Give Me My Internet 2: A new beginning

Those of you who regularly read my blog will vaguely remember the troubles I had getting online last year, trying to find some kind of broadband solution, you may have missed such moaning on this blog, fear not, I have a new round of moaning to do.

 

Last week was a blast, I've moved into a lovely new flat, my heart swells, the flat is large, clean, warm and well, nice. There is a BT-branded phone socket on the wall in the hallway, and when you plug in a £2.99 Tesco Value phone there is a dial tone.

 

Alas, when you call a mobile to try to find what the line's number is, there's just the "number unobtainable" message.

 

When I dial 150 nothing happens, it just goes silent.

 

I want to sign up Sky Broadband, they seem like good people, offering unlimited internet for around £10 a month. Just imagine all the blogging I could do, just imagine all the episodes of The Sarah-Jane Adventures I could watch, or the gigs I could hear about, the videos I could post, the graphs, the drawings, the poorly rehearsed Tindersticks cover versions, oh, the limitless possibilities of limitless internet.

 

Alas, when I try to sign up to Sky, they say that the phoneline is active and demand I enter the phone number. I would love to, but I cannot get it.

 

When I try BT's website, there is nothing I can do, no help mechanism I can follow without entering the phone number, but I don't have it.

 

When I phone up the nice people at BT, after rounds and rounds of recorded messages and option, I end up just waiting patiently whilst it rings out.

 

An hour.

 

I've waited an hour to speak to someone at BT who can help.

 

There is no one.

 

If I unping the phoneline from the wall in my hallway, and pull it out to the road, and tie it to my car's tow hook, and then drive at high speed away from my flat, wrenching the phoneline from it's roots, will it drag the phone exchange through it's network of tunnels and out and trailing down my street? or will it just become unattached somewhere and my phoneline will cease to be active so that Sky will send round a nice man to hook up broadband for me?

 

How do I get my internet?

 

Give me my internet!

Arguments during Dispatches

There were arguments whilst watching Dispatches last night. The program blew the cover on tax havens and government ministers and advisers who use them.

I feel the need to clearly verbalise my feelings on the subject.

Firstly I think in the UK we pay too much tax. I dispute the assumption that the government has any right at all to my earnings. As I've discussed elsewhere, I pay about 50% of my earnings as tax, sure income tax is 22%, but with fuel duty, VAT and so on, its 50%.

I get up early, I drive for miles to get to work, I work hard, yet half of my effort is to fill government coffers. Except the government has no money, its just a transient state, it spends my money, or worse, it gives it away for free.

And where it gives it away is the problem, the redistribution of wealth, from the hard working to the workless.

I'm saving my pennies to buy myself an xBox 360. If anyone who lives on benefits, on government handouts, who does not work, who does not have to get up at 7am to go to work, if they can afford an xBox 360, if they have a higher standard of living than me, then I pay too much tax, tax levels in the UK are too high, and I fully support anyone who takes legal measures to reduce their tax bill.

I believe sovereign states have the right to set their own tax levels, without having to ask the UK's permission.

Is that a contradiction? Considering I dispute the government's right to my (or anyone else's) earnings? Nope.

If anyone seeks to reduce their tax bill by moving their assets and money abroad, then so be it. It's a perfectly legitimate expression of opinion, the UK's levels of tax are too high and it follows they should be lowered.

Spread of rents in the UK housing market

Good evening blog readers, I'm in the process of moving house. I'd been meaning to move away from Wembley and closer to work for a while and now, well, to be honest I'm of no fixed abode until I get keys to the new place some time next week.

Anyhoo, it took a while to find somewhere to live. We had a budget, around £800 per month, no more than £900. We wanted a two bedroom place so one room could be an office/studio/den/spare bedroom, but a one bedroom place would be okay if it was nice. I had location stipulations, nearer to where I work in Enfield than Wembley, and also closer to ways into London town centre of gigs an stuff.

Other people in the househunting game have other stipulations, such as, not in the east and near on of those cool west London tube lines.

Here, take a look at RightMove, London doesn't really really cater for the two bedroom less than £800 a month west dweller.

No matter how hard you look, there's always going to be something better in that price range towards the east.

The concept of 'cheap' two bedroom doesn't exist in west London.

