Well another Tuesday came and went without Apple releasing the new version of its flagship laptop. As I write this the Forum is currently on page 214 of the 5th thread of people waiting for the release.

The problem is nobody really has any idea when the new laptops will be out. All we can be sure of is every day that goes by brings us one day closer to the inevitable release. The problem is there are lots of people who need to make the decision to either buy the current model or wait for the new one.

Without any indication of when the release will happen, all people can do is wait and join the forum discussion  support group.

Apple is really starting to disappoint me as a company. I am a self-confessed fan-boy, but only of their products, not of their company ethos.

I will purchase one of the new Macbook Pros eventually, but I steadfastly refuse to part with significant amounts of money for year old hardware.

First of all, the message to these people is:

“please stop spamming me with your offers. I have not, nor will ever require, your services and I certainly did not ask you to contact me”

I am sure some of these companies work well to produce good quality products, but that is not the issue. The issue is we have been fighting for years against spam, cold calling and other unrequested communication and these companies are setting us back several years by sending out obviously un-researched copy/paste emails to every web company they can find.

This sort of thing is lazy marketing, and I can only presume if you do lazy marketing you also perform lazy coding and lazy project management… so in the words of Dragon’s Den… for that reason, “I’m Out!!”

Anyway, it turns out the easiest (or only, I don’t know) way of deleting this stupid file (why Windows SERVER would need to hibernate anyway is beyond me!) is to drop into command prompt and run the following command:

powercfg -h off

Easy when you know how, but annoying if you don’t!

That said, while browsing the Apple App Store for iPhone apps I happened upon the Virgin Atlantic “Flying Without Fear” program. I am not scared of flying at all, but I happen to know a few people who are and this app looks great. It covers everything from explaining what all the noises are, the procedures during the flight, the concept of turbulence, right through to what to do if you feel you are starting to panic. Brilliant!

I believe every airline should have things like this. In the grand scheme of things it costs them little to produce and maintain and can be one way in which they can make their potential customers feel welcome and valued, like they actually WANT you to conquer your fear and get on their plane (where you will subsequently pay through the nose for every aspect of your journey).

My problem with this app is they have priced it at $4.99 (£2.99 in the UK). Ok, it is not exactly re-mortgage the house money, but really, this should be FREE. People do not choose to be scared of flying, and as a national carrier, Virgin should be doing more to help those with a legitimate fear of flying. You don’t see airlines refusing to help disabled passengers board the plane, do you? Airlines go out of their way to help the disabled, elderly, and infirm. Why can’t they do the same for those affected by fear of flying?

I have the utmost respect for Sir Richard Branson, but when I first saw this app I thought “great, this is a guy who cares”, then I saw the price tag and was less than impressed.

Yes, I know they are a business and I know there are shareholders to satisfy, but for a company that plans on being one of the first in line to take paying passengers into space, maybe they could break some frontiers a little closer to home first.

I know there is very little chance Mr Branson is reading this post, but if you are… With respect, please don’t try and profit from peoples fears, and most of all, please don’t turn into Alan Sugar!

This is not the first time it has happened either. Back in 2007 Fasthosts broke their email system and didn’t have reliable backups. Further back than that their backbone went down for nearly a week.

For a company that claims to provide reliable hosting and support they do not exactly have the best track record. I jumped ship with Fasthosts after one of their big outages as it cost me business. One of their flagship products is reseller hosting, encouraging customers to put all their eggs in one basket. That’s all well and good, but when things go wrong their phonelines tie up and they drop those eggs all over the floor.

This might be ok if you have some hobby sites, but if you rely on hosting for a percentage of your income I would recommend hosting with someone who does answer the phone and has people in place to fix faults fast.

Oh… one last thing… when was the last time you (or your host) did a backup of your sites and email?

The word, meaning “to remove someone as a “friend” on a social networking site such as Facebook” was chosen ahead of other such ridiculous words such as “intexticated”, “funemployed” and “sexting”.

Maybe I am just old fashioned, and hell I am not one to get all high and mighty on grammar, I struggle at the best of times, but these words remind me of Newspeak from George Orwell’s 1984. The premise is basically to reduce the number of words in the dictionary by removing words that are not needed and replacing them with modifications of other words. So, the opposite of “good” would no longer be “bad” but rather “ungood”.

Watching the BBC it is clear the English language is in enough trouble as it is. The TV show “Strictly Come Dancing” is the worst offender by far. Alesha Dixon is no candidate for Mensa it must be said, but the BBC should really give her some lessons in English and not allow her to come up with sentences such as “you was good” or “I think you done it better last time”.

As far as I am concerned there should be more focus on teaching correct use of the words currently in the dictionary, rather than dumbing down the dictionary even more than it already is.

One last thing,  “Hashtag” was also a finalist. Sorry, I know what it is, but it sounds like a sport for drug users!

Yes, time for another rant… it’s been at least 24h since the last one

I ordered Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 on Tuesday morning because Amazon had it in stock and were price matching the local supermarket which I was too lazy to get out of bed and visit.

