Category Archives: Personal

It all started with the loss of my iPod…

Posted by David Hurst on December 18, 2011 1 comments

My iPod has disappeared forever. Up until recently it was merely mislaid, but since I’ve recently moved house and therefore packed (and unpacked) all my worldly possessions into boxes, I know for sure that my iPod is gone. Maybe I left it somewhere, or maybe some scrote swiped it (in which case I hope it explodes in the swipee’s face), either way, I have had to face up to the loss of my trusty 30Gb iPod Video and it’s exorbitantly priced, impulse bought, leather case.

The simple answer to this musical conundrum would be to buy a new iPod Classic, but since Apple are charging £197 for one, I decided better of that idea. I mean seriously, £197?? You can buy a whole computer for that amount. Or, for considerably less you can do what I did.

I decided to dig out my Sony MiniDisc Walkman. Alas, the battery had gone the way of the dodo, but a swift trip to eBay, £8 and 2 days later, I was in business. The sound quality through the original Sony headphones (which unlike iPod earphones will actually stay in your ear once placed there) and “digital Megabass” are brilliant. It’s all too easy to forget that Sony pretty much invented the portable music player and therefore probably know a thing or two more than Apple about making a good quality device. The Walkman works as good today as it did the day I bought it about 14 years ago.

I had a few MiniDiscs lying around, but I was going to need a few more to scratch my musical itch. So, once more I ventured forth to fleabay, and found a plethora of brand new blank MiniDisc options. With a bundle of discs duly ordered, I stumbled upon an auction for a Sony MiniDisc hi-fi separate player/recorder (the JE520 to be precise – one of the best Sony made), so I got bidding and soon took delivery of a shiny, almost new looking MiniDisc recorder complete with remote control. This set me back the princely sum of £33! It sounds lovely through my Rotel amp and Mordaunt Short speakers, and it connects digitally to my Rotel CD player.

And so, I set to recording some of my old CD collection. No quick digital duplication here – the recordings take place in real-time. And, there’s no Internet database to kindly populate the album and track names for you, instead these have to be manually entered with the remote control.

Suddenly, recording an album has become an event again, just like it used to be. The process has evoked happy memories of hours spent in front of my Dad’s hi-fi, carefully recording vinyl and CDs onto cassette and neatly labeling it. This has been a real discovery for me. It’s not just nostalgia or rose-tinted glasses, it is actually better. You have to take your time over an album. You read the CD booklet, get involved in the music, enjoy it – and this is a very good thing.

Since digital music took off, I have amassed a music collection totaling more than 30Gb. I have purchased vast amounts of music that I have either listened to once or not at all. Albums have become cheap throwaway commodities collected for the sake of collecting, and not enjoyed like they should be. My collection includes great swathes of music that I don’t even really like, just because it’s easy and cheap to own.

Whilst I won’t be deleting my digital music collection, I will be continuing to use my MiniDisc Walkman, and I’ll be playing MiniDiscs on it that I have recorded myself, and in the process I will be rediscovering great albums and re-igniting my love of music. The next album I buy will be a CD, from a shop. I’m going to buy it and excitedly unwrap it in the car and have a first listen on the way home, then I’m going to put it straight in the CD player and record it to MiniDisc, whilst I lovingly caress the booklet and drink in the music. Then I’ll take the MiniDisc into work and play it over and over on my Walkman. And somehow, this process will get me involved with music again and enrich me.

I feel sorry for all the iPod users out there, because frankly the way it was is just so much better.

 

Mac OS X Lion Review

Posted by David Hurst on August 10, 2011 6 comments

Let me start by saying that I’ve just wiped my MacBook Air and I am now back in the comfortable surroundings of Snow Leopard. That’s the quick review.

I’m definitely what you would call a “power user”. As a professional web developer I demand much from my computer. It has to work well and not waste my time having to be fixed on a regular basis. This is the reason I left my PC and Windows well behind and moved to Mac in the first place. And, with each iteration of Mac OS X, the Mac has gotten a little better. Until recently, when Apple made the bemusing decision to bring the linear environment of the mobile OS to the Mac. This is not a step forward.

The App Store
It all started with the App Store – actually a great idea. I love the way I can log into App Store on my iMac and download all the applications I bought on my MacBook Air. It’s a great way to buy software, and it has resulted in a lot of software becoming much cheaper. The developers can afford to reduce prices because the App Store massively increases their market reach. What’s not to like?

