HIS month’s schedule has been erratic so far and I spent a lot of time outdoors, owing more than anything to improved weather. Today too I spent almost all day at a friend’s house. Cycling has become a lot of fun, especially along the canals here in the UK. The terrain is rough though, so the bike breaks down quite routinely. I will try to spend the next two weeks blogging a little more as I never neglected my online activity as much as I have recently. Well, frankly, not much has happened either. Since Novell is dead, the “Boycott Novell” push is hardly necessary anymore. We won.

hen I was about 20 I wrote down some efficiency tips that I realised I had adopted (very out of date and potentially embarrassing, going back to the days of static-only pages in this Web site). I can look back at my teenage years and recall being bored and dissatisfied with some of the ways I was passing time. This mostly improved when I started my Ph.D. and derived influence from my boss.

While making a lot of time for exercise and enough time for sleep and social life, I do always try to maximise use of my work time. In particular, here are ways to combine work and boring chores. I typically read papers while I shave, as the latter task is mostly mechanical (shaver, no blades), I listen to music/lectures while preparing to leave or showering, typically audiocasts while doing jobs around the house, and typing of blog posts (including this one) between sets at the gym, unless friends are nearby, in which case I speak to them. There are good devices with full-sized keyboard that make this possible, especially in particular gyms at quieter times of the day. This leaves a lot of the complex jobs that require multitasking to the desktop, which has a vast workspace, steady Internet connection, and event alerts. This actually helps promote the argument that we decreasingly depend on just the old-style desktop, assuming devices integrate correctly. This always leave me wondering how many aspects of ours lives will depend on Linux (which is huge in embedded and mobile devices, not just the server side). But that’s a ramble for another day…

y PC is connected to a stereo system that pipes into the bathroom, bedroom, and living room. But the stereo’s CD is broken. So I started using the tray as a cupholder. It is actually quite handy and since the system is quite old, spillage would not be catastrophic.

obile phones are a marvel of innovation and their small size is a testament to human achievement. But mobile phones as mere phones go a long way back, decades in fact. Their functionality today has hardly changed when it comes to core objectives like making and receiving calls. So how have people come to the point of treating them as accessories and status items in our increasingly superficial social system? Why are my colleagues advertising a phone brand in all their E-mails for example? Why are people without a phone (or a Facebook account for that matter) frowned upon? Must everyone be semi-detached to a phone? Is it a status symbol? Is that how it’s marketed? Wrist watches were like that sometimes, e.g. Rolex.

I personally no longer carry a mobile phone (or cellphone to Americans) for reasons that I explained a lot of times in many different places. I do, however, carry a PDA (it was even used to compose this post with a full-sized keyboard). It’s not something that I love to talk about as it is controversial and my view is an unpopular views. Usually I avoid naming the reasons in order to avoid a pointless conversation. But here is an attempt to cohesively explain some of the factors that led me to giving up mobile phones in 2003. I am unlikely to get one again as it is like an addiction in the sense that once one is purchased, it is hard to get out of the cycle, due to people expecting your number to work, the phone to always be switched on, and for you to be near a computer even when you are not. Moreover, there are strings like contracts, which give nothing other than more complications and paperwork. Getting a mobile phone is easy, but getting out/rid of it is the hard part, as I learned 8 years ago. Among the factors that cause discomfort, as mentioned earlier in other contexts, is the associated complications that resemble getting utility bills and having to challenge mistakes, set up direct debit, check billing addresses, handle repairs, etc. Another of course is the inability to distance oneself from work. People expect people with a mobile phone to be accessible anywhere, at any time. It is unreasonable given that the phone owner might not have Internet access at every moment of the day, which is crucial for some people to operate properly in a professional way. But then there are also the elephants in the room, which make people moody or confrontational when the subject is brought up. There are primarily two such elephants; the first is privacy and the second is health. Enough said, no? The industry which profits from mobile phone extravaganza funds research to deny the health implications of associated radiation, whereas almost any study not funded by those entities shows the opposite. It’s like the tobacco lobby back in the days. Please don’t attack the messengers just because the truth is not convenient. Also, do not be selective so as to fit one’s belief of choice; it’s like faith which overcomes reasoning, even confirmation bias. Regarding privacy, more people appear to be catching up with the problem, especially recently. Using triangulation it has always been possible for carriers to determine the position of the callers (geographically) and as time goes on and antennas density increases, the identification is further refined. In the past it was not as bad as before because carriers were not legally required and retain this information for the government. They are now, as friends who work for British telcos tell me with complete confidence. This is a serious step back which shows how hostile phones are becoming. This data is not there for the user, so it can mostly be used against the user. It never goes away, either. To make matters worse, even makers of the operating systems of the phone are now probing for one’s location. How can that ever be useful to the user? Marketing? To spin this attack on privacy as something positive people might say that it’s for one’s safety, in case someone gets lost/injured/abducted and becomes “missing”. In practice, however, It is rarely the case that the phone becomes a saviour unless a call is being made. So the privacy part of it (location recording with a long trail of history) is an entirely invalid point. Why retention?