Its been a while since I was out looking for a two bedroom flat, in fact last time was around ten years ago, in Glasgow. We got a rather executive city centre flat for £575 a month, that was expensive for Glasgow. But for London, that's not even on the radar for the cheap end of the market.

There isn't even a cheap bit of London with the shittest two bed flats for around that. I know inflation exists, but no no.

Anyhoo, so I like graphs and stuff. I went onto RightMove and started scraping.

This is a graph of the distribution of two bedroom flat rental prices in Glasgow from RightMove. It tells us that if you're looking for a £800 two bed there, you can pretty much get any flat on the market. A shitty flat in a shitty area will cost £400 a month and a decent one will cost £800. Sure there are more luxurious city centre ones over a grand, but most of the market is within your grasp.

Its not just Glasgow that's that cheap, here's a look at the spread in Glasgow and Manchester. Its the same spread.

Sure, Manchester is a touch more expensive. The average being £628 per month compared to Glasgow's £593 per month, but there's not much in it.

Anyhoo, here are all the price spreads that I scraped off of RightMove.

Yes its hard to see what's going on there, suffice to say there's a wide spread of rental prices comparing different cities and towns in the UK. That's kind of obvious to all.

You'll have heard of the north/south divide, or how London is horrendously expensive compared to the rest of the world and it gets cheaper the further from London you go.

So to illustrate this here's a graph of average rent for a two-bed in different parts of the UK, with latitude along the y-axis and price along the x-axis.

The rent floor for the UK seems to be £490 a month. No town has an average rent much below this. Sure, some of the vilest shitholes will be cheaper, and there's always flatshare.

London is generally more expensive than anywhere else in the UK. Even the cheap bits of London are more expensive.

Here's a wee graph of the spreads of various places in that expensive latitude around London.

I've cut off the x-axis at £1500 per month cos above that it gets rather depressing. Do you really want to know that the average rent in West Hampstead is £1710 a month an Tower Hamlets is £1570? Around three times more than double the average in most of the UK.

The other day Raedwald blogged about how Middlesbrough was well cheap, you could buy a four bedroom house there for £132,000. But that still not quite scraping the barrel.

I use to joke with people that I could quit my job and move to Hull and live in a nicer flat just on my Job Seekers allowance. But it appears there are cheaper places than even Hull. Carlisle for example.

Here, this is my wee list of the average 2-bed rent in various places in the UK.

£1,711.15 - West Hampstead
£1,569.78 - Tower Hamlets
£1,530.41 - Bethnal Green
£1,394.95 - Brixton
£1,252.63 - Wembley
£1,173.56 - Brighton
£1,144.02 - Enfield
£1,093.44 - Uxbridge
£1,031.45 - Walthamstow
£955.47 - Croydon
£874.05 - Reading
£869.32 - Slough
£828.37 - Chelmsford
£783.09 - Edinburgh
£775.00 - Burnham on Crouch
£755.04 - Portsmouth
£736.06 - Bristol
£692.54 - Plymouth
£668.94 - Cardiff
£666.67 - Birmingham
£664.54 - Colchester
£648.22 - Newcastle upon Tyne
£645.89 - Norwich
£627.92 - Manchester
£617.50 - Leicester
£606.42 - Liverpool
£597.65 - Sheffield
£592.19 - Glasgow
£581.67 - Swansea
£578.26 - Moss Side
£576.36 - Nottingham
£553.09 - Coventry
£516.23 - Doncaster
£507.14 - Bolton
£504.90 - Rochdale
£504.41 - Middlesbrough
£497.64 - Bradford
£496.24 - Hull
£479.17 - Carlisle

Thrilling stuff, I'm sure you'll agree.

Does this open up some interest questions about the nature not just of Housing Benefit, but also Job Seekers Allowance in the UK, and who pays for who.

**UPDATE**
Playing around on Excel instead on OpenOffice Base, I've put together this surface graph of the spreads in each of the aforemention towns, and done it so it looks a little like the cover to Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures.

Its going to be a wee while until I can get on a 'puter that can run better graphing software.

Yeo Dairy

I don't watch X-Factor very often, but staying at my brother's place this weekend, it was on TV. Gotta say, this advert for Yeo Valley milk was the best thing on.

