BBC interested in TalkTalk

I got an unexpected email today from Catherine Wynne of the BBC. Apparently they are doing a piece about TalkTalk on the 6 o’clock news tonight and during the research came across my TalkTalk problems post (the one with 500+ comments – mostly about problems people are having).

They would like a number of comments from TalkTalk users regarding the service. If you’re interested (and read this quite a bit before 6pm 27th February), call:

Catherine Wynne
Number snipped since it’s no longer relevant

Soon to be unbundled to TalkTalk

Yesterday I received a letter from TalkTalk announcing their equipment had been installed in my local exchange and that I would be connected at the end of March. Which according to some people may be the same time that I lose my internet access and phone line. They say it should only go down for twenty minutes and make big deal out of the fact that BT engineers will be doing the actual changeover.

Luckily I have internet access at work so I’ll let you know either way 🙂

Some baaaaad service from Pizza Hut

Yesterday I was in London meeting a friend. We decided to go to Pizza Hut (the one on The Strand near Trafalgar Square. 45 minutes later we left not even having had our order taken.

In hindsight I’m not even sure why we waited so long to be honest. There was a certain level comedy to it, after all once you’ve been waiting for half an hour there is part of you wanting to see just how long it could possibly take. There worst thing was that we weren’t the only ones. At least one of the group left (who hadn’t been waiting as long) and another was still that arrived about minute after us.

We eventually decided to leave after reasoning that considering how much food had been brought through, even if we did order there’d be a ridiculous wait for the food. So we went down the road to Pizza Express and were served in two minutes.

New feature from PayPerPost

Some people love them, some people hate them. Either way it seems PayPerPost are hear to stay.

They have just release a new feature to try and get more sign-ups that simultaneously gives publishers some exposure while out more money to them (they must be doing really well or have some confident venture capital behind them). The new feature, “Review My Post”. You’ll notice the links at the bottom of my posts for the time being. Basically you click the link, join PayPerPost and get a special opportunity just for you in which you have to review my post. I get free exposure as you promote my blog, you get $7.50 and PayPerPost get another (hopefully) loyal postie. The odd bit is I also get $7.50…

So it’s basically PayPerPost paying $15 for each new sign-up. Considering the crazy people out there and what they are paying (there is currently a $1000 opportunity that wants PR 8 sites only) I expect they’re getting their money’s worth.

This means you could get paid (as well as me) for reviewing my post (which I get paid for anyway) which is a review of a feature that lets people review other posts (and get paid) which may themselves be website reviews (that they’re paid for). That’s quite a chain of reviews…

How to get TalkTalk broadband working

Phil Jones has written a guide to getting TalkTalk broadband working. Importantly the guide tells you how to do it without using the setup CD – quite a few of the problems people have had might not have happened had they not used the CD.

It’s in depth, complete and for the most part anyone should be able to follow it. I’m not sure the average user would be up to fitting a network card (something only a few people would have to do) but as he says, you may know someone who could help.

Yahoo! Pipes is great, isn’t it?

Yahoo! have launched a new service called Pipes. It allows you take user input, grab web feeds, do clever stuff to the result and output it either as RSS or JSON – all with a nice graphical interface. I had a quick play with it and decided there was loads of potential for this. Although I couldn’t really think of any specific examples…

But I’m sure people will start coming up with cool stuff eventually 🙂

Steve Jobs doesn’t like DRM

Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple has announced that the “best alternative” for consumers regarding digital music downloads is the removal of digital rights management. Implications from previous interviews have strongly suggested that he personally doesn’t like it and having the largest share of the personal music player market means it would be good for business too.

The music industry (and the movie/TV industry to a less extent) have to be worried by this. The sales from iTunes are now significant enough that if Apple threatens to remove DRM anyway then they would lose too much by not complying.

Ideally Bill Gates will announce similar feelings. Surely it’s good PR all round for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be united solely to protect the consumer? I’m being a little hopeful perhaps…

EVE Voice is here (almost)

EVE have announced a second stress test on Singularity, their test server, to see how voice chat holds up in EVE. For a long time people have used external programs such as Ventrillo and Teamspeak to talk. Now (for a small fee if I remember correctly) users will be able to chat in game, hopefully in a way that is nicely integrated into the UI (and the new fleet system).

Google gets hacked – kills the web

This morning Google went down in a big way, and in a disturbing way slowed down the most of the world wide web. Well it may not actually be most of it, but it was most of the stuff I was browsing.

The whois output for google.com this morning was:


GOOGLE.COM.ZZZZZ.GET.LAID.AT.WWW.SWINGINGCOMMUNITY.COM
GOOGLE.COM.ZOMBIED.AND.HACKED.BY.WWW.WEB-HACK.COM
GOOGLE.COM.WORDT.DOOR.VEEL.WHTERS.GEBRUIKT.SERVERTJE.NET
GOOGLE.COM.VN
GOOGLE.COM.UA
GOOGLE.COM.SUCKS.FIND.CRACKZ.WITH.SEARCH.GULLI.COM
GOOGLE.COM.SPROSIUYANDEKSA.RU
GOOGLE.COM.SA
GOOGLE.COM.PLZ.GIVE.A.PR8.TO.AUDIOTRACKER.NET
GOOGLE.COM.MX
GOOGLE.COM.IS.NOT.HOSTED.BY.ACTIVEDOMAINDNS.NET
GOOGLE.COM.IS.APPROVED.BY.NUMEA.COM
GOOGLE.COM.HAS.LESS.FREE.PORN.IN.ITS.SEARCH.ENGINE.THAN.SECZY.COM
GOOGLE.COM.DO
GOOGLE.COM.BR
GOOGLE.COM.AU
GOOGLE.COM


It seems to be back up now although you may still have problems depending on who often your ISP updates its DNS records.

Although it seems only google.com was affected*, most of Google’s other domains reference google.com as a nameserver, so they were inaccessible too. This includes googlesyndication.com, the domain Adsense ads are served from. As such every single site that hosts Google ads well have seemed slower while the browser waits in vain for a response from Google’s servers.

* At least as far as Google are concerned. A whois on yahoo.com was almost the same but I didn’t actually notice whether Yahoo was down or not.

Google, Adsense, hacking, Internet, Yahoo