Silvershed Blog » internet

Too much time.

mim — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 13:54:00 +0000

I’m told that we spend too much time on the internet, finding things that have no business to be found. So, in this spirit, I bring you Rate My Network Diagram (for Nigel), and the fantastic Skyscraper Page.

And you don’t need to thank me for finding this stuff for you either.

Fuckwittery #473

mim — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 11:41:00 +0000

I really really can’t stand customer support that, well, doesn’t.

We’ve been with our web hosts a good year now, and have always been pleased with the quality of the hosting. The web site seems quick enough, and I don’t think there has ever been any down time. We’ve only got one FTP account, which is annoying, but we’ll live.

Until we got through our next 6 month invoice. It got us thinking about what we’re paying for, and we realised we’re paying £4.99 for a service that is currently advertised at £3.99, with 5 FTP accounts and an additional 200mb of space.

No worries, I thought, lots of places have business processes that keep customers on the old deal until they ring up and complain. I’ll give them a ring, get my details changed. Or so I thought.

Apparently, because we signed up at the higher price, that’s it. It can never be changed. If I cancel my account and sign up again, they’ll charge us for the transfer of the various domains we’ve got registered. And this is even though we’re paying for a service with the exact same name as the one they’re advertising.

As Stuart said, I don’t care which country my CSA is based in, as long as they actually do CS… If I wanted an automated response from a script, I’d look at the FAQ.

I’ve fired off yet another email querying their policy, and if nothing changes, I think we’ll be going to trading standards – and moving web host. See? No-one’s the winner.

Spare Time

stuart — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 17:08:00 +0000

I love the fact that the web is a playground for people with far too much creative time on their hands. One of my mates sent me this today and as I am a child of the ASCII art generation I just love it.

This is worksafe but you may want turn the sound down just a little bit!

Just for Jim

stuart — Wed, 04 May 2005 09:18:00 +0000

I know I hahe been a little lax in updating anything on here recently. However, never going anywhere means that you don’t see as much interesting stuff as normal.

Stumbled across this today ClicketyClicketyLinkyLinky and wonder whether this is the start of a new form of discrimination? The article is pushing it as ‘domain shame’ which I think suggests that the shame element is with the sender.

I think, however, that the prejudice element is coming from the recipient and not from the sender. Prejudice always comes from someone else to begin with, it’s not like anyone ever felt inferior within their own group to begin with. What I think is sad about this is that originally there was the ‘digital divide’. Those people who had and understood computers and were online with them versus those who did not have one and were not online. Now that this has started to be addressed with the falling prices of kit we manage to come up with another way of discriminating against a certain group of people.

Where do I see this going? Ultimately I see it continuing, probably only within a small group of people. I think that the majority of people will really not care what your email address looks like. Where it will continue to be prevalent is within the business community. I think to some degree this is a necessity, caused by the volume of spam generated by the junk mailers from these domains. If the junk mail stops then some of the basis for the prejudice will also have been removed. It might not then go away but at least one reason has been removed.

Just my tuppence worth, let me know what you think about?