Then, some bright spark at Apple decided that OS X Lion would be released as a download through the App Store, with no physical media edition available. This is a stupid idea. Apart from the obvious fact that a full OS could never be considered to be an “app”, in order to restore your machine, you will now have to restore a previous version of OS X first. On my MacBook Air (2010 edition) that means restoring Snow Leopard 10.6.4, and this doesn’t have the App Store. Therefore I then have to download the 10.6.8 upgrade which is best part of 1Gb in order to get the App Store. Once this has downloaded and installed, I would then have to re-download OS X Lion (several Gb) and install that. This is appalling. I’m glad I’m not a sysadmin supporting a network of Macs…

OS X Lion Visual Improvements
Once I had installed Lion, I was pleasantly surprised with the new visuals. It’s not a massive change – the login screen looks nicer and buttons are squarer. Overall, the appearance is better.

Launchpad
Launchpad brings iOS style app browsing to your Mac. Mastering the weird three finger plus thumb grasping gesture to open Launchpad can take a while. It doesn’t feel intuitive to me. But once in, it looks just like the screens on my iPad. I dove right in and started organising all my apps into neat little folders (a process that seems to take forever) and then never used it again. Why would I? I have all my most commonly used apps in my dock, I can rapidly hit Command+Shift+A in Finder to bring up the Applications folder, and I can search in Spotlight for an app – all of which can be done in significantly less time than it takes to open Launchpad and select an App.

Utterly pointless. It’s just eye candy. A home user or recent Windows migrator might be dazzled into thinking this is something “new” and “brilliant”, but for a professional user it has no point whatsoever.

Mission Control & Spaces
One of the best features of Linux is the way you can have multiple virtual desktops and switch between them. When Apple introduced this to OS X, I was over the moon. I have four virtual desktops arranged in a grid and I use Control+Arrow Keys to navigate between them. It makes my work easier, and makes a laptop with a lower screen resolution a viable main development machine. It allowed me to buy a 13″ MacBook Air to replace my enormous, more expensive and less mobile MacBook Pro 17″. For me Spaces is one of the key selling points of OS X. Trying to use Windows 7 without virtual desktops after Mac with Spaces is truly horrible.

So, why have Apple wrecked this functionality? In OS X Lion, you can no longer organise your Spaces in a grid – you have to have them all in a line. This is a real step backwards. What’s worse though, is that OS X Lion looks at how you use your spaces and then re-orders them on a whim. One minute your terminal windows are in the space next to your browser, then all of a sudden they’re two spaces away! Who’s in control here? It’s my computer and I know damn well how I work most efficiently. I don’t need an OS to make these decisions for me.

Another great feature of OS X is Expose and this used to combine really well with spaces, allowing you to rapidly move windows from one space to another. This functionality has also been removed.

Autosave & Versions
This seems like a neat feature, but it’s just confusing. I use Preview a lot for quickly cropping images, and saving a copy. Now I’m just confused – there’s no “Save As” option on the menu and it now seems to save the file the minute I change it.

The Autosave has been useful though, as when stuff inevitably crashes (which happens a lot in Lion), you don’t lose too much work. On reflection though, I’d rather have an OS that doesn’t crash and continue pressing Command+S on a regular basis as habit has taught me.

Mail
Mail now moves messages into conversations. This is annoying. If you have multiple new messages in a conversation, opening the conversation and scrolling through them immediately marks them as Read. Losing messages becomes much easier, since they end up somewhere in a conversation where you don’t expect them to be. Of course, in theory conversation threads are a great idea, but in the real world people don’t change the subject lines of emails when the subject changes. As a human being, I can determine a change of subject and organise my emails accordingly – the computer cannot.

Mail also has developed the annoying habit of crashing. A lot. Up to 10 times per day for me – always when I’m in the middle of typing a message. Autosave does mean that you don’t lose much, but I’d rather that it didn’t crash at all.

Auto Correct
The little auto correct spelling widget that pops up everywhere on iPad and iPhone to help counteract typos from the touch keyboard, has now made it on to the Mac and frankly it has no business being there. I don’t mind a bit of underlining of spelling mistakes, but having the system auto correct them is hugely frustrating. It would be annoying in a word processor, but when it starts doing them in my code editor and Terminal windows, I really lose it.

