Have you seen this video on Google privacy?  It’s creepy!

Apparently, it’s showing in Time’s Square.

It’s posted on InsideGoogle.com here: http://insidegoogle.com/2010/08/do-not-track-me/

I’ve been with the same ISP for 12 years.  I joined Freeserve in 1998 on a dial-up and went to broadband when they offered it shortly after.  Freeserve became Wannado and Wannado was bought by Orange.

For the most part, I have been happy with the service. I get the top package (Up to 8Mb but my area only gets 6). 

But last summer I got an email saying I was using too much internet in the evenings, so they started throttling our usage.  This really sucked.  I couldn’t want live baseball games anymore and services like the iPlayer were unusable.  I suspect the iPlayer and MLB.com were the culprits for the large net use anyway, and I didn’t like feeling like a criminal because I used too much of the “unlimited broadband” I was paying for.  I was paying about £30/month.

So I finally signed up for the 50mb cable broadband from Virgin Media.  I’m paying only slightly more than I was on Orange and the performance is sooooo much better.  I can watch Youtube in the evenings again and I’m actually able to watch the MLB services I pay for.  I’ve had it a few days only and can’t believe the difference it has made.

I cancelled the Orange account on the same day as the Virgin Media broadband was installed.  They said it would take 14 days which I was fine with.  But then, four days later I get a call (on a Saturday morning) from someone telling me I have to pay a £30 disconnection fee because I was cancelling my service and not just transferring it.  I complained but it got me nowhere.  I asked what the fee covers (like, does someone have to do anything to cancel it?) and the guy couldn’t give me an answer.  I’ll just take the hit and pay them and be glad to have them out of my hair forever.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a lot of help with cancellation anyway.  But I did have good things to say about Orange before.  If they were quicker about increasing the speeds in my area, I would have definitely stayed with them.  But then they screw me at the end.  To hell with them. 

I would never subscribe with Orange broadband again—nor would I ever recommend them.  I’ll also probably leave their mobile network when my contract is up.  I went from a satisfied customer (mostly) to an unsatisfied customer.  All they get out of it is £30.

It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything.  I can’t really say that I’ve been too busy—I’ve been enjoying the summer.  Since the kids got out of school, it’s difficult to get much work done.  So, everything is on hold until September.

I haven’t even been tweeting lately.  I guess I feel social media fatigue and am waning a little on Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc.  Everything I think of to write about seems too mundane to write once I start typing it.  So, I don’t write it.  This is not what a blog is all about.  A blog should allow you to write what you want regardless of whether it is worthy of someone’s attention—if they want to read it, they will (or won’t).  I seem to be experiencing an inexplicable self-consciousness whenever I start writing something lately. It will pass soon, I’m sure.

On the tech side, I’ve been playing around with Silverlight a lot.  I have a hot and cold relationship with it.  Sometimes it seems like such a gimmicky technology which flies in the face of web standards.  At other times it seems like something that is so cool, you shouldn’t ignore it.  I’m getting a lot of agents calling me about WPF work in the banking sector—so it may be picking up soon (since WPF will probably lead to Silverlight work).

I just got back from a week-long holiday in Paris—well, actually most of it was spent at Disneyland.  I listened to some Michel Thomas French CDs before going over and tried to use French as much as possible with varying levels of success.  Despite learning Mandarin and Vietnamese, I failed the only semester I took of French in high school and always had trouble with masculine and feminine nouns (I had the same trouble when learning Hindi and Spanish).  I think I learned more in the past few weeks than I did that entire high school course.  Still, my French knowledge is really lacking—but having finally visited France, I am motivated to learn more of it.  It was a lot of fun, and very easy to travel to from London on the Eurostar.

Now that summer is drawing to a close, it’s time to get back to work.  I’m going to either start looking for more Overpass clients or find a contract somewhere.  The next few weeks will be pretty busy.