Ahh, Dixons. That famed electrical store which, three months ago, stopped existing as an actual entity, and turned entirely virtual with a woman poking at non-existing buttons on a non-existing screen and asking a non-existent customer “When do you want it? … That’s not a problem” (at least according to the ads). This was, of course, as parent company Currys ate up the Dixons brand and spat it out.

Dixons. What a marvellous shop it is. And ethically aware, too. It does lots of recycling – not least of press releases.

You may have seen in today’s newspapers and news programmes that Dixons is to stop selling analogue radios, them being so old-hat. This news has had a mixed reaction on the web: Some are cynical, some think it’s a step towards the future, some a sign of the times. But it’s undeniably getting wide coverage. It must be nice for an electrical chain to get so much free advertising of it’s modernity, but I can’t be the only one for whom this story rouses a profound sense of deja vu.

It smells remarkably like a reheated story from last year, when Dixons decided to stop selling 35mm cameras, them being so old-fashioned and uncool. That, again, was seen as a big sea-change in consumer electronics, and generated much free advertising for the chain. But again, there was something not quite fresh about the story.

That might be because the year before, Dixons decided to stop selling video recorders, them being so old-school and obsolete. This generated much free advertising for the chain, and every talking-head worth their appearance-fee told us that this marked a huge shift the consumer electricals market. But some complained that this story might not have been quite as modern as they’d hoped.

Crazy suggestion, but that might just be due to the fact that a whole four months before, Dixons had decided to take a stand and stop selling Manhunt, a computer game which the parents of a murdered schoolboy blamed for his death. “Ooh, look at our corporate responsibility for the modern age” cooed Dixons, to the sound of many press photographs outside their stores. Rumours that they later regretted this when stocks of the game completely sold out in the rest of the country due to massively increased demand thanks to the oxygen of publicity the case provided remain unconfirmed.

By now it must be struggling to think of things to stop selling. It apparently has personal CD players and “boom boxes” on its “endangered list”, but if it’s going to continue at this rate, there’ll be no non-existent buttons left for the virtual Dixons woman to poke at.

The last case I cited is, admittedly, a little different, but it’s hard to deny that Dixons have put out almost exactly the same story for three years running now, simply replacing one piece of technology for another. And yet it still generates acres of media coverage and free advertising. This either means that newspapers don’t realise what Dixons are up to, or simply don’t care about serving three-year-old reheated reports to their readers – after all, it fills another page in the lazy summer months.

Perhaps it’s irony – after all, this latest story is published right alongside the twenty-four-year-old reheated trash about A-Level results, for which the quote in this post (still on my wall) is probably still the best response published in a national newspaper. To anyone getting results today: I hope they’re what you wanted; if not then it might seem tough today, but you have your whole life ahead of you and you can still go on to do many wonderful things. A-Levels are no pre-requisite for greatness.

I have a Compaq laptop. Compaq is owned by HP.

The laptop has never been terribly successful. When I bought it, I also got a docking station, which unceremoniously died about a month after the one-year warranty expired, and HP refused to repair it – even on a paid-for basis. The screen has also broken, and under the Next–Working-Day pick-up and repair warranty, the laptop was picked up two working days later, and returned (working) a week later. The hard drive has also broken, whilst the laptop was under warranty, but I was unable to wait a week for HP to fix it, and so had to have this done at personal expense.

Now to the latest fault. Shortly before the warranty for my laptop expired, the screen broke yet again. Unfortunately, this happened immediately before my exams, so I couldn’t afford for the laptop to spend a week away. I contacted HP, who refused to delay any warranty repairs by a couple of weeks, as the laptop would then be out of the warranty period. So, again, at great personal expense, I bought an external monitor, and a one-year next-day on-site warranty extension. All-in-all, I spent around £250 – over £100 of which was on the warranty extension.

The exams ended, and I contacted HP – yesterday, in fact. After more than half-an-hour in a telephone queueing system, HP duly agreed to send for a technician (from HP subcontractor ICM Computers) to visit me the Next Working Day (today) – well done, HP. The technician came out, very efficiently, with a replacement screen. It didn’t work. After an hour of trying to fix it, the technician admitted defeat, and said he’d order a new new screen from HP.

