Before there was the internet, there was a different service that provided On Demand news and information called Teletekst (in the UK called Ceefax). Many people from before our generation (read our parents) grew up with this system and have created a so called lock in. I know for example that my mother often still uses Ceefax to check the news sometimes, and for the now “interneting” part of her generation many Ceefax providers have created an online version.

My mother also checks this online version because she knows how to use it and she probably likes the ugly high contrast (you need to become old to like that). Until recently I didn’t really mind that she used this system but now she started sending me some interesting stories, and I noticed that Ceefax has one big flaw: it doesn’t support links. And as it doesn’t support links, there is no reference to a story, no “reading on”, no more learning than there just is on that screen.

In school I learned that you always have to check your facts, and that a story doesn’t really have a value without its references. It is amazing in this sense that the past generation blames the internet for providing less value while I think most articles on the internet DO have references. Making a hyperlink is quite easy on the internet, but in a newspaper or Ceefax article this is simply impossible. I therefore would like to denounce my appreciation for old media like newspapers and Ceefax, and I would wish that people would stop making stupid ports like this Ceefax readers because they forget to force people to move to a system that is inherently better.

Originally posted on FourStarters

For years I have found Yahoo to be a “shit” company. This is mainly because my mother kept using Yahoo Messenger while this product proved to be very open to hackers. Frequently she asked me if I (as I am a computer science student) could write her a program to restart other people’s pc (in other words hacking) because this often happened to her. Obviously she wanted some revenge.

So I never used Yahoo, not their messenger nor their email. Strangely I do use del.icio.us and Flickr, two sites bought by Yahoo. On Flickr the presence of Yahoo is steadily growing, causing many problems recently when they forced all old-school users like me to switch to a Yahoo account. On del.icio.us though, they are not that present. On the front page they are not even named.

So what is happening here? When Google buys a product they often totally integrate that product in their own services. Is Yahoo aware of their own (bad) vibe with users, and are they becoming more of a consortium of other services besides their own brand? Maybe one day del.icio.us will also be rebranded to a Yahoo product. I must say that I like most of the newly bought Yahoo products, so on that fact they are creating a better vibe in my sense.

Since moving to London in January we have been trying to get broadband in our home. One problem was that we first needed a UK bank account to order a connection. Once (after 2 weeks) this was arranged, we ordered broadband with NTL (now Virgin Media) because cable internet saved us the cost of a unnecessary BT phone line (£11 per month). A fucked up company as NTL is, they didn’t bother sending us an email to confirm when they would come to install the cable, but after some calls they could tell me that it would take them three weeks.

When the guy finally came to install the broadband he couldn’t figure out how to (he was not quite a genius anyway) as we life in a flat. When he told me “he had to come back another day” I decided to call NTL, cancel, and quickly order some “normal” broadband with Orange. Orange also managed to be quite unclear in their after sales support but at least everything eventually was clarified by email.

On the Orange site it says that it would take them at most 10 days to connect you, which later on was changed to at least 10 working days. So after two weeks we finally got an email that all should work. Strangely their CD+manual was quite well assembled but totally failed to do the job. Manually connecting with a LAN cable to the router I managed to figure it all out, and now we have internet.

We still have two problems though. First of all they promised at most 8MB but later on they could only deliver 2MB. Now their site said that the speed might “be subjective to the quality of your telephone line”, but I more or less expected a maybe 6MB or 4MB line. Does anyone know if I can get a discount for such a setback in speed?

Epilogue: NTL was so upset that I canceled, that it took them two fucking weeks to do a follow up call trying get me back to them. After a short discussion with the salesperson who almost tried to force feed me a broadband package I decided to brutally make clear that they were inconsiderate morons who were unable to understand the concept called “service”. The sales person hung up.