Thorn Dice

Am currently clearing my flat and loading up a storage container, so of course I'm getting distracted by cool things on the internet.

I was looking for a cool new hobby to get into, 3D printing seems neat, considering it can produce wonders such as these thorn dice.



I'm not a gamer any more, but WANT!

Places where I have lived in London

It was 2007 when I moved to London from Glasgow, I had a job but no where to live when I arrived. I had a plan, I'd drive down in my wee car, and then find a nice internet cafe, and sit on the internet on Gumtree until I found myself somewhere to live.

It was a fine plan, I only slept in my car for one night before I found a room in Alperton, about five minutes walk from the factory where I was a manager.



Living near enough to your place of work to be able to walk home for lunch is a luxury, its a joy. The accomodation was a bit crap though

Revulsion of Desire

My heart, it swelled, I was so ready to love, the joy of the life we could have lead together.

But it wasn't to be.

I can't stand my HTC Desire, and I'm going to have to take it back to the Orange shop.

I got it yesterday, after awaiting for ages for the Orange online shop to have some in stock, I took the advice of the internet and went into Harrow to check out the high street shop. The gentleman who served me was friendly and helpful, he gently tried to persuade me to get the Samsung Galaxy instead, but my heart was set n a life with the HTC Desire.

Somehow I'm on the £15 a month Dolphin price plan, but regularly pay £40 a month, somehow although the internet shop says I'm entitled to an HTC Desire as a free upgrade, in real life I'd have to pay £50 to upgrade, but my heart was set on our life together, so £50 wasn't so bad. I handed over the money, was advised to charge it for ten hours before I used it and skipped merrily home.

But after a few hours with it, no, its not to be, and back to the shop it will go.

Before I go on, here is a small bullet-pointed list of the reasons why:-

• 9 hour battery life
• Cluttered up with irremovable Orange Apps
• Poor 3G signal
• Poor GPS signal
• Orange SafeGuard censor/filter thing
• Clunky user interface

Like the nice man said, I charged it up for ten hours, so it was the middle of the night when I started playing with it, and after a few hours I needed to charge it again. My last phone was a BlackBerry Curve, which when I first got it, had a battery life of ten days, more than a week. The HTC Desire, I'm going to have to charge it up every time I go near an power socket. Maybe some folk are used to crap battery lives, their phones always on the very foreskin of technology, but for me that kind of neediness is too much.

I'd be a little fucked without a phone, and so a short battery life is Thomas the Tank.

There are two Maps applications on the phone, google maps and Orange Maps, two app stores, the Android Marketplace and the Orange App Shop, there are a tonne of games. I'm not really a game kind of person. Sure, I'm addicted to Mario Galaxy 2 on the gf's Wii right now, and I have been dreaming of buying an Xbox 360 S 250Gb for months and months in the hope I'll be able to play Warriors and Project Gotham Racing 2 again, but on a phone, I don't want games.

No games on my phone please. Sadly you can't remove the Orange installed games, there's five of them taking up valuable program list real-estate. I have to scroll past them, any time I want to go into the program list, there's no way to get rid of them.

Similarly, the stocks and shares app, the weather app, and whatever the heck FootPrint is, there's no easy way to get rid of the or hide them. At least on the BlackBerry you could hide stuff, but on the Desire, nope.

I dunno, maybe only some of the unwanted apps are Orange-installed, and some are Android HTC affairs that are also locked. Either way, I don't care, it don't matter to me, all that matters is the only way to declutter the list of programs is to take it back to the shop an not bother with the Orange HTC Desire.

Ooh, I downloaded a bar-code reader app. Its great, you just point it at any barcode on anything, and it'll read it. 2D barcodes too, so you can see what all those cool internet folk are really saying in their 2D barcode avatars. I spent a joyful few hours going through the gf's cosmetic collection, scanning barcodes then searching for how much these potions cost online.

Maybe I'm a dirty perve, but its so much fun.

GLEE!!!!

But is it enough fun to keep the phone, to spend my life with it forever?

I downloaded the FourSquare app and we headed off to Brent Cross. On day I shall be mayor of all of London, with my Blackberry I was making good progress, alas it didn't have GPS, so I was always in the vague area, but with the HTC Desire from Orange, it would know exactly where I was.