He’s coming back tomorrow, and I get the feeling that this isn’t going to be over quickly, so I’m blogging the experience. Next installment: tomorrow.

Earlier this month, Trinity Mirror announced a 13% fall in profits, and hence a wholesale review of its operations. Reaction to this news largely assumed it was the regional papers which were at most risk – but is it? Rumours I’m hearing are suggesting otherwise.

With a 14% year-on-year circulation decrease – the biggest in the Sunday newspaper market – The People is looking on shaky ground. Quite why this is a case when last week’s front page had the earth-shattering exclusive BB PETE PORN SHOOT SHAME (“The Big Brother star who won the hearts of millions with his shy charm is today exposed as a sex-mad gender-bender.”) is unclear to me. However, I’m hearing that The People is likely to be closed before long, as the decline in the Sunday newspaper market as a whole makes resuscitation of the newspaper an unlikely prospect. Although, of course, it’s not entirely unlikely that Trinity Mirror will ditch all its other titles as well, and get out of the newspaper business.

Matt Wells also alludes to the closure of The People in his latest missive about the decline of the tabloid over at Comment is Free. Oh, and we should all have a good laugh at the Daily Star for trying to teach it’s readers Greek in a week (maybe they should start with English), the Daily Mail for withdrawing its You supplement from the newstands after finally realising that there’s nothing in it which anyone would ever want to pay for, and The Sun for printing a front-page story congratulating itself on the previous day’s exclusive – which printing an apology for the very same exclusive on page six.

I do hope that’s cheered you up – unless, of course, you work at The People.

I’m sorry for any problems you’ve been experiencing with the site over the last couple of days – some are my fault, some aren’t!

You may notice that some of the YouTube videos on the site are buggy, and don’t always seem to be appearing – particularly this one and this one.  I’ll be perfectly honest, and say I have no idea why that’s happening.  Parts of the YouTube site have been down for maintenance today, so I don’t know if it’s related to that.  If any kind reader knows, feel free to comment.

That brings us nicely to the second point – there was some disruption to the site tonight whilst I tweaked the way comments look, primarily because I personally found it frustrating to have to look down to the bottom of a comment to see the author before reading it.  So now the author’s name and website are featured prominently at the top, making them look something like mini-posts all of their own. Oh, and for added clarity throughout the site, external links in posts are now marked with this icon: .

In more positive news, last month was the first in which I attracted more than a quarter of a million hits, representing a 13% increase over the next-best month in the site’s history, and a 101% increase on the same month last year, despite a 48% decrease in the number of posts.

Thanks for sticking with me.  If you notice any other niggles, get in touch in the usual ways – email simon@sjhoward.co.uk, text ‘simon’ and your message to 60300 (or give me a laugh by sending a picture or video message to the same number – just remember to start the text portion with ‘simon’), leave me a voicemail on 0845 638 1916 or fax me on 0845 639 1918.  Charges for all of these services are detailed here.  All of these details are now in the sidebar for easy reference, too 🙂

As has been widely reported, NASA have lost the original tapes of the first steps of man on the moon.  Oops.  I’ve lost one or two things before, but I’ve never really managed to lose one of the sole records of a defining moment in human history.  So I feel I’ve done quite well over the last twenty-one years, and it makes me feel better about the occasional bit of kit I might have lost at school.

Luckily, copies of the footage still exists.  The stuff that was shown on TV is clearly still around, but that’s grainy.  NASA, who were technologically advanced enough to send man to the moon, were not technologically advanced enough to work out how to directly broadcast their lunar footage on TV, and so had to show the footage on a TV monitor, which was then filmed by a TV camera, leaving the image somewhat grainy.  And, so it would appear, no-one’s bothered working on a solution to the problem over the last 37 years, so we’ve still not seen the original footage.  And now they’ve gone and lost it.  Probably taped over it with the Dick Van Dyke show, or something.