Terminal
For some reason Terminal now cannot handle using Nano (a Linux text editor) via an SSH connection, unless you change the terminal emulation from xterm-256color to xterm-color. If you don’t you’ll get random characters and garbage, and your text files will generally get screwed up. Apple don’t document this change, it’s up to us users to fiddle with the settings to get it to work again.

DigitalColor Meter
OS X has a brilliant utility called DigitalColor Meter. As a web developer this is hugely useful for quickly identifying hex values for colours on the screen. Only in OS X Lion you can’t do this any more, because Apple have removed the hex display option. Now you can only get RGB values. Why?

Scrolling
OS X Lion has reversed your scroll direction. Admittedly it makes more sense to push up when you want to scroll down – it’s the same action you would make in real life to push paper around – but I couldn’t get used to it. At least you can change it back.

Scrolling with a scrollbar is much more tricky though, since apps don’t have them any more. They appear briefly once you start scrolling (with mouse wheel or touchpad) and if you’re quick enough you can click and grab the scrollbar. I don’t like this. I want a scrollbar I can click and grab with my mouse.

Networking & Time Machine
In my office I have a CentOS Linux file server that runs Appletalk. Only, under OS X Lion, I couldn’t connect to any of my Appletalk shares. I had to recompile a new version on my Linux server to make them work again. Why does Lion not support all versions of Appletalk?

This is a much bigger problem if you use a network device for Time Machine backups, as many people do. There are loads of forum messages from users complaining that their network backup devices and NAS no longer work. Personally, I spent a great deal of time building my own network Time Machine backup service on my Linux fileserver. This works perfectly under Snow Leopard, but refuses to work under Lion. Presumably this is because almighty Apple only want you to use their own Time Capsule.

Stability & Speed
My MacBook Air has crashed more times with Lion in 2 weeks than every Mac I have ever owned in the past 8 years. On top of that, I now get to see the rainbow beachball of death with monotonous regularity. Lion has definitely slowed down my previous lightning fast MacBook Air.

Conclusion
Lion is nothing more than a dumbing down of OS X. A stripping of functionality and a funnelling of users into a rigid computing environment where Apple becomes the mighty overlord. Pro users like myself are cast aside as Apple try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They have turned their sophisticated, secure, stable and fast operating system into a shadow of its former self.

Limited functionality works on a smartphone and a tablet, but I don’t want it on my £1200 computer, thanks very much.

I have gone back to Snow Leopard and I will not consider re-installing Lion until these problems are fixed. Frankly, I think Apple should split OS X into two products like Windows: Home and Professional. The Home version becomes all “Fisher Price” like Lion is now, and the Pro version could be like a proper OS with proper features.

If it doesn’t get sorted out, my next development machine will be a PC and it will be running Linux.

Mac Mail constantly crashes in OS X Lion

Posted by David Hurst on July 28, 2011 44 comments

Is anyone else having this problem? It appears to be something to do with the autosave features in Lion. My Mac Mail has crashed 14 times in two days, which is more crashes than I have seen in the past 8 years of using Apple Mac.

Admittedly, the autosave feature does mean that I only ever lose a few words, but it’s irritating nonetheless and I can’t believe it hasn’t been properly tested before launch. Frankly this is just one of many gripes with OS X Lion, but that’s another post for another day.

Anyone else having these problems?

Did Apple outsource development of Lion to Microsoft?

Honda VFR for sale – VFR 750 F

Posted by David Hurst on June 26, 2011 1 comments

Honda VFR 750 F for saleSOLD

The Honda VFR750F is widely regarded by the motorcycling press as one of the best motorcycles ever built. It’s easy to see why when you ride it – great handling, lovely engine and comfort all in a design that still looks good 15 years later. The 748CC V4 lump puts out 100BHP and 53.5 ft/lbs of torque, and is good for over 150MPH. The bikes have a reputation for racking up high (and trouble-free) mileage too.

