June 2008

I thought I’d seen it all, but obviously not - Richard Keys, the Sky Sports presenter famous for talking to the camera when he should be talking to his guest, has been presenting Euro 2008 for Al Jazeera Sports!

A Muslim friend of mine recently told me that globalisation has already happened, there is nothing anyone can do to stop it and I should get used to the idea. I should add that he was quite happy about it too. He calls himself a citizen of the world. Richard Keys is clearly following in his footsteps. It’s just not what you expect to hear Keys to say though, is it? “This is Richard Keys for Al Jazeera Sport”.

Yes, it’s a stupid headline. Surely, politicians don’t have principles? 

Some do. David Davies is one of them. I won’t repeat what he says so forcefully and eloquently. Instead, I will refer you to his statement to the press in the wake of his resignation from the House of Commons to force a by-election on the issue of detention of innocent citizens for 6 weeks without charge.

Do have a listen - and remember - there is a large, and more and more vocal broad-spectrum minority who just can’t stomach this nonsense anymore. Could we be pulling ourselves back from the precipice?

David Davis’ statement

I admit it. I left one cult to join another. That’s right, much to the displeasure of one particular friend, who hates Apple like Dawkins hates religion, I love all things Mac and most things Apple.

Today is the closest Macophiles get to Christmas in our cult. Steve Jobs delivers a keynote speech (more popularly known as the “stevenote“) at 10am PST, today, the first day of the WWDC - a developers’ event in which Jobs typically announces several products, including at least one magical new product which Macophiles know as “One More Thing”.

We speculate, but we just don’t know. We think it might be a 3G iPhone with more memory, GPS and location aware software, delivered to Regent Street in padlocked-until-Monday boxes, but we really have no idea.

What I know is this: Whatever I hear in the stevenote, I will probably want it with an intensity of desire that isn’t matched by that for any other product. It is marketing genius and doesn’t happen by accident.

You mightn’t be aware of the excitement these events generate. Hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, conspire to bring down Twitter and other services that struggle to deliver blow-by-blow accounts from the hall in which Jobs delivers his stevenote. Queues form outside Apple stores days before the event. Speculation reaches fever pitch. It’s amazing.

This kind of fervour isn’t reserved for WWDC either. In a show of commitment that makes queues for new game consoles look no more impressive than the disgruntled throng of teenagers outside an Indian “two schoolchildren at a time” corner shop, I was staggered recently to see a queue that encircled the entire block outside the Apple Store in Regent Street for the release of Apple’s OS X Leopard release. It was the longest London queue I’d ever seen. The only time I’d seen more people stand in line for the same thing was when over a million of us walked through London against the war in Iraq that the Crusader Blair had already committed to going into on behalf of his master George Bush.

It is one of life’s continuing ironies that the country that shoots up copies of the Qur’an, gangrapes Muslim girls whilst torching their families and defends apartheid whilst shouting “democracy” Orwell-style can also inspire such love and passion. That’s empire for you.

Go Steve! You know your customers. And you know that practically anything you announce tonight, I will crave beyond reason.

I’m on Bluehost after experiencing a lot of downtime with Midphase.

Sadly, despite the excellent telephone customer service (they appear to know what they’re talking about), the server is not that great. All my sites are experiencing frequent slowdown. (Can you call slowdown frequent?)

I’m also having problems with memset, which is supposedly PC Pro’s readers’ choice. They are pretty reliable, but not particularly helpful (they can’t be, they’re not a fully managed service) and recently I’ve experienced really slow page loading.

You tell them about the 30KB/s download speed you’re getting trying to recover 5GB backups and they tell you to buy more bandwidth! You tell them you’re on unmetered 5Mbps and they tell you that it’s contended 40:1! You ask them if they are fully contended all the time and they say “we don’t have those figures, buy some more bandwidth!”

You tell them that their support is not great and they ask you to buy more support. You buy a support package and they can’t cover everything, so you pay extra for that too.

I can forgive all of the above (they’re a British company, they’re bound to be worse than an American company when it comes to the Internet) except the bandwidth throttling. Sometimes, pages with barely 100K on them were taking 7 seconds to load. Unacceptable.

Which brings me back to Bluehost. Can I really expect anything much at all from a provider I’m only paying £4 per month to? For that £4, I get unlimited hosts, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage and more SQL databases than I could use in a lifetime.

Won’t someone just take a bit more of my money and give me some peace of mind?