19/03/2006
This blog is metamorphosing
As you may have seen, I haven't blogged much lately. Apart from a
drought of thoughts, I've had enough of HTML updating, Thingamablog
(good as it is) and being unable to update from anywhere other than my
own broadband connection.
So I'm off to wordpress.com for a trial period. It's a bit of a step
down being unable to customise my blog, and to have to use someone
else's look and feel, but if it's one I like then I don't really mind.
Besides, it gives me so many advantages - I don't have to worry about my
HTML code not working properly, I can write from anywhere, and
it's free. I can't run Wordpress myself because blueyonder don't provide
MySQL, and I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so it's the best I can do.
Old articles remain here, but for the meantime...
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25/01/2006
Blog housekeeping
entry posted by Inquisitor at 18:07
(permalink).
edited on: 25/01/2006 18:14.
categories: Blogging
Updated my blogroll - knocked off a few, put on a few, changed addresses
of others - and [edit: couldn't fix the page titling because my software
won't let me]. Added more obvious permalinking too - it was very
subtle before. Maybe I'll feel confident enough to do some CSS changes
when I have more time, or possibly even write an article.
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22/01/2006
Long time, no see
Just haven't been blogging all that much lately, or seen the need to
blog. But now I'm back in business, at least in a part-time sort of way.
So, how has life gone since I went away?
-
Movies: There are a few movie-watching controversies right now
that I'm going to have to give my position on: I'm pro-King Kong (I
even liked the first section) and pro-Jarhead. Didn't much take
to Narnia (the use of the "something's bad there... wait, no,
it's good" cliché over and over again really didn't appeal to my sense
of true movie-making, or to even the book, although I accept that they
did a pretty good job with what material they had). Missed The
Producers due to not being anywhere near a decent cinema over
Christmas and so will have to wait for a video rental. Saw Bittersweet
Life at EIFF last year; if you're anywhere near a cinema showing
it, please do, it's no Oldboy but it's still a worthwhile
watch. March of the Penguins is out on Region 1, so anyone who
wants to see it can. Must see Cock and Bull Story, which for
some reason is only at the Cameo (Cineworld are still showing Cheaper
by the Dozen 2, however.) I have no position on Brokeback
Mountain, because I haven't seen it.
-
Music: I've been listening to a lot of Kraftwerk lately, having
got the Minimum-Maximum DVD (lovely DTS track, by the way) and
an epiphany came to me: Electric Café isn't actually all
that bad, is it? Sure, it's no Man-Machine, but it's got a sort
of rhythmic undertone that propels the whole thing along in a very
listenable, almost dancey way; and "The Telephone Call" is
eight minutes of phone-sampling techno brilliance. Anyway, besides The
Mix it looks like an absolute masterpiece.
-
Blogging: I really need to get a better blogging system, but I
don't want to pay. Decisions, decisions...
-
Politics: This
is really depressing. As is George Galloway going on Celebrity
Big Brother. What the hell was he thinking? Obviously not about
his constituents...
So far, the best musical thing to happen this year should hopefully be
Shayne Ward getting kicked off the #1 position; which will probably
happen this week (to the Arctic Monkeys, dear God), at least according
to Popbitch. Else, I'm looking forward to the Belle and Sebastian album.
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10/11/2005
Traitors and treason
The Sun today is somewhat out of step with the other newspapers: calling
everyone who's against 90-day detention a 'traitor'
is a bit much, really. I thought that kind of inflammatory bollocks was
going to be too low for them - I was expecting it from the Express and
St*r, though - but you
never fail to be surprised.
[NOTE: Bloggerheads
explains link. Nudge nudge, wink wink.]
I was watching the debate, and one of the Tories (having finally found
their spine) catcalled Police State at Blair; his response,
"We're not living in a police state!", didn't exactly ring true, because
if the bill had passed we damn well would be. Even in the modified
version it's a bit much. Personally, I don't think anyone who supports a
fair justice system with as few opportunities for the police to get
trumped-up charges as possible is a traitor (not that our wonderful
police forces would ever ever beat a confession out of someone, of
course, especially not one of those Arab types), but that's just my
opinion.