Sadly Honda don’t make the VFR750 any more, but don’t fret, you can still buy one… mine to be precise…

It’s on eBay with all the details. Come and view it, make me an offer, and it can be yours.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230639636689

Be warned: Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed Next Day, is not guaranteed

Posted by David Hurst on February 8, 2011 26 comments

In fact, your package is just as likely to not be delivered as if you send it by regular first class post. The “guaranteed” bit refers to the fact that you can get your postage refunded if the delivery deadline is not met. Sneaky. Why does the Advertising Standards Authority allow such blatant misleading advertising? Do Royal Mail get special treatment?

The money you are paying is not for any superior postage service (your Special Delivery item will go out with all the regular post), it’s for an insurance policy to cover the value of the item(s) you’re posting. And that insurance does not cover any other financial losses you or the recipient may incur if Royal Mail can’t be bothered to deliver on time. If you want this cover, you have to pay extra for “consequential losses” insurance, and it is highly unlikely your local Post Office will offer that to you – Royal Mail keep it well hidden.

So, there is nothing “special” about Royal Mail Special Delivery, and it is not guaranteed. On their own website, Royal Mail advertise the service as:

“Special Delivery Next Day – for guaranteed next day delivery”

As a consumer, I interpret “guaranteed next day delivery” to mean that I can damn well expect my item to be delivered the next day. I do not interpret that statement to mean that the postage fee I paid is guaranteed to be refunded if the item doesn’t turn up next day.

You can’t trust the tracking service on the website either. I entered my reference number and was given a message saying that my item would be delivered before the deadline on the 8th February (today). At about 1 minute past the 1pm deadline, the website message changed to a generic “your item is making its way through our network” message.

This has been a bad week of deliveries for me. First, Parcel Force took 6 days to deliver an “Express 24 hour” item, then this nonsense from Royal Mail. If I serviced my customers this way, I wouldn’t have an income.

Do we need credit card companies & banks to be our moral compass?

Posted by David Hurst on December 9, 2010 1 comments

A few days ago I felt compelled to write a little about the Wikileaks debacle (Wikileaks “cablegate” – fallout from the release of classified US Embassy cables) principally because I’m disgusted at the way various companies have suddenly decided to withdraw services from Wikileaks. This frankly smacked of coercion by the US government – something which they denied. Except of course, this it yet another lie as it has since emerged that the US government did in fact request Paypal to stop providing services, since they deemed Wikileaks’ activity to be illegal in the US. The country that prides itself on its values for individual freedoms, is in fact trying to stymie free speech.

Since my last post, a Swiss bank has frozen bank accounts belonging to Mr Assange. The Swiss? Surely they are the world leaders in confidentiality and discreet banking? Not any more it would seem. Presumably the US has been sticking its nose in there too.

Then of course Visa and Mastercard decide they can no longer process donation payments for Wikileaks – a journalistic publisher. They are still perfectly happy for you to use your credit card to buy all manner of pornography, violent movies, and even guns. You can gamble yourself into unmanageable debt with your credit card – that’s fine. Just don’t think about making a donation to Wikileaks. These companies are hardly qualified to become some sort of global moral compass, and there’s no reason why they should try to be such, unless of course the US government is once again pulling strings behind the scenes like a petulant child.

I don’t agree with what Wikileaks has done in publishing classified information without properly redacting names of people, who may now be in danger as a result. I think Julian Assange is hugely foolish if he thought there would be no backlash from all this. But… everyone has a right to speak their mind, and the Internet is the ideal place to do it. Any effort to stifle free speech on the Internet is an attack on the freedoms of every citizen in the world. It seems odd that this should come from a country that sends its armies around the world to bully other countries into adopting “democracy” and “freedom”.

I always knew the world, and especially its governments, were completely corrupt, but I didn’t expect business leaders in the online world to capitulate so completely, so quickly.

What do they all hope to achieve anyway? There are more than 500 mirrors of Wikileaks, and that number is growing daily. People will still get this information, and if someone wants to donate to Wikileaks, they will find a way. It won’t be long before groups emerge that accept donations on behalf of Wikileaks.

Yesterday, a group of activists that are pro-Wikileaks, initiated a DoS attack on Mastercard and killed SecureCode processing, causing annoyance and frustration for anyone trying to shop online with their MasterCard. I certainly don’t endorse such criminal behaviour, but if a company like MasterCard takes a ludicrous and unfair stance such as they have, they have to expect recriminations.