I chose the supersaver (free) delivery option as I wasn’t in that much of a hurry and thought as long as I get it this week it should be fine. Anyway, I just logged into Amazon and their estimate for delivery is 17th – 19th!

I must admit it is partly my fault. Mainly because this has happened to me before with Amazon. They offer the expensive shipping options and the reason people pay up is because Amazon sit on the order for 3-4 days before they even start the shipping process.

I should have known better, but it does seem wrong. I can understand paying extra to get it sent courier, or before 12 noon etc, but to pay extra just so the begin the delivery process in a timely manner is a bit off.

Well maybe I am expecting too much now that Internet companies have mostly got their arses into gear and tend to ship same day if you order early enough (except Amazon, but that’s for another rant!), but I placed my order Sunday night (8th) and it is still not here.

Of course, maybe my standards are too high but if a company is going to not post your product out immediately there should be notification, order tracking, or something. How do I know if it is due tomorrow or 3 weeks on Friday?

I emailed their contact address and was told (by automated reply) that they are posting the products out same day, and that I would not receive any more emails from them. Really? Then where is it? Is this an acceptable response?

I am starting to get a little irked, again maybe because most ebayers I deal with post out same day, as do most online retailers.  Is it too much to ask to dispatch within 48h, and if not to simply let me know?

Oh well, it will arrive when it will arrive I guess, but in the mean time I can’t help but have a deflated opinion of them as a company.

UPDATE: I just chased them up and they are out of stock til the 17th and will process the order then. I have asked for a refund and they said accounts will have to get back to me! For crying out loud I have rarely seen this level of incompetence before (or maybe I am just spoiled).

I will be looking for another alternative now, maybe a small PC to run XBMC on?

If you register one of these domains you cannot host it yourself, you cannot control it and you cannot use it for email. Basically all you can do with it is provide an online business card!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7761395.stm

Reading the above article it is not even clear Mr Mahdavi knows how it will work. In a comparison to when this was done in the past Mr Mahdavi says “The flaw, he said, with Enum was that it demanded people be on the web. By contrast, .tel will work with many different devices such as smart phones”. Well if this system does not require the recipient of the information to be on the web, just how will their smart phone get the information?

He goes on to say “It will become their place on the cloud,”. Get a grip Mr Mahdavi, you can’t just spout the latest buzzwords and expect to have credibility. This domain is just sheer nonsense!

The worrying this about all this is ICANN, the overseers of the domain system can allow this sort of thing to go on. Why does one company (telnic) have the right to tie up an entire top level domain name? I am all for new domains coming out, but what next, .wifepics? It is concerning that ICANN have taken it upon themselves to move from simply regulating the distribution of top level domain names to wholeheartedly regulating the content too.

Surely this goes against everything the Internet was designed to be?!

EDIT: Seems others are not happy with this either : http://telscam.org/

If I analyse the amount of questions I get, both in work and out of work, on various topics (mostly technical) I think only 60-70% of the time I have the answer. The rest of the time I go away and find the answer. Most of the time I have some form of internet connection to the first port of call is to fire up Google and see what I can find.

if the problem was for example an error message, I would ask the customer/friend/colleague exactly what the error message was, word for word. I would then type this into Google (in quotes, to make sure Google knew I wanted to search for all the words in that particular order) and hit search. Most of the time the first page of Google is filled with helpful articles and forum posts with people having the same issue.

Sometimes there are pages of people having the same issue but there is no resolution, but most of the time (>90%) there are suggested answers. Sometimes there is the odd red-herring in that the question was asked in 2001 and things have moved on, but Google now have the facility to search for recent posts, so I you just search during the past 12 months then most of the answers are relevant.

I do not consider this to be rocket science, or some kind of secret code I enter into Google. I simply looked at the error and typed it into Google. Surely this is something the village idiot could do? Why then do very intelligent people come to me rather than asking Google?

The obvious answer is “why have a dog and bark yourself?”. LOL, ok, I asked for that! Seriously though, I don’t think that is the issue. Most of the people who ask really would not bother me with their issue if they knew they could get the answer from Google.

Could the issue be they did not know about Google? I find that hard to believe too. Google is so big it has become the word used to describe the act of searching for something on the web. “searching” has become “Googling”. That’s pretty impressive!

I can only therefore imagine that people are still techno-phobic. The scary thing is some of these people are not old, they are in their 30’s and really should know better. Maybe it is how I was introduced to computers at an early age, wanting to break and repair to discover how things worked, but for me the absolute last option is to ask someone else. Even reading the manual comes before that (and being a bloke, you must realise we just don’t DO that!).

One of these days I will write a simple (hopefully non-patronising) PDF that I can give to these people to print out (that’s what these people like to do, print!) which shows them step by step how to search in a smart way and how to filter their searches. Firstly though, I must get over the shock that most of these people simply don’t seem to even think about trying to find the answer themselves.

I have tagged this post as a “rant”, but it isn’t really. I don’t tell people to go away and Google it, I do help them. Maybe I should get a job as a researcher, I don’t know. I like helping people and that’s why I do it, but that still doesn’t help me understand why people seem not to want to help themselves.