Oh,
and that of quite a lot of MPs of course. Ian Paisley actually
voting against internment is hysterically funny, for some reason. All
the Lib Dems managed to get their policies in order. And at least George
Galloway managed to vote this time, which says... something.
Good comment at
Davblog: really rings true somehow... And as for treason: that stunt
Blair and Clarke pulled, withdrawing the bill and saying they're going
to "make concessions" and then bringing it back intact a week later and
saying "no, f you, three line whip" really does count as betraying
Labour MPs, doesn't it? It almost certainly contributed to it being as
big a loss as it was. Good lesson to Blair: don't screw your own party
over, or you'll live to regret it.
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04/11/2005
Bad Lyrics Corner, late 2005 edition
entry posted by Inquisitor at 21:44
(permalink).
edited on: 04/11/2005 21:52.
categories: Blogging
, Music
"I don't like cities, but I like New York
Other places make me
feel like a dork"
-- Madonna, "I
Love New York"
Still, it's not as bad as James Blunt, so we can at least be thankful
for that.
Oh, and finally fixed the CSS for the permalinks, so they look pretty.
Be thankful.
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07/08/2005
The unavoidable death of Time?
The recent collapse of the Granville Technology Group has been compared
by many to the MG Rover collapse, and in some ways they're similar - a
large company, poorly managed to death - but it is, however, a unique
situation. In the case of GTG, we have a company which seems to have
aimed to alienate customers by deliberately selling them shoddy kit -
something which even the Phoenix consortium would have baulked at - and
then locking the customers in just to annoy them.
Time Computers, the brand used by GTG for most of its life, was never a
particularly good company - it sold machines on the cheap through
newspaper advertisements with cut-back components, overreaching software
deals and financing agreements. It was, however, a profitable one -
right to the point when its founder, Tahir Mohsan, not only became so
rich he ended up on the Guardian's young Rich List, but became president
of the Federation of Asian Businesses into the bargain; in fact,
recently he was listed by the Manchester
Evening News, on 31st May this year, as being worth £80m.
What exactly happened between the point when they were able to buy the
charred remains of Tiny back in 2002 (Tough It's Now
Yours, according to computer-repair slang) and the bankruptcy of
today?
Well, as we all know, they started pulling stunts. Before this time,
they were only slightly worse than every other direct retailer; only
using slightly worse components, with a tendency to overload software
and charge for tech support. Firstly, they started charging extra for
reload discs - so you had to pay GTG £60 if you even wanted to restore
the computer to factory condition - even if the system had been damaged
by a virus, Trojan or component failure. Insultingly, all the £60 CD-ROM
did was unlock a partition hidden on the computer in the first place
which contained the restore software; this was a stunt pulled by no
other UK computer vendor. Most don't supply original Windows CDs (with
the notable, and unusual exception of Dell), so the only recourse is to
wipe the system back to factory condition using the restore discs -
which come in the box. Time didn't do that, and this undoubtedly gained
them a huge amount of adverse publicity; especially since they also had
the most expensive technical support number in the UK computer industry,
a £1/minute 090 monster, which considering that Dell use an 0870 seems
to be outstandingly poor value.
I started to write about Time when the company pulled its most visible
and outrageous stunt, in late 2003. They had taken a practice previously
seen amongst US computer vendors (but not their European offshoots)
of locking the system's modem so it could only dial particular telephone
numbers, locked it to the numbers of their ISP offspring company - the
still-running and must-avoid Supanet (Internexus Group) - and
then for a time smugly told customers to go buy a USB modem if they
wanted to dial their own ISP. The modem was always a standard Conexant
HSF software modem - a piece of kit you can buy very cheaply online -
and all that was ever locked down was the driver; the modem was not
locked in hardware, it was entirely Time/Tiny's creation and definitely
not the "optimisation" their PR people later tried to claim it was. This
got me to put up my now-mostly-useless Time page
- in its original form, just a somewhat vitriolic "10 Reasons Not To Buy
From Time" list, which then quickly expanded as solutions to the locking
problem started to come out, GTG found a way to lock the driver harder,
and more solutions came through.