And every one of us should be in fear of our civil liberties. These sort of actions set dangerous precedents. If I write something on my blog that someone else takes a dislike to, do they then have the right to coerce other organisations to stop supplying me? Will my bank accounts be frozen? Probably not, because I don’t publish classified secrets on my blog, but the principle is worthy of thought all the same. Regardless of what anybody thinks about Wikileaks, the simple fact is that they did not steal this information. They have simply published information that was given them. This may be irresponsible, but the same accusation could be levelled at the vast majority of the world’s press, and I don’t see their editors being arrested on trumped up charges, or having their assets frozen.

I’m not a celebrity, please get me out of here!

Posted by David Hurst on November 9, 2010 1 comments

The phone on my desk rings. It’s Pete. Haven’t spoken to him in a while and the poor man sounds frantic. Turns out he dropped an email to a BBC TV show called Instant Restaurants the previous day to register his interest in being a participant and they’ve phoned him back today to invite him to take part in a show being recorded that evening. Pete’s wife is ill and he needs a complete mug friend to take her place. I am that friend, or at least I am the first friend that was stupid enough to say yes.

So, with two and a half hours’ notice, I rush home to iron a shirt (well, in fairness, I rushed to the shop first to buy a new shirt, then rushed home to iron it), trim the mane and try and tease my barnet into something resembling presentable. A quick swig of courage, courtesy of Uncle Jack, and we’re on our way to some chap’s house nearby. Frankly, my gut is churning and I just know I’m going to end up regretting it.

The basic premise of the show is an amateur chef opening up his home as a restaurant for a bunch of complete strangers who at the end of the night will pay what they think the meal is worth. Apparently, “underground restaurants” are becoming something of a trend, and I must confess I had been tempted to give one a whirl since I saw Jamie Oliver doing something similar on his US tour. I hadn’t imagined that I might share my first experience on national telly.

“Let’s play it vanilla”, says I to Pete, “whatever we do, we don’t want to do anything that’ll end up on the trailers and be repeated for eternity on Dave”. Pete was more concerned by the fact that two blokes turning up together might look “a bit gay”. With action plan and avoidance notes thus decided, we booted over to the location and found ourselves in the middle of a housing estate, signing away all our rights on a TV contract, that rather worryingly included a clause to say that the production company was not responsible if we should in any way die during the filming of the show.

Next, we were filmed “arriving” at the house, complete with some awful banal dialogue that Pete and I made up on the spur of the moment which would have been a cringeworthy moment had it ever made the final cut. The whole time we were there I though that we were going to be completely stitched up. “Stand closer together”, said the rather lovely Australian camera lady, “trust me – it doesn’t look as close on camera”. I practically had my tongue in Pete’s ear.

We were greeted (after I had been filmed pressing the doorbell about 20 times) by our “waitress” for the evening, who was thoroughly delightful and had somehow been arm-twisted by some friend of a friend of the chef to do the job. I thought she was very professional actually, and the most authentic restaurant experience of the evening. The rest was not so great.

The “chef” had cleared his front room and set out a couple of tables, complete with plastic chairs of the kind my arse last graced during my English Lit exam. The room was rather sterile and the rack of lighting equipment and cameras hardly added to the atmosphere. Anyway, the waitress duly served us some of the wine that we had brought with us and we sat whispering to each other waiting for our fellow guests to arrive. These comprised three middle-aged ladies, who joined our table, and three local lads with proper thick Somerset accents.

To start we had a choice of scallops or a mushroom salad. Seafood is rarely my first choice when dining out, so mushrooms it was. Nicely cooked they were too, however the salad comprised mainly of raw onions swimming in vinegar was not to my taste. Some considerable time later, we were given the choice for the main course of either more seafood or lamb. After seafood, the meat I am least likely to order is lamb, but faced with this choice, I had to go with it. As it turned out, I really enjoyed it. The veg was well cooked (if a little cold on the plate) and some of the lamb was delicious. Some of it was raw. I did my best, but when your dinner is eyeing you dolefully from the plate and bleating gently as you spear it with your fork, it doesn’t do much for appetite.

It was at this point that I picked up some of the floppy raw meat and made some rather predictable gag about a talented vet being able to bring the thing back to the land of the living. A camera was duly stuck in my face and I was made to repeat my gag, which was nowhere near as amusing the second time around. Thankfully, this toe-curling moment missed the edit, as they focused instead on the hair one of my fellow diners found in her desert.

