I thought this might be the smallest blog post in the world but I remembered Blacksheep already won the blog awards in that category for his blog which contained no content at all. That untitled blog, which his harshest critics lambasted as being an error, also, controversially, won best punctuation and spelling for a blog.

And, as if that wasn't enough hardware for the night, his blog also won first place for best regional submission from an area around Maynooth. Fans admire the blog post for its nihilistic candour and have even drawn parallels to the ground breaking conceptual artist, Marcel Duchamp.

For me, I think he made an error, was too eager with the return key. I can't even link direct to the blank post as the lack of title means it can't be indexed, but enough about the blog awards, I want to talk about shirts.

Why is it when you buy a non iron shirt the first thing you have to do is iron it to take the creases out?

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We oldies don't do much mobile calling but we know about "cheap"! We call Dublin twice a week on our landline at 1 half pence per min. (how do you do fractions?) How? - Dial 0844 200 20 20. Wait for Robot instructions, then dial Irish Number followed by "hash" (where's that on the keyboard?) They are called "Telestont" I believe. Calls to uk mobiles from landlines can be made at 10p/min. by dialling 08719 997 997 and follow instructions. Hope this helps somebody - (Maiden Blog!)

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When I penned my original blog about iphone, iphone me bollocks ,this piece of technical crap was'nt available in Ireland yet, well come March 14th all that will change.

Please follow the link below as Pat Phelan articulates these points much better than me. If you decide to buy one of these phones after reading his blog God help you.

 

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If you're buying retail and go into any of the high street stores such as PC World, Comet, Currys, John Lewis, Dixons, Tesco all laptops on sale come pre-installed with Windows Vista. If you go online to Compaq, Toshiba, Sony, HP, Acer and the rest, you have no choice but to buy Windows Vista. In fact, all websites display the same message "Toshiba recommends Windows Vista", "HP recommends Windows Vista", "VAIO recommends Windows Vista", "Acer recommends Windows Vista" on and on ad nauseam.

With the consistent wording, these recommendations clearly originate from Microsoft rather than clinical engineering tests. Microsoft are heavily incentivising manufacturers to push Vista which has unbelievably been in development since 2001, consuming Microsoft people and money. Despite this, Vista, delivered three years late, doesn't perform any better than XP and needs some serious hardware just to run the graphical "Aero" interface such as 1GB of system memory and a 40GB hard drive capacity.  

Business customers running Vista Business were thrown a life buoy, being quietly allowed to "downgrade" to XP. Retail customers, however, don't have the same licensing choice. If you have it, you're stuck with it. The main change in Vista is the unnecessary user interface and an improved search function as it tries to catch up with Google. Oh, and My Computer has been renamed Computer.

With Vista OS I am reminded of the Apple II being replaced with the Apple III in the early 1980s. The Apple III was designed by Marketeers and was the beginning of the end of Apples leading market position until it started to find itself again with the iPod. Vista has the look and feel of a development being led by Marketeers, it's not an operating system of choice.

So what is the alternative? As you can't seem to buy a laptop with XP you can return to Apple and the MAC OS (once it's not the "leopard" 10.5) or you can build your own with a Linux distribution such as Ubuntu, i.e. buy a Vista Laptop and uninstall the Vista OS. For the moment, my choice is not to buy.

Is it any wonder Vista is ranked number one by PC World as the biggest tech disappointment of 2007?

1. Windows Vista
2. The High Definition format War
3. Facebook Beacon
4. Yahoo
5. Apple iPhone
6. The Broadband Industry
7. Voice Over IP
8. Apple "Leopard" OS 10.5
9. Microsoft Office 2007
10. Wireless Carriers
11. Microsoft Zune
12. Internet Security
13. Social Networks
14. Municipal WiMax
15. Amazon Unbox

 

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Despite having the Techguys with "a wealth of knowledge, years of experience and unrivalled expertise in all manner of computer and technology related challenges" I couldn't get onto the PC World website as it was too busy. I am advised the store will open soon, and bizarrely, am asked to try again in 1430 minutes.

1430 minutes, why that's just under 24 hours? What's the matter, can't the Techguys get the load balancing on the servers right? Is the challenge too great? Or maybe PC World, ironically, just doesn't have the hardware?

By the way, I assume the 1430 minutes is an error in their calculations, unless they've been really clever and included a variable to cover the amount of time a visitor will waste trying to find a laptop without rubbish Vista installed.

Wouldn't it be useful if PC World added operating system into their search function? You might feel you actually had a choice, even if it was only to select XP.

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I'm only here a day and already I have a moan about it. Comments. When I want to make one, I scroll down to the bottom of the blog I just read and notice a big ---------------------- dividing line above the comments link which makes it look like that's to place a comment for the blog below so I scroll back up like a good lad to make my comment which of course ends up as a comment in the wrong blog. Any chance the format could be changed to make it a bit clearer or have the blog printed on the reply page. This would also have the side benefit that you could copy & paste to quote from the blog you are replying to.

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Since Easyspace was acquired by Iomart for £10.5M at the tail end of 2004 services have been in decline. One of the problems, and I speak as a user and customer of Easyspace since the 90's, has been in their outsourcing of support services to India. When support was based on shore in Byfleet, Surrey, the technical response and customer service experience, was always spot on. 

This Thursday I contacted Easyspace support with a very simple problem to resolve. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to renew five of the domains in my stable with a debit card, as I have been doing, for what must be now almost ten years. 

The response I got back on my support ticket, time stamped 4:33am (about 9am local time India) claimed "Debit Card is for Monthly Customers Only.", and prompts me to follow a link about payment methods which goes on to explain about direct debits. 

My query had asked "I have tried to renew these [domains] on three separate occasions, even using different debit cards but I keep getting the same message - unable to process at this time."....

Iomart is a public company. You expect an appreciation of the difference between a debit card and a direct debit, but there isn't one. Perhaps this is an outcome of not properly managing an outsourced function, where you end up getting a customer response which begins "this is the wrong answer".

Of course, since last year I have been migrating all my services away from Easyspace, ever since I had been encouraged / miss-sold an upgrade to a dedicated server with a rubbish Plaxo control panel. In fact, this is the reason I registered the domain, reallyannoyshit.com and started this blog. Over a year later and this company are still annoying the s... out of me, and are still getting it wrong.

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The headline says it all "iGeeks" await €1400 iPhone launch" well there you have it, Steve Jobs was in London yesterday to launch and announce the coming of the new iPhone which will be available from November 9 2007, mark your diary.

 I suppose that there will be many that will be looking forward to the launch and more luck to you, but heres the beauty of this product, it will not be able to operate on 3G in Europe, that right it will not be 3G compatible, the so called "donkeys bollock's" of phone,music, and internet technology will operate at the same speed of dial up internet connection, brilliant, I suppose that when you buy the phone you'll be handed a 10 mile telephone cable which you will use to "Dial -up", but at least you'll be connected, albeit physically.

 Whilst the world has moved on in technological term's Apple still makes shite products but use's marketing ploys to tempt you into the Den that is non-compatibility, isolation and uselessness, but whipping £899 (€1400 approx) out of your pocket, remember "I'm PC, I'm Mac" well there you go, additionally it also be said that the same phone that does'nt work on 3G is available in the US for $399 and $599 in Japan but this price is under review, why, because the Japanese are'nt stupid.

 I suppose the next announcement from Jobs will be that Web 2.0 is overrated and the feck'in thing will be Web 1.0 compatible, or if that fails they will buy Digitals Vax.VMs system from a down and out on the street and get the Marketing Department working on it.

Christ as a child I used to get two tin can's put a hole in each, connect with string, and talk to my fellow soldiers during "our war", now Apple has "sexed" it up, to the Patent Lawyers seems to be the only option.

 Feck I'm annoyed by this Sh##t.

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Government insist there is no risk from Wi-Fi radiation

Read what other bloggers are saying....

• BookDrunk
• NextLust
• ChrisBlogger
• ParentDish
• Technovia
• Computing
• Digamy

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Play once and it becomes an effort to stop. No fancy Xbox needed, no shoot em up gore...

This script runs Pacman

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Monster is a jobs board, which in the UK is billed as a leading careers website. The marketing gump on their web site includes the following statements

• It's committed to connecting organisations with individuals
• helps you explore the possibilities and find the opportunities that are right for you
• Offers innovative technology and first class services
• Changes the way people look for jobs and employers look for people
• Contains a searchable database
• Is part of Monster Worldwide Inc., (NASDAQ: MNST), a member of S&P 500 index and the NASDAQ 100.

They are currently spending god knows how much on their "monster works for me" global add campaign. Rob Brouwer, CEO, Monster UK & Ireland, comments "It's aim is to encourage and motivate candidates towards a positive career move in 2007 based on their own individual needs or desires - the reason they go to work".

Call me old fashioned but for me one of the key reasons people go to work is to be paid, but with all this "innovative technology" and "searchable database" thingy there is no way to filter your results by how much you would like to be paid or a minimum salary requirement. Everything is jumbled in together and it's a hit and miss whether the optional keywords field will successfully filter out what you don't want. The chances are it will also filter out the jobs you do want as they simply may not contain the chosen keyword.

The search structure is basically ten years old Web 1.0 ("very 1998") and you can't find anything on it unless you're prepared to set up camp for the day and "pan for gold". It would make far more sense to use some of that TV money to add new search parameters or new table columns or tables to the database. In fact, such small changes might only take a week of development work for one person, I'm sure this cost is probably less than the cost of one TV advert.

Rob, I am certainly motivated towards a positive career move, your marketing team have devised a good add, I just wish that when I peeled that label off there might have been some "innovative technology" and a "searchable database".

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I recently heard the Cork City Council web site was being criticized for failing to really appreciate the needs of the people who might use it, in particular it didn't consider how the site might be displayed by other browsers. This seems to have culminated in the Council putting a note on the site saying it "will only operate correctly by using Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5. or greater". The user is then invited to "upgrade".

With close to 90% of browsers already using Internet Explorer 6 or above or using the superior Firefox browser the number of people this invitation would apply to is a very small minority, given that we must also count browsers such as Safari and Opera.

To change from Firefox to IE would actually be a downgrade. The W3C browser statistics for November '06, rate Firefox browser usage at just under 30%, as it continues to take market share away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Council web site does not display properly in this browser, suggesting it was only developed on Internet Explorer and not tested on other environments.  By web standards, this is very un PC (boom boom), as it has the potential to alienate a substantial number of visitors..

W3C, shorthand for the World Wide Web Consortium, are the standards body for the web. They develop and define the language standards that ensure the universality of the web. In addition to Cork City Council ignoring users with other browsers, the website doesn't meet these standards set by the W3C. In fact, it contains twenty three errors, which realistically, would take about ten minutes to correct.

They do include an accessibility roadmap which does mention attaining AA and AAA accessibility standards. This is all very well, but it's usually better to start at the begining: Lads, aim for the A standard first, a good point to start at would be to correct the twenty three errors, and sort out displaying the site on other browsers. As a local government body you