The subject of privacy is better understood by those whose activities might be seen as subversive by some who themselves subvert society. The vigilant ones amongst us understand that privacy protects us from those who have too much power.

The one major circumstance where having a mobile phone would be invaluable is when trying to coordinate a meeting with someone out in town or some streets where a land line is not easily accessible. But that someone would have to be unreliable as people could arrange meetings and avoid being late long before mobile phones. Today’s generation got accustomed to the idea of using a phone to justify being late (people are still late, but they get reassurances and estimated times of arrival, which is not ideal either). If the train system was run like this, there would be considerable trouble.

The matter of fact is, a lot of people these days use their mobile phones for purposes they were not designed for, e.g. loud conversations about what’s available for lunch. It becomes an attention-seeking apparatus and less of a tool of necessity. People give away phones to workers or family in order for them to be contacted rather than in order for them to make contact and if they cannot be reached there is an unsubstantiated fear and paranoia. Rather than quell and suppress uncertainty (when someone can or cannot be reached) it just causes more anxiety.

Do you still carry a mobile phone? And if so, have you tried carrying none for a whole month as an experiment? It would probably not be an ideal experiment due to the tie-up or addiction mentioned at the start of this post. It’s a cyclic trap, more so than addictive computer games. Social interaction manifests peer pressure. The truth is, even without a mobile phone people can do all the same things; there are substitutes for everything and nothing ever rings to interrupt an epiphany.

arvey and I are about 50 years apart (in terms of age) and I met him about 10 years ago when he and his wife came to visit. Harvey has been somewhat of a mentor to me since then; in return I did all that I could to offer Harvey assistance (mostly technically) and we made a good pair. About 5 years ago as a sort of humour motivated by boredom (as I had just helped him launch his good site) we had the following images created, the latter one being a picture of me at age 15 in Wengen and one of Harvey as a young adult (back in the 60s or thereabouts).

Motivated by these old pictures which by mere coincidence resemble one another, Harvey has just created the following:

Thank you, Harvey, for the inspiration and advice you’ve given me over the years.

Executive summary: One has to be fortunate to get set up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) within days, must prepare for dozens of agonising hours as average/worst case scenario

wanted to have my Internet connection sorted out upon my arrival at the new apartment. I really did. Weeks before moving in I repeatedly asked everyone involved to leave the connection working and do the pass-over in the simplest way possible. It could not be so simple though. You see, the UK (and perhaps other countries too) has this funny procedural complexity which means that in addition to having to reassign accounts, e.g. closing one account, returning equipment, then opening another account and deploying similar equipment, there is a need to rent a line from BT. People here will attest to the experience of spending up to a month (if not more) trying to get an Internet connection running. If they feel unhappy with their current supplier — and some are said to be so atrocious that even weeks off-line is a worthwhile and acceptance exit barrier to cross — a switchover is likely to occur over and over again. Barking mad.

Here are bits of information that I found out for myself, not by reading anything on any other site (which may contain false/impartial testimonies).

