{Cheese and Beans}

As I have wrestled over the past year with the idea of stopping all this blogging nonsense, I have been turned around each time by an avalanche of comments and emails. It’s very easy to forget while thumping away at a keyboard in the dead of night that your thoughts and opinions will be broadcast across the world when you hit the submit button – in the same manner that you occasionally dig through the flotsam and jettsam for voices that speak to you – your voice may speak to others. Thousands of others.

What has brought all this to mind?

I recently lost one of the voices I read for many years – an amazing, opinionated, honest writer in the American mid-west. She was killed in a car crash in the early hours of the morning. News of the accident circled the globe in minutes – passed from country to country by those that had read her.

This evening, while trudging through the personal hell that is my Google Reader blogroll, I happened upon a post from another long time inspiration, announcing the retirement of her blog. It was a shock. Another voice gone.

What on earth is happening?

My resolve became focussed as I read a post from another corner of the world about the mania to monetize blogs. Given the impending death of the newspaper industry, and the empowerment that the internet as a publishing platform has brought to fruition, I can understand the reasons the hoards of shallow money men and marketeers have arrived, but it doesn’t make me like the situation any more.

I can’t help feeling that everybody is missing the point. We are the point. People. Our thoughts. Our voices. The community we have built, on the platforms we have built. Anything else will eventually prove to be unimportant. You only have to look at the current success of twitter to realise that all people really want to do is communicate. They don’t care how, and they will put up with a huge level of interference in that communication before they cease trying.

It is with this belief in mind that I find myself quite unexpectedly digging my heals in. Standing my ground. If nobody else is going to, then I damn well am going to carry on writing, and tell my story. It will be heard by those who choose to seek it out.

I will not go quietly into the night.

While away with work over the coming weeks, I am staying at a rather big, rather expensive hotel on the outskirts of a big city in the UK.

Any novelty that might have been had through “living in the hotel” has been destroyed before the end of the first night. It all comes down to one thing – no internet.

No internet means no Skype video call with my children.

At (their) dinner time this evening I sat down in the hotel room, and looked around for an internet cable, or a leaflet explaining about WiFi. I even looked in the wardrobe. Nothing.

A sinking feeling came over me as I realised that none of the rooms in this wing of the hotel have any form of internet what-so-ever. The hotel does have some things though; 1970s decor, vandalised Playstation controllers, and wood splintering off the bathroom door.

Mindful of the minutes ticking by, I called home on my mobile to break the news to our children – that they would not be seeing Daddy after all.

When our youngest had her turn on the phone she asked;

“Why you so far, far away Dad?”

“Because the people I work for told me to”

“Why they tell you to go away Dad?”

It’s sometimes very hard to explain things to a 4 year old.

“Because they did, and I have to do as I’m told…”

As a last resort, a little later in the evening I tried both of our 3G dongles in the netbook, and my work laptop. For a few moments we thought we had a solution; the BT dongle gave a steady 3G signal, and video worked in Skype. It then ground to a halt, and hasn’t worked since. The Vodafone dongle worked in the netbook only, and Skype on Ubuntu refused to attempt a video call without hilarious lag.

So – I’m looking at 6 weeks of Monday through Thursday with a stone-age internet connection which appears to be as reliable as a baby’s bum.

In fairness the evening meal (part of the room booking price) was really nice. It probably helped that I am here with colleagues, so didn’t have the “single person in busy restaurant” experience that I’ve had in the past (it’s a pretty damn lonely one).

One thing about the meal though – one glass of wine cost the same as two bottles of the wine we have at home. I guess that’s how Paris Hilton pays for her idiotic dresses.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XSTwfdFwIY&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]

This is going to be really interesting…

I have been meddling with the various places that I hold accounts on the internet this evening – trying to bring the same username into effect everywhere (as much as that might be possible, given the lack of planning that went into the mess I have singlehandedly created). While doing so, I thought it might be a sensible idea to keep an online backup of my entire personal blog – so grabbed http://jonbeckett.wordpress.com. A few minutes later it was populated with my old blog posts – if you would like to know how I did it, feel free to email me.

I was going to title this post “To blog, or to microblog”, but I’m not quite sure if “to blog” is grammatically correct or not (if it is in the dictionary, I will headbutt the table rather theatrically, and make disgusted murmurings about the erosion of the English language).

While life and work have recently conspired to restrict my participation in any online activities to speak of, it has afforded me a perspective on the communities I frequent that I would otherwise not have had.

