Category: Random

A brief ADSL related aside. Are you having problems with BTOpenworld? Then you need to know about btopenwoe.co.uk.

Ok. The latest news for BTOpenworld customers struggling with broadband access via crappy alcatel modems is that you might just as well stick your thumb up your ass for all the help they’ll provide at the moment. In the meantime, according to a helpful correspondent who is high up at a Mac print-publication, Hermstedt ADSL modems (around £139) come with fully working OSX.2 drivers. Which is a nice if expensive solution. Equally expensive but apparently the solution if you’re planning to use Airport is the solution that Matt Webb suggested to me – buy an ethernet router of some kind and stick it between the Alcatel modem and the computer. Apparently this will help…

Warning: If you are an OSX user in the UK who is using BTOpenworld‘s broadband service and is thinking of upgrading to Appe’s latest operating system OSX.2, then be aware that the Alcatel SpeedTouch USB modem does not work with Jaguar and you will be left without any kind of web access. There are no functioning drivers for the Alcatel modem compatible with OSX.2, and no information on when there will be. I have discovered this to my cost, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.

BTOpenworld have also helpfully declared that they no don’t even support OSX (“It’ll work, but we can’t give you any help on it and stuff”). I’m eager to spread the word on this one – and I’m also eager to be a bridge for any updates people might have. Mail me.

Anyone who’s worked in any kind of office at any point in their lives has probably had to sign a contract or a piece of paper that outlines what is acceptable and what is unacceptable behaviour in the office. As part of this often comes a short edict about ‘abuse of the internet’, which generally is taken to mean downloading child pornography or not getting any work done at all because you’re busy playing ‘Go’ on a network with someone in Japan. If you abuse the internet, you will get fired.

Of course abuse of the internet is a fairly loose term, which as yet doesn’t have a consistent meaning between jobs. I remember an article in the press in the UK a few years ago which held that a woman who booked a holiday during her lunch break at work could be fired for abusing the internet. Most of us who live at least a third of our lives online reacted with a certain amount of horror to that. After a while, the net becomes an extension of your head, or your hands, or your ears or your eyes. Being separated from it in a working environment becomes ridiculous. The capacity to chat to a coworker on AIM about a work-related matter becomes normal – as does the ability to ask a friend in another country for a link about icon design.

And then you get to the weblog, which may prove to be the latest thing to be legislated around: via blogroots comes this fairly reasonable policy on weblogs. It’s a balanced view of them – carefully measuring both the need of businesses to cover their own asses and the need for individuals to feel they have online free expression. Unfortunately, while it is eminently pragmatic, that doesn’t mean that it’s actually morally right. Something that seems eminently clear to me is that the needs of business impinge on the rights of the individual to have a life ‘outside work’ a hell of a lot more than they should…

When Wil Wheaton started weblogging, I though it was great. I loved the fact that the culture of weblogs allowed us all to enter a world that – for the most part – remains completely invisible to the general public – a world of faded celebrity, auditions and call-backs. I loved the fact that he actually seemed to be a pretty decent bloke and that he had a sense of humour and a sense of perspective. I got quite excited when I heard he was going to be in the next Star Trek movie – he’s my age, he’s exposing himself on the net – I kind of felt weirdly like one of my peers had made good again.

After a while, I moved on to reading other sites – Wil runs a very popular site, it’s not like he needs my patronage, and there are so many people out there to connect with, however fleetingly. But I was drawn back today by a fragment of news – that his scene had been cut from the movie – and read his commentary on the phone call he received, and it’s actually just really sad and poignant and weirdly affecting. Be strong, Comrade Wheaton. Soon thirty will come and the weight will be lifted and your perspective will change and all will respect and admire you. It happened to me. Kind of.

“Doesn’t it wake you in the middle of the night. The feeling that someday they will pass that foolish law and come for you and your children? Take you all away?” Ladies and gentlemen, the X-men 2 trailer. ‘Nuff said, true believer…

I’m prone to ramble – so let’s start with the link: Public and Private – random unposed portraits of people taken on the corner of Edgware Road and Marble Arch. The site is beautifully designed, simple and elegant and the photos are of the highest quality and tremendously poignant. Perhaps it has a special significance for me because I travel through this part of London every day on my way to work, switching wherever appropriate between buses 6 and 98.

By way of meta-commentary – thinking about the process of choosing a link to post – I think it’s worth saying that I planned initially to post this link yesterday but I decided that it might spoil the impact of Cal and Denise’s amazing City Creator, so I managed to restrain myself. Is this tactical blogging? Is it immoral? It’s difficult to tell. Clearly there’s a value in the as-it-happens authenticity of weblogging.

As a further aside – this constitutes yet another link I’ve borrowed (stolen) from the wonderful Matthew Webb – who manages to post significant gems like this in parallel with commentaries about RSS/RDF aggregation and links about the wonders of anal bleaching – links that I’ve followed up myself on the interhighweb to uncover a particularly fascinating post to an agony aunt on anal advisor which includes the lines:

“Several people have written to me asking me about skin bleaching in the anal area. First, let me assure you that the way your ass looks now is perfectly normal; in most people, the puckered flesh of the anus is naturally a few shades darker—or a slightly different color—than the rest of their skin.”

From earliest times when man first scraped pointer cross pixel, the goal of all humanity has been the creation of almighty empires of pixels – vistas of microscopic blocks of brightly coloured light coming together to form perfect tiny universes populated by oddly chunky tiny little people. As harbinger of the wonders to come came eboy‘s pixel palaces – but finally we can all scratch out our little piece of tiny heaven out of light itself… Presenting CityCreator.com – a creation of Cal and Denise. Bow down, ye new Gods of the unantialiased – and bear witness to the dawn of a new age…

Above and beyond the lustful need for a new iPod (mine is bashed and broken and lying in the basement of secret branch of MicroAnvika with Joe the iPod Man) is my need, my craving for Jaguar – the upgraded version of MacOSX. I’ve been reading reviews and watching the countdown for several weeks now. Someone asked me a while ago how long it was until it came out. I knew this figure to within one hour. Sad, it’s true. But all these new features: iChat, Mail, Address Book, Rendezvous and iCal…

You can arrive home at eleven exhausted and drained. You can try and watch TV for a while and fall asleep during the horrific climax of an episode of one of your favourite TV series. You can stay asleep on the sofa until three in the morning, and then stumble awake to find your hall has been flooded by the dodgy tap in your bathroom. You can mop it up half-heartedly and robotically before wandering bedwards. You can lie awake in bed for two hours unable to sleep, before finally succumbing a little before six in the morning. And then you can wake in a panic because you think you’re late for work, only to find that you’ve only been unconscious for an hour. You can get up and try and watch the end of the TV show you were watching the night before and doze off in the middle of it. Just don’t expect to feel so hot the next day. Okay?