developments at Telewest
I use Telewest Broadband and today I received an email informing me that my broadband service had been upgraded to from 1MB to 4Mb free of charge. As I am currently paying 25 GBP per month for the broadband connection, it is really a case of Telewest trying to keep up with the competition to avoid customers switching provider rather than a spontaneous act of goodwill.
And as if that wasn't enough excitement for one day, I then noticed that 'Teleport' (TV and video on demand) had appeared on my digital TV service as well. This promised me the chance to pause/rewind any of my favourite TV programs I had missed on the first showing. However, when I scanned the list, the choice was quite limited and fairly uninspiring - BBC News, Booze Britain, Eastenders, Most Haunted.
In fact, the only two TV programs I would want replayed are 'Lost' and 'Early Doors' so I guess I will stick with the old video recorder technology, record those on to tape and still be able to use those pause/rewind facilities.
Teleport Movies just seemed like FrontRow rebranded but with slightly more films available and the fact that you can choose the start time and view the film over an extended time period.
Early Adopters
Recently, I was watching my daughter doing some homework on the PC and noticed that she was listening to music from a radio stream over the Internet, talking to her friends in real-time using Instant Messenger, uploading photos of her holiday to her Web page, ripping music from a CD ready to copy on to an MP3 player and integrating an chart from Excel spreadsheet into a Word document.A couple of things struck me:-
- Females are indeed better at multi-tasking than men.
- Where was the homework ?
Inland Revenue
Just submitted my tax return online which was pretty painless and quick. On the final page, I entered some additional information with a minor query. When I submitted the form, there was a data validation error. When I read the error message more carefully, I realised that the carriage return character is not allowed in the free form text box so I removed all of them. However, the form was still rejected until I realised that the question mark character '?' is also not permitted.So, rather like Tom Kyte, the Inland Revenue is not currently accepting questions.
Less is more
Just bought my daughter a cheap MP3 player. Small, lightweight, silver and cheaper than an iPod. We connected it to the PC using the USB cable. The MP3 device simply appears as an additional disk drive so I quickly show my daughter how to copy one song from 'My Music' onto the player and she does the rest. Within 5 minutes, she is happy and listening to music on her new toy !This prompted me to finally get around to something I wanted to do for a while - to copy some new music onto my aging Sony MiniDisc Walkman. This is slightly larger and heavier than the MP3 player but still looks (and sounds) pretty good.
Anyway, it's been a while since I transferred any music. So long in fact, that my hard disk on the PC died and has been replaced. Consequently the Sony OpenMG program needed to transfer music onto the Walkman is not installed any more and I can't easily locate the original CD. So I go to the Sony web site to download the software. Sony's website is actually a confusing mess of sites distributed worldwide. Sony make some great technology products but their Web sites are a truly bizarre mixture of styles and content. One even insisted I download IE 5.5 (I was using Firefox).
Eventually I discover the OpenMG software has been upgraded, revamped and is now called SonicStage. I download and and install the program, conquer the non-intuitive user interface and am finally poised to press the button to finally transfer two CD's in WMA format to the Sony device.
However SonicStage won't let me because of copyright protection so I have to rip the CD's again using SonicStage and finally tranfer the music to the MD Walkman.
That's fine for two CD's but I am hardly going to re-record my other 124 CD's into Sony's ATRAC format.
Sometimes, less is more.