Now, wonderfully, internet conspiracy theorists are claiming with all the conviction they can muster that this doubtlessly proves that the moon landings were faked.  Of course it does.  The loss of a tape in an archive of tens of thousands clearly outweighs the evidence of the (albeit grainy) film footage, photographs, and samples of the moon that the astronauts brought back.

Anyway, in my experience, if they stop looking for them they’ll turn up.  And then they can make a fortune by airing the ‘lost footage of the moon landings’ in some TV special. 

In fact, you know where they probably are?  Right alongside Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and 150 Home Office PCs.  Wherever they might be.

I’m all for silver surfing, and with the positive impact it appears to have had on the life of this 78-year-old widower over his YouTubing career, perhaps it’s something we should be positively encouraging.

For the uninitiated, here’s his first Vlog:

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/silveryoutube.flv” /]

Good for him. And before someone makes the obvious joke, no, he’s not my alter ego.

This morning, having seen posts by Mark and Dwight, I’ve been playing with some of Windows Live’s new services, and I’ve been left distinctly underwhelmed.  I don’t mean to be rude, but I just don’t understand why they bothered with many of the products on offer, when they bring nothing new to the market, and really aren’t very good.

First off, I’m writing this in Windows Live Writer.  This is a program which allows me to post things on this blog: Something I’ve done quite successfully without the need for special software 925 time before.  What’s more, it doesn’t even seem to aid me in any way that WordPress doesn’t, and in fact in many ways is worse than WordPress.  For example, where WordPress gives me an exact representation of how my post will look on the blog at the touch of a button, Windows Live Writer helpfully provides an inaccurate estimate with half of the page cut off.  Great. 

There are some advantages: I can use Desktop style keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-I, instead of using Alt-I which I inevitably forget to do – but it doesn’t bother with standard Microsoft red-squiggle spell-checking, which is one feature which could actually prove useful.  Alright, it does allow for posting to multiple blogs, but very few people ever do that.  And it does include some handy options when inserting images, like adding shadows (see above) or watermarks, which could be useful for some sites.  

Then there’s Windows Live Messenger, which practically everyone on Earth will inevitably continue to refer to as MSN.  I’ve just upgraded from the latest MSN release, and can see virtually no difference other than a skin-change.  Microsoft is now co-operating with Yahoo, but since I have no-one I want to talk to using this interoperability, it does little more than warm the cockles of my heart with the spirit of friendship and co-operation.  What’s the point?

Next? Windows Live Mail.  This is a huge improvement on the standard Hotmail interface, but it’s still buggy, clunky, slow, and full of big flashy ad banners to drive you crazy.  Gmail’s done it first and done it better, and so have Yahoo with their latest Beta.  What’s the point in Microsoft trying to compete using an inferior product?

Then, tying in with that, Windows Live Mail Desktop, possibly the most cumbersomely named piece of software ever to leave Redmond.  It’s basically the now unsupported Outlook Express, stripped down a bit and given a God-awful skin which includes large flashy banner ads.

The Windows Live Safety Centre took the best part of three hours to assess my laptop, whilst running it reported that it found five viruses, but then the results page said it hadn’t.  So quite what happened there I cannot say.  It’s good to see Microsoft taking security seriously, but I did feel that this product wasn’t up to much, either.  Though for novice users, perhaps it’s better than nothing at all, and I guess it’s good to have everything in one place, but why on Earth choose a web-based place?

Other components, like the live.com personalised homepage, just seem like copies of things competitors have done, and have done better.  But, like with Google’s releases, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of an overall plan here.  It seems like a load of “Ooh, Google’s launching this, we better compete” releases cobbled together under the Windows Live brand.

Maybe if I was a Hotmail aficionado with a terrible MSN Spaces blog then I would be excited by these releases.  And there’s no doubt that they will be the next ‘big thing’, because Microsoft will ram them down our collective throats until we accept them.  But it seems disappointing that a pioneering company like Microsoft can’t produce something better, more worthwhile, and generally more useful, instