The more things change, the more they stay the same

Ah yes, my favourite telecoms provider, NTL are back at the trough again. They’ve just introduced a 1Gb per day bandwidth cap on their cable modems and broadband access (previously advertised as “unlimited access, always on” – guess they’ll have to rethink that one too) and some people such as www.dont-pay-ntl.co.uk explain why.

Of course, around where I live, (in an area sponsored by the useless bastards wonderful philanthropic company) they can’t even organise broadband with cable modems. Instead, what they did was lower the threshold on what broadband was, and tried to make out that dual-channel ISDN (128Kbps) was an always-on broadband connection. Thankfully, I went back to a BT phone line as soon as I got the chance, and went with ADSL for broadband instead.

Blogroll

Oh yes, and a quick piece of extra maintenance got done yesterday. The semi-regular (and roughly quarterly) editing of the blogroll over on the right. So (and about bloody time too, in at least one case) welcome to the roll, ScaryDuck, Chaos Angel, Kennamatic, More a way of life and (last but definitely not least) Neil Gaiman too.

More Birthday Bits

Along with Scaryduck and Gert, it looks like Kitchentable also had his birthday this week. On the same day as the other two as well. How bizarre is that?

Still, from the story of the birthday party it looks like the little sod had a good time of it.

Clash of the Titians

Sorry, couldn’t resist the title. Looks like it’ll be worth a trip down to the National Gallery in November to see the exhibition of Titian paintings all in one place, and situated in a facsimile of the Camerino gallery they were initially housed in as a collection..

Speaking with the Dead

I still really don’t believe that anyone would go for something like this, but there we go, as Barnum said, “There’s one born every minute“.

So, with that thought in mind, there’s not a lot else I can say about Afterlife Telegrams where, for a mere $5 per word your message can be memorised by a terminally ill person, and then sent into the ether once they peg it.

Proof of sending is not proof of delivery, as our own Royal Mail would say.

Conversations with Mother

Yes, following on from yesterday’s realisation that I’d keffed up the diary, I spoke to the illustrious parents again tonight.

My mum called me a fuckwit, which is true, and nothing particularly shocking coming from her. And they’re coming down the weekend after instead. Probably. She didn’t have her diary with her, so we’ll see, but it looks OK. Not bad, only being booked for two solid months before seeing them.

An intriguing way to exercise

Emily over at Dubberley has a new fitness regime to play with. It involves the Pelvicisor. Looking at the site, it just looks vile – do some women actually use this kind of thing? The mind boggles. Although I must admit I did like Emily’s thought that after a week she’d be able to fire ping-pong balls across the house…