That was the plan, that's what was supposed to happen, but no no.

Wandering round Brent Cross there was no GPS signal, and barely any 3G signal, I couldn't even update Twitter to moan about it. My little FourSquare dreams of skipping hand in hand with my Desire through clothes shops and coffee bars, came tumbling down. The grim reality of silence and shite signal strength.

Ah, in the old days of my BlackBerry Curve I'd spend hours on google reader, catching up with the world, reading blogs, frothing at the injustices of the world. Hours at work would fly by, with muted snorts and sniggers, evening with loved ones spent smiling and nodding and vaguely agreeing with whatever they were prattling on about whilst I was in my own little world.

With the Desire's larger screen and fast 3G connection and cool pinching zooming in type things the world ought to have been a more beautiful place. But no, my dreams were dashed again, as soon as I sign into google reader, I get some blocking screen from something called Orange SafeGuard, that is to protect me from things only over 18 year olds can view.

I'm a youthful looking chap, even with a couple of grey hairs, the folk at work reckon I'm a good decade younger than my ID has it, so its understandable that Orange SafeGuard would try to protect me. I have a healthy appetite for porn though, redtube, youporn and pornhub being my choice video sites, and Curvy, Menage a 3 and Chester 5000 XYV being my choice of rude webcomics, so I clicked through to get the SafeGuard thing removed, only to have my dreams dashed once more with a broken link, so I couldn't actually remove SafeGuard.

Strangely though, the next time I logged into Google Reader, I had no problem. That kind of inconsistency frustrates me.

Hours pass, and I've installed a few new apps, and had my dreams dashed by them, and I think its about time to tidy up the desktop from the standard on, move things around a bit, and that experience was clunky too. I couldn't find how to delete apps and widgets from the desktop so I had to start a new clean slate, and then if I made a mistake and placed an app where it wasn't wanted, I couldn't shift it, and had to start again. Maybe there's an easy way of doing it, but with the rest of the shite I've put up with the thing, I can't be arsed.

Not everyone has these problems, some people enjoy using the HTC Desires, I've seen them, they're satisfied.

I'm not though.

I painted a beautiful picture in a heid of life with an HTC Desire, and this thing from Orange don't match it. It doesn't come close, it is a worse experience than my two year old BlackBerry Curve. And so, back to the shop it'll go.

Then what?

On Twitter @marksany is the herald of the iPhone. I have given this though. I like the idea of the iPhoniverse, the Apple life. I'd want an old school iPhone 3GS rather than the iPhone4, that antenna business hasn't been resolved satisfactorily.

But no, its not going to happen, I'm not at a point in my life where I can embrace the iPhone. I'm typing this blogpost on my Acer Aspire One net book, running Ubuntu. There's no iTune on Ubuntu. I have no Apple Mac, and my old Windows desktop 'puter is about to be packed away, and unlikely to ever reappear. Without some kind of home computer to 'tether' (if you will) the iPhone to I'd be missing a chunk of the iPhone experience. Its unsatisfactory.

I could be wrong.

I often am.

In fact, one of the main points of this blogpost is incorrect. It is possible to remove the Orange-installed apps from their HTC Desire. I can re-flash the memory with the uncorrupted Android OS. People off of Android fora all over the internet have done it. It voids the Orange warranty, but it resolves the issue. It requires a Windows PC, but it does resolve the issue. I'm unwilling to try. I've had the HTC Desire from Orange for just over 24 hours, and I think I prefer my old BlackBerry Curve.

Its possible, I guess, that in the next few days @conorfromorange might announce that the new version of the Android software, Froyo, is coming out to Orange users, and without is the removable of all the frustrating apps and shite that annoys me so.

But that won't help the crap 3G and GPS signal that thwarted my FourSquare dreams and subsequent moaning, but would that be enough to keep me as an Orange customer?

I don't like having my emotions toyed with like this. I've dumped beautiful women for less.

I fear maybe I'm being stupid and ungrateful here, that the HTC Desire from Orange is a great phone, loved by thousands, why don't I love it? Why must I make a fuss, why can't I just accept it the way it is, embrace it tightly and love it like I've loved others before?

I handed over fifty quid for it, when other upgrade phones would have been free. I paid for it, and all I got was heartache, a big load of heartache.