Later, Time put up a page containing software to unlock the modems,
which I'm sure was due to Internet pressure; but it still required the
user to create a Supanet account to access, if they weren't lucky enough
to have a mate with a knowledge of what to do, and had several
suspiciously unnecessary restrictions. These meant that if a user has
one of the last Time PCs, they cannot unlock the modem using Time's
software even if they find someone that's kept it - the unlocking
software has a challenge-response protection which requires a key
generated by Time's now-nonexistant website. (Plug: my Time page still
has the registry-based unlocking method, despite pleas from GTG to
remove it, which should hopefully still work.) It's almost like they
wanted to give their customers one last screw.
I received many emails from Time employees during the page's existance,
which were the main reasons it was kept up - the company was not only
screwing customers, it was screwing its employees too. I also had the
entertainment, on occasion, of GTG's Internet PR team showing up in the
page comments (having followed the link from the pro-unionisation ITEF
site) - now sadly lost by HaloScan, I promise you I didn't delete
anything - making occasionally salient points about the page's vitriol
but otherwise parroting a one-note "We didn't do it" song, easily
disprovable with Romulus2 and Watchdog. I'll leave it to an ex-employee,
posting recently, to give the gist of much of the commenting:
I am not sorry nor surprised to hear of the collapse of Granville
Technology! I worked for the company for 2.1/2 years, 3 months in the
Legal Dept, the rest of the time on the front line customer service team
and the Supanet Dept.
In 40 years of employment,(I resigned voluntarily in January 2001) I
have never worked for a worse company - it was difficult to decide who
was treated worse: customers or staff. The management were abominable.
(Neil Foster, 31st July 2005, comments)
Many of the comments before this, now lost in HaloScan's black hole of
doom, were in the same vein.
I made a comment on the 21st of April update that I hoped Time wouldn't
become "the MG Rover of the British computer industry" as long as they
fixed themselves. At this time, I really didn't know that Time were
going to become the MG Rover of the UK computer industry - they'd been
losing £2m a month since January and it's been suspected by some that
they were insolvent even at the time I wrote it (they were taken down by
defaulting on a HSBC loan, taking out their credit card facility for
their High Street stores and killing off the company.) They'd sold a
dodgy line of plasma screens under the Tiny brand name that had a
lot of people very, very angry (AV Forums thread - I hope you don't
need registration), they were pulling all the usual stunts, and people
weren't taking the bait anymore. They'd finally started to run out of
marks; but too late for many. And that's what's so sad about the demise:
the fact that unless you bought using a credit card (which should always
be done for >£100 purchases, but too many people don't realise this),
you will have paid hundreds or even thousands of pounds for either hot
air, or faulty kit, and there's nothing you can do about it except
complain at somewhere like tinycon.com.
It's the biggest shame of the entire affair - that the people most
responsible for the death of GTG are those who will be least affected by
the consequences. Isn't that just so sad?
[EDIT: Grammar and sentence construction corrected. *Sigh*.]
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19/07/2005
A short hiatus (to dial-up land)
At least two weeks, maybe three, and since I'm unable to update the site
properly from non-blueyonder space this means blog silence. However, I
will return in time for the new, incredible blog series:
Inquisitor At The Edinburgh International Film Festival 2005! Yes
- bigger and better than last year, hopefully.
Over the period from the 17th of August to the 27th of August, I will be
attending rather a lot of screenings - including both the opening and
closing night films, and the List surprise movie. (I know this because I
just bought the tickets. Get yours now!) I will not, afaik, be attending Serenity,
because all the tickets for that have gone already - although if any
turn up for Best of the Fest and aren't in the way of planned
screenings, I'll grab them.