I chose apple sponge with custard (or as Masterchef insist on calling it, ‘creme Anglais’ – yo Wallace, we’re in England not France and it is called custard) for desert. This was OK, although it certainly wasn’t a sponge. Lovely stodgy cake, yes – sponge, no.

By this time, fully 3 hours had passed since we first came in. Now, I’m in favour of lingering over a good meal with pleasant company, but this was a bit long even by my standards. Finally, it was time for an on-camera interview… in the garden… in November… at night. I was cold. I managed by some sheer fluke not to sound like a complete tool, and then parted with more money than I really wanted to for the meal, because I’m a snob and didn’t want to seem like a skinflint on national telly.

All in all, an interesting experience, that thankfully very few people that I knew ever watched.

I think next we should try to get on Bargain Hunt. I reckon I would really suck at that.

Ubisoft – error: This CD-Key has been used already

Posted by David Hurst on October 12, 2010 10 comments

Last week I bought The Settlers 7 – Paths to a Kingdom for my Mac. It’s a game released by Ubisoft, who seem to have introduced a copy protection system that requires you to register an account with them online and tie your game activation code to an online account. The principal benefit for the gamers is that you can play the game without having the DVD in the drive, and you are allowed to install on multiple machines (but only use one copy at a time). That’s great, but there’s also the huge disadvantage in that there is no resale value for the game on the used market, and let’s face it, game trade-ins is a pretty huge market.

“This CD-Key has been used already”
I was somewhat surprised to be faced with this message when trying to install my game. I bought it new from a shop and removed the security seal myself, so how exactly has my CD-Key been used already? Has anyone else been faced with this error message when installing a brand new game?

Slow/non-existent support
I submitted my support request via the Ubisoft Solution Center three days ago, and so far I have received nothing apart from an automated acknowledgement. I don’t find this sort of response time acceptable for an issue that effectively prevents me from using the product I have purchased and now own. I have provided all the information Ubisoft will need to resolve my request, including a scan of my shop receipt and my manual with clearly displayed CD-Key.

If you have had similar problems, please leave a comment.

ZDNet loves Microsoft, hates privacy (and is not averse to providing misleading information to support their cause)

Posted by David Hurst on September 17, 2010 1 comments

I happened upon a ZDNet article about Internet Explorer 9 today. What drew me in to have a read was the post title: “Internet Explorer 9 beta review: Microsoft reinvents the browser”. Wow, thought I. Have Microsoft done something groundbreaking with their new browser?

Simple answer: no. They just caught up with the other guys, optimised it a bit, added hardware acceleration and made it look like Google Chrome. Apparently, it even supports standards. Yep, you read that right – a Microsoft browser that properly supports standards. Web professionals around the world will probably need to hold off breaking out the Champagne though, because IE 6 – 8 will linger around like a bad smell for many years to come, and we’ll still be writing and re-writing CSS and doing silly Javascript hacks just to get our standards compliant code to look right on IE.

What struck me as odd is the way ZDNet positively orgasmed over the browser and made lots of unfavourable comparisons with other browsers. They particularly seemed keen to highlight the fact that Google Chrome has no hardware acceleration, as though rendering complex 3D scenes and animations through a web browser is a commonplace occurrence.

Then I clicked through the various screenshots on offer, and found these two:

ZDNet: Code required for IE9 rounded corners

ZDNet: "Code required for IE9 rounded corners"

Fair enough. That looks like straightforward CSS – the same code that can be used on Chrome / Safari to do the exact same thing.

And then…

ZDNet: Code required for rounded corners in Chrome 6

ZDNet: "Code required for rounded corners in Chrome 6"

Hang on a minute! That’s the exact same piece of code expressed in explicit notation. This is complete misrepresentation by ZDNet in some half-arsed effort to prove that IE9 is somehow better than Chrome. ZDNet need to wake up and join the 21st century, where web developers have been happily applying rounded corners in standards compliant browsers for ages. Perhaps they should consider hiring someone who actually knows a bit of CSS before they publish this kind of pure arse gravy.

Naturally, I felt the need to remonstrate and post a comment on the post – an action that (surprise, surprise) required registration. I duly therefore went through the registration process, taking care to de-select all email newsletters and junk mail options – I don’t want my inbox bombarded with articles from this lot, because I now don’t trust a word they say.

