet weather shooting at 50m (rain jackets are a bad idea when they get in the way of the string…) meant a dodgy dozen of 12 and an overall score of 428.
We were most surprised to discover however that the Sheffield novice team had won the novice competition, finishing about 30 points ahead of Durham's team, which was one person down! It's the results that count though :) The result granted us a team trophy and a medal each - I'm hoping I can attach this one to my quiver before I "misplace" it!!
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