It would appear that the Twitter bubble has burst – or rather, the unwashed masses have exposed themselves as more lazy, shallow and disinterested than most had perhaps predicted they would be. The great majority of plebs on twitter post only about themselves, never reply, never send direct messages, and never invest any effort in contributing to the community.

There is more wrong with Twitter than most users realise; the service itself encourages thoughtless output of banality. Considered opinion is impossible, and each voice becomes drowned within the flood. Conversations are hopelessly disjointed, and there are very few controls to prevent marketers from scraping relational data from the system.

More worryingly, I have noticed that the blogs I used to follow and enjoy on a daily basis are slowly drying up. Perhaps a form of natural selection is at work – perhaps my own relative disconnection from the internet in general has been shared by the group? Who knows.

I look forward to the return of those I read, and the return of “blogging” in general – the shared and considered thoughts and experiences of a self-made community spanning the globe as we go about our “normal life” – which of course is relative.

Why do we find each other’s lives so fascinating? One thing is for sure – you cannot express how good or bad your day has been in 140 characters. You need paragraphs, punctuation (shock horror!), and at least a passing knowledge of the rules of grammar in order to form coherent posts that appeal to, draw in, and endear those who stop to read.

Is it all about what we are sharing, or about the readers who happen upon it?

I played chess on the internet at lunchtime against some anonymous person somewhere else in the world. I would love to tell you who they were, and where they were from, but alas I cannot – I will never know more about them than their username. I requested a game, the board came to life, and my clock started ticking down.

It was all a rather topsy turvy afair for most of the game – no doubt a product of me not having played properly for several years, and the opponent probably being a casual player. Once upon a time I read books about chess – I studied the game and it’s luminaries from centuries past. Morphy, Steinitz, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, and Kasparov.

The foundation of what I should be doing is still there at a high level… ideas such as pawn structure, active pieces, control of diagonals, and so on still come to mind while looking at the board, but they only really come into play if you don’t leave pieces hanging left right and centre. As is usual, I rolled into the game in somewhat confident manner and set about throwing cheap tricks in front of the opponent. None of these worked, and I ended up retreating and sacrificing material to get the hell out.

The whiff of failure caused some extra part of my brain to come online, and I began marshalling my remaining forces.

The opponent didn’t see the attack coming… it was horrific. If he had been afforded one extra move, his Queen would have wrought all kinds of destruction upon me – but that’s the thing about Chess – you never get that “one extra move”. Even he was impressed when the checkmate arrived out of nowhere, and congratulated me on a fine sequence of moves.

Of course I would like to claim that the entire attack was planned. It was not. Each move unfolded more though the pieces happening to be nearby than any spectacular strategy on my part. I guess I shouldn’t be telling you that though. Rather I should be striking fear into your heart less you ever sit on the opposite side of a chess board from me…

The photograph is of astronaut Steve Bowen. His expression pretty much sums up my feelings of being back online.

It’s been six months. Six long months since February when a shark internet company called PowerNet stole our telephone line from under us. This evening our line became ours again, new hardware was connected to it (courtesy of British Telecom), and we are connected to the firehose once more.

The earlier part of this evening was taken up with Windows updates, virus updates, Apple updates, and various application updates. We had been surviving via a Vodaphone 3G USB dongle for the last few months, but it was a shocking reminder of how the internet used to be… with connection speeds anywhere between 56K and bytes per second. We took Broadband for granted – our recent experiences brought into focus just how amazing it really is.

It’s quite a novelty to check email as I wander past, to listen to music on Spotify, to watch television programmes on the BBC iPlayer, to surf YouTube and Vimeo (mostly to catch up on the adventures of a few blogger friends), and of course to participate in Twitter, Facebook, and the various instant messaging networks.

It’s great to be back!

You might not know this, but I have had no broadband internet connection at home since February. With a little luck the situation is about to change (5 months later) – I thought others might be interested in the story.

When Broadband was first introduced to the UK a few years ago, we signed up with Pipex – an independent supplier that had very good reviews at the time. We were happy with the service they provided, it was reasonably priced, and we didn’t really think about it.

Roll forward to the last year, and we became more and more aware that our internet connection was becoming slower, more variable, and even dropping from time to time. After a little investigation, it turned out Pipex had been sold to Tiscali, a company famous in the UK for terrible support, awful customer service, and shockingly bad broadband supply.

We finally decided enough was enough in February, and called Pipex to cancel our contract with them – and requested a MAC code to move our broadband supply to somebody else. Almost unbelievably they offered to double the speed, and half the price of our connection. I told them in no uncertain terms that if they could offer that now, then they had obviously been ripping me off for months – and that there was no way I would continue the contract for that reason alone.