You can imagine my annoyance then when I got an email confirming my newsletter subscriptions with ZDNet. Yes, they completely ignored my wishes and privacy, and decided to send me their junk mail anyway!

Unbelievable. But, it gets worse…

I naturally logged straight back in to the site to change my subscription preferences, but found I was unable to do so, without giving ZDNet loads of personal information first!

This kind of contempt for user privacy is perhaps to be expected from an organisation the publishes complete falsehoods in order to support a product they favour. I guess Microsoft has them on the payroll.

Use ZDNet at your peril. They probably sell your data to the highest bidder… and the lowest… and every bidder in between.

Liverpool: death of a football club

Posted by David Hurst on September 17, 2010 None comments

Four games into the new Premier League season and Liverpool sit proudly at position 13 in the table. One scraped win, two draws, and a thumping at the hands of Manchester City is not the start we were looking for. Roy Hodgson came in, with much hype regarding his credentials, and has not yet demonstrated any great ability in the transfer market or much tactical genius on the pitch. Still, Liverpool’s plight cannot be wholly placed upon Mr Hodgson’s shoulders when the real lack of vision, conviction and direction comes from the vacillating members of the board of Liverpool Football Club.

The problems are simple:

  1. The club does not have a team capable of competing for the title.
  2. The club is saddled with massive debt.
  3. There is no significant investment with which to buy players.
  4. The stadium is too small and cannot generate enough revenue to keep up with the likes of United, Chelsea and Arsenal.

The solution is also simple: money. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. The beautiful game is now the hunting ground of uber rich investors, with a Premier League club being the ideal bauble to grace the portfolio of the world’s billionaires. No longer is it enough to bring youth players through the system, nor is it even possible. Big clubs can’t afford to give the game time that young players need in order to progress. This means they go on loan at lower league clubs, playing a lower standard, never progressing fast enough, and eventually get auctioned off to a life in League 2. On the rare occasion where a young homegrown starlet breaks into the multi-national ranks of a Premier League club, they just get stolen away by United, Chelsea, City etc. for a fraction of what they will one day be worth.

So, trying to bring players through doesn’t work. What choice is left? Money. Until every club has a super wealthy oligarch owner, we won’t see any sort of equality in the league and unless the FA and Premier League actually do something to restore the game, then we won’t see any return to the “beautiful game” (nor indeed any chance of an England team that can cut it on the world stage).

So what do Liverpool do? They need a new stadium – and not some crappy American football stadium that adds hardly any capacity, like current owners Hicks and Gillett are proposing – a stadium of similar capacity to Old Trafford (if the current plans go ahead, New Anfield will still be 15,000 seats behind Old Trafford). Further, Liverpool owe around £237million to the Royal Bank of Scotland with a penalty of £60million due if it is not repaid by October 6 2010. Finally, the club needs serious player investment if it is to compete at the highest level.

The choice for Liverpool then is clear. Get a new owner, preferably one that is dripping in money and doesn’t need to borrow all the money required to buy the club. Enter Kenny Huang.

Mr Huang offered to buy out Liverpool’s American owners, pay off the Royal Bank of Scotland loan, fund the new stadium and provide significant investment for players before the end of the transfer window. Perfect. Except it isn’t, because Mr Huang got fed up with waiting for Liverpool FC’s retarded board to make a decision, and subsequently withdrew his offer. I don’t blame him.

Liverpool brought in BA boss Martin Broughton as Chairman earlier this year to help facilitate the sale. A guess a quick sale would not be in Broughton’s personal interests – presumably he gets paid more, the longer it takes.

So, there is no money to pay back RBOS, which means re-negotiating terms, which means hefty financial penalties. There is no money for players unless we sell, and the transfer window has long since shut. Which world class players did the club acquire? One. Joe Cole. A great signing, for sure, but when you consider Yossi Benayoun and Javier Mascherano left, the club is down overall, and still without a world class striker to partner Torres.

Will the stadium ever be built? Who knows?!

Pretty soon Gerrard and Carragher will be past it, and Torres will get fed up with the lack of trophies. What’s left then? A mid-table club that’s what. And if the debt doesn’t get sorted out, then Liverpool will be playing in a lower division faster than you can say “Leeds United”.