O2

O2 are not so bad. In fact, most people I speak to (friends) share positive stories about O2 as an ISP and I have been using their decent mobile broadband (dongle), whereas others’ was a no-no. T-Mobile/Vodefone were too clueless, unlike O2 where few members of staff are knowledgeable enough to advise a GNU/Linux user. One member of staff in particular — a young man in a T-shirt unlike his buttoned-up colleagues — was extremely helpful; the others just gave a lot of grief, caused delays, and chose to argue rather than realise that the old saying, “the customer is always right”, probably means that the customer will eventually get his/her way anyway. So it’s a mixed bag there really.

What made O2 unacceptable as an ISP (yes, despite the good pricing) is that they started by lying about discounts for existing clients, conveniently calling the owner of a dongle a “customer” even though later on its turned out not to be the case. When a company overstates its special deals to the point of deceiving people, it is likely to disappoint through followup deceptions in the future, adding caveats, caps, and hidden fees. O2 also resorted to fairy tales about being connected within 24 hours (citing the extremely rare exception). The truth is, it often takes them weeks and there may be high charges for setup. ISPs in general compete over who is lying/spinning the most; they exaggerate setup time of their competitors (as Virgin did).

Virgin

Virgin and Sky are expensive, but maybe when cable TV is considered a necessary part of the bundle then they may turn out to be a decent deal. I visited Virgin’s shop a couple of times (and visited O2 about 5 times, for the sake of comparison), however it was not terribly helpful and the pricing for line plus broadband was not particularly appealing. Sky — like Virgin — just mailed me (unsolicited by post, i.e. snail mail) various brochures and other marketing material, but it stressed entertainment, not productivity.

TalkTalk

TalkTalk, despite all that they did to oppose the MAFIAA (although later they did some customer-hostile things well, e.g. DPI), are said to be absolutely atrocious in the sense that disconnections occur even minutes apart and their low prices can be justified/explained by their offshoring of support to poorly-paid Asian workers who merely read from the same list/script, trying to blame customers for TalkTalk’s known flaws. It is an attempt to exhaust the customer and not actually help. The bottom line is, even though I was enchanted by TalkTalk’s response to bad policies like the Digital Economy Act, TalkTalk appears to be the worst one can get. Several people said this to me, even today. Some are getting excited by the price (initially), only later realising why it is so cheap.

BT

Contacting BT is hard. Very hard, except on the phone (free calls, but hard when one’s line is not enabled, which is a sort of a recursive issue). They no longer have shops around, at least not here. They treat people like numbers and they do not keep track of customers’ problems. One agent says “do X” and then another agent knows nothing about it and says “do Y”. When one is asked to contact BT to give approval of an action, the next agent knows nothing about it (they are actually called “consultants”, which is a fancier name for people who absorb anger from customers all day long). The E-mails are almost robotic, the Web site-based forms are too. No replies to E-mails are possible. They fancy one-way communication, not in the sense of ignoring queries but in the sense that they make no queries even possible.

At BT, the gigantic size takes its toll. There are huge queues, too many members of staff who do not know what other staff said or did, and this morning I spent almost one hour just waiting in the queue to speak to a real person, which is actually not that bad after wasting dozens of hours with BT. Some lines and exchanges have better “waiting line” mechanisms/metaphors that give an estimated time until an agent becomes available. Actually, this whole fragmentation and separation into many departments is somewhat of a curse too as one hand does not work with another; for instance, BT made a mistake in the sense that one person says the contract is for 12 months, another one says 18, and it is not even possible to argue over this and point to what some other unnamed person said previously. It’s an endless battle when one speaks to a dozen different agents on a dozen different occasions about one single case of one single customer. Assignment would work a lot better (assigning an agent to a case for example). Otherwise, just as BT may record every call (to “improve the service” or something along those lines), the customer too should hold BT agents to their words by recording and playing it back later.

My story with BT is very long one and rather vexing; typically it seems better to just forget about it. But if it’s really that bad, why not share it to warn others? It might be tiring, but if others can be warned, there is a point in doing so.

To explain some basic things about the connection problems I have been having, additional background may help. I am using a machine at the computer science department at the moment, but I also temporarily use cellular-based Internet connection, which is expensive as O2 costs 7.5 pounds per gigabyte.

