The Blog of G

What with all the debacle this week between eircom and Smart Telecom, we’re now in the market for a new voice carrier as we had been a very happy Smart customers for over a year now.

Prior to that we were eircom’s customer for 18 month’s give or take and I’ll be cold in the ground before that every happens again. I got the impression from repeated “technical issues” going unresolved until the regulator, Comreg, stepped in that eircom couldn’t care less about there domestic customers. Strangely, our migration to Smart coincided with a polar change in the quality of service.

Since Smart took over our voice traffic we have not had an issue since, compared to every 2-3 months previously.Unfortunately, Smart could not provide us Broadband so we were in the unusual situation of having our voice services from Smart and our Data from eircom.

Now, I’m not a petty man, really I’m not (ask Elly if you won’t take my word for it ) but from what I have heard reading various articles and blogs this week it would appear that eircom turned off Smarts voice customers ’cause Smart hadn’t paid there bill, then hired 500 hundred new temporary “switcher” staff the same day and I even heard a rumour that eircom had actually refused a payment from Smart. To me this stinks of Anti-competitive behaviour short of sending a masked men with AK-47′s round the smart offices, I can’t actually think of any way it could have abused it’s position more. As a result I will be cancelling my broadband with eircom and seeing as how if I have a land-line I’m paying eircom line rental one way or another That’s gotta go as well.

This leaves me in a rather difficult position, despite living in the greater Dublin area with many broadband providers available to me I have a choice of 3 apparently, once you rule out DSL (cause they need a land line) and satellite (latency is too high for good voice) 2 of these (QBS and Digiweb) are listed on the governments Broadband website. The other, NTL, isn’t listed for some reason.So far we have only confirmed that NTL can provide us service, but the others will be contacted and checked out as well before a final decision is made. As for the voice service well again there are 3 choices, Skype, Blueface and Skytel, actually thanks to Tom Raftery maybe only two.

What’s our holy grail for voice?

Happy Birthday Steve (a.k.a. Dossy) hope your feeling better today oh and BTW…

hahaa your :p

Before I get into the meat of this post, I wanna take a paragraph to congratulate Cristiano da Matta on his release from hospital, as some of you may be aware Christiano was involved in a nasty accident with a deer while testing a champ car. Good luck with the rest of your recovery.

Anywho, What did we all think of the Chinese Grand Prix? Magnificent, only word that I can think of to come close to describing it and it puts things closer at the top of the championship, than they have been at this stage of the season for more years than I can remember.

I do think some of the Renault tactics did have a strong whiff of team orders about them. Apparently, that’s okay though unless it’s Ferrari. I mean it was okay when Ron Dennis ordered Coulthard to allow Hakkinen through to win the championship and then a year or two later Ferrari do the same thing and the rules are re-written, go figure!

Still it was nice of them to set the precedence, expect to see Schuey/Masa employing similar tactics over the next 2 races which will decide the championship for this year.

Before I get on with our main review I feel I have to mention this keyboard, all I can say is this is a work of art no more no less, I so want one and here’s hoping Santa will be good to me.

 Now back on topic, I have is a simple 128mb flash based unbranded player, hangs round my neck on lariat style headphones and holds little bit more than an hours worth of toonz so only minor overlap on an average workout.

If I’m being honest, I inherited this little guy, from my sweetie last christmas cause someone (ahem) got her a shiny new 6Gb Rio player.

While the 128mb capacity is not wonderful it only takes a couple of minutes to load a different set of songs on it so not a big hassle. I would be lying though if I said the new “clip-on” shuffle hadn’t tempted me when I saw the video of Steve Jobs Launching it, but thanks to not having the cash to drop straight away, I discovered this little iRiver player a few days later and I think I’ll wait for it

Unlike most people in the world today, I don’t swoon over ipods, I think there over priced, have way to many restrictions and well to be honest, I don’t follow the herd mindlesly, if there is a good reason to follow the herd then yes of course follow but to do so blindly is somewhat shortsighted. So the rest of the world can keep bleating on about how great there ipod is even though it’s there third warranty replacement and they had to reformat the thing cause they had to re-install windows and the case scratched within seconds of being removed from packaging.