A MAC code arrived in the mail, and we rang our chosen Broadband supplier, who informed us that the MAC code was invalid, and we already had a supply of broadband on our line anyway – from a company called Power Internet.

Hmmm…

I called Pipex, and they claimed no knowledge of Power Internet, or how we could have received an invalid MAC code. After spending over an hour talking to their various support departments one day, some conversation happened off the phone and they did appear to understand. At the time, I began to sense that Power Internet had been subcontracted in to do engineering work – perhaps when Pipex was bought by Tiscalil.

We never received another MAC code from Pipex, despite numerous requests. It would appear we were no longer even a customer.

So who were Power Internet? We called them, and they had no knowledge of us. We tried to sign up with other broadband providers, and they repeated what we had already been told – that Power Internet were providing our broadband service.

We finally got in touch with OfCOM – the regulatory body that oversees the operation of communications companies in the UK, and they began investigating. We got in touch with British Telecom – who owns the entire damn network – and they could do nothing either.

Finally, OfCOM requested that Power Internet write to BT – even if they claimed they were not supplying our broadband – requesting that BT remove their service from our line. Nothing happened. OfCOM chased Power Internet. BT chased Power Internet. We chased everybody. OfCOM threatened to report Power Internet to Otelo (the communications ombudsman).

Finally, today, my other half received a phone call from Power Internet, and a complete cock and bull story about having maybe found out what the problem was, and that our line was now cleared of a service.

We immediately signed up with British Telecom themselves for a supply of broadband to our house. We fully expect them to call back tomorrow and tell us that Power Internet are tagged on our telephone line (meaning nobody else can supply it). If it does go through, we will have unlimited 8 megabit broadband some time next week, free IP telephony, and a 3G dongle thrown in.

If you ask me what I think has been going on, I’ll hazard a guess that a group of people in several companies have figured out a way to commit massive fraud in the british Broadband infrastructure, and we managed to fall through a crack and expose some of it. Of course I cannot claim that I know that, because I’ll probably get taken to court.

In summary, thanks very much to Pipex, Tiscali and Power Internet for collectively ensuring we had no internet connection at home for 5 months. I have no words to express my gratitude.

I’ve been having a bit of a sort out this morning (in between making breakfast for everybody, coffee, getting dressed, brushing teeth, dealing with tantrums… the normal stuff…). I’ve been trying to figure out how best to follow my far flung friends on the internet such that they don’t think I’ve forgotten them.

I am rubbish. There, I said it. I get consumed with whatever I am doing, and the rest of the world may well not exist for weeks on end – and then I flip flop back towards wanting to know how the rest of the world is, and become a temporary social maven.

So. I was looking at easy ways I might drag the happenings and thoughts my friends record around the internet towards myself such that I could easily dip my toe in their firehose from time to time. It looks like FriendFeed may still be the best answer, but it’s not perfect. Using it properly will involve adding people as “imaginary friends” that do not have FriendFeed accounts – and it’s yet another social network to keep track of (but in this case a utilitarian one, rather than a destination). My main concern would be that I forget about people.

Perhaps the RSS reader is STILL the best option. Who knows.

The wheels fell off our broadband connection at home a couple of days ago in spectacular style, and it’s starting to feel like somebody has cut my air supply off.

The online world has become a preferred place to seek entertainment, knowledge, community, and friends over the last few years – and given the various demands on my day, it has become increasingly persuasive.

The computer at home is always on – email is checked minutes after getting up while running between the shower and making the kids lunch and breakfast. Throughout the working day the iPhone in my pocket vibrates to announce new emails and reminders. Quiet moments will invariably find me checking Twitter to find out what friends are doing, or catching up on my runaway blogroll.

Retuning home on an evening I am usually doing freelance work for some client or another, and the connection will become more entrenched – with conduits open in the background to Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, IRC, Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. The computer speakers will continually murmur a soft heartbeat of the worldwide community sharing their day with each other.

Tonight that connection is down. Gone. Closed. Silent.

Given the various commitments I have to paying clients for freelance work, I will have to find a suitable cafe with internet access tomorrow, and set up camp for several hours. There is a Starbucks and Costa Coffee in town. The cafe in the park also has internet access. The choice may well come down to whichever has the best atmosphere.

Sitting in a cafe to work at a laptop will be a new experience for me. Will I be stared at in a condescending or envious manner by fellow customers? Will the staff be nice? Will I contemplate using the cafe as a regular weekend haunt away from home to get work done?

Sunday mornings at Starbucks ? Maybe. Maybe not.