First of all, the reason BT is the ISP I went for is some hurried mention from a neighbour and other tenants. But BT is a monopoly, or at least a former monopoly pretending to play fair. Can it at least deliver a service to justify market leadership? They also handle the phone line, which means no messy line rentals/transferrals should be needed if one sticks with BT. Well, in theory at least! I have pressured them since the first day at the apartment (having pressured people who were there beforehand, in vain) and got an agreement with them after 2 days, over the phone. They arranged for my connection to be up 12 days from the time of the agreement (it usually takes 1-2 weeks for some unknown reason). Until now I have had no phone line or Internet at home; to make matters worse, after about 10 very long calls to them over the past two weeks it seems like my line is botched and they are sending out an engineer to fix it by Monday. The line worked fine until the day after I had made the agreement. How strange. Did they break it while trying to make modifications at some level (modifying phone numbers)?

To put this long story short, I have been very angry and disappointed with this time-consuming experience. I have never had to work so hard to get a wired, which means high-bandwidth, connection. Fortunately I have had fallbacks, but that does not justify anything (and a fallback may be hard to find, even when it’s critical for one’s job, as in my case). I hope my phone line and Internet will be up and running very soon, maybe Friday if I’m very lucky. I have not blogged or microblogged properly since the 6^th of this month. Tomorrow I visit Sunderland and Newcastle, so no progress can be made on setting up the Internet at home (Royal Mail, for example, cannot come to deliver the hub).

The bottom line is, O2 seems like a reasonable option, but none is a great choice; nothing really stands out and the bottom line is, even if one is determined to get connected as soon as possible it is unlikely to be simple. Here we are in the 21^{st century and getting connected using 20th Ethernet seems a lot more complicated than using a dongle; likewise, buying a mobile phone seems simpler than setting up one’s landline. It’s like trying to give some old gramophone a kick, or playing VHS.}

[Or in general, what has been going on]

nce a year I take a break from the Internet, usually for about a week. This need not mean being absent from the Net altogether, just a lot less omnipresent (if present at all). Last year I took my longest break ever (well, since the 90s) from the Internet, lasting about 5 days of zero access to the Net. It was an interesting experience. Usually I take these breaks in summer, but due to problems with the Internet connection (although I do work to have it restored in the new house as quickly as is feasible) this time it happens in spring. Anyway, for those who might be interested, here are my experiences when stepping offline after virtually ‘living’ on the grid on a daily basis for 51 weeks.

First of all, despite initial expectations, there is not much of a yearning to get back online. When the train of thought is interrupted and online activity slips out of mind, so is the desire to get back in there. Typically, there is a feedback loop such as conversations with people and it’s this type of cycle that make it disruptive upon departure. Productivity-wise, being offline is not more productive, but it depends on the definition of productive; activities merely change a bit. It is probably a lot harder taking 7 single days off throughout the year than it is to take one week off. It’s something to do with workflow. Similarly, when it comes to coding, it often works better if a week is set aside and dedicated just to code; transitions that are too frequent lead to mental baggage and distraction; separation between home and work computer sometimes helps eliminate the temptation to mix the two.

Anyway, as I digress, hopefully (if BT keeps its promise) I will be properly back online next week. The ISP is a very bad deal (more expensive than the rivals), but it’s supposed to be unlimited without restrictions, although BT loves to embed antifeatures like throttling and Phorm (spying on packets). Until then I am focused on getting research and development done; in addition, when time permits, I re-plan the operation of Techrights which once a year requires a rethink because technology changes and means of disseminating information (e.g. IRC, microblogging, audiocasting) make delivery a constantly-changing turf. Those who stick to “traditional” paradigms like “old media” did (e.g. newspapers) are doomed to become extinct because everything evolves.

I currently have three jobs, one of which is the business I start with some friends and people whom I know can offer me contracts. This oughtn’t interfere with my operation of this site as well as Techrights (I own about 6 domains at the moment, but these two are by far the most major ones), in fact in some ways these are complementary. There has been a lot of social life recently; now, that — unlike the jobs — can really come to the expense of hobby Web sites. Maybe sleep can give way.