Handy hint if you're booking tickets - if you have a Cineworld Unlimited
Card (no longer UGC, sigh, they've even rebranded the doors), and you
plan on booking before the start of the festival, head over to the desk
there between 5pm and 9:30pm and you get two-for-the-price-of-one if you
show your card. In case you're wondering, this has just saved me £30
(the cost of the Unlimited Card for three months). There's probably
something in this year's programme, if you pardon the cliche, for
everyone - Korean revenge thrillers, Scandinavian comedy, Spanish
weirdness, Land of the Dead, the lot.
And I will be reviewing, for this site, only a small fraction. But will
it be worth it? Almost certainly.
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13/07/2005
Apparently listeners to Planet Rock have better taste than I'd think they would...
...since, in a poll to vote for their ideal supergroup (with separate
polls for singer, guitarist, bassist and drummer), they
ended up voting for Led Zeppelin. Now, ain't that the truth!
I'm going to London on Thursday, by the way, and needless to say I will
be going by public transport. There's no reason not to, as far as I can
see it, and it's all been booked for weeks. So I'll be writing up my
experiences on Tuesday when I get back; needless to say, I won't have
access to blueyonder between Thursday and Monday, so only the haloscan
comments (if anything at all) will get updated. (Think I should switch
to enetation? Vote now!)
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19/05/2005
Whew, that was a scare...
Finally got the blog back up and running, and looking even better than
the adapted thingamablog layout - I binned the non-working-in-IE kludge
involving my layout, one of Movable Style's and a lot of HTML coding,
and instead worked from V2.0 pages and added in the thingamablog control
code in order to create templates from scratch, and it's working and
looking even better than ever. So call it ISX.networks/2.5, like the
Winamp dudes.This version is better for people with text browsers, too,
although I'm not sure I get that many people who need them.
Now it's possible for IE users to actually see my blog, welcome all!
Although I do recommend you get
Firefox anyway, just because (although if you're using
Safari/konqueror/Opera etc, there's no urgent need.)
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14/05/2005
Election 2005 - post-mortem
I did, in fact, stay up for the election. Instead of blogging, however,
I was on the #ukbloggers IRC channel gratefully hosted by Nick
Barlow, qwghlm.co.uk and
others, for whom I'm extremely grateful.
So, it's a third term and another big but more controllable majority for
Tony Blair. Not really a surprise; a surprise would have been if Howard
got in. Not very many surprises on the night, in fact; the only biggies
were that George Galloway somehow got back into Parliament (I'm not a
fan) and the fact that the Lib Dems made as few gains on Labour as they
did, despite having a very large percentage of the vote. And,
unfortunately, Blunkett's back in the Cabinet; ironically overseeing
Child Support; even worse, Blair replaced Geoff Hoon with one of the
only less suitable men in Parliament, the indescribable John Reid, and
Ruth Kelly's still there. My MP, Alistair Darling, got relected with a
reduced majority. Such is life.
The fact that Labour got a majority of 68 on only 37% of the vote means,
of course, that we need a much more proportional electoral system than
we have now; something Jack
'master of doublespeak' Straw doesn't seem to be able to comprehend
(link courtesy Nick
Barlow) in an article so godawful I'm surprised the Guardian
even agreed to print it. Nick makes the argument about as well as I
would, pointing out the 1997 manifesto commitment to an electoral reform
referendum (swiftly forgotten post 170-majority) and the ignoring of the
Jenkins commission. We may well not see a decent voting system from this
government, and it's a real shame - FPTP should have been consigned to
the history books long, long ago.
And may I just extend my commiserations to Tim Ireland (of Bloggerheads
and Backing Blair fame),
who is about to suffer four-to-five years of Anne
Milton... shame, really.
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08/05/2005
Welcome to ISX.networks/3.0!
Courtesy of a piece of software called Thingamablog,
I am now in the progress of converting the weblog over to a more, um,
'organised' look and feel... It's still not as easy to update as, say, a
MT weblog, but it's also a lot more secure and at least I can keep my
look and feel. I'm going to shift over all the old articles, so it won't
be a problem. Also, the Time page is staying -
I'll move it over to the new look in due course.
In the meantime, enjoy RSS feeds, a proper working archival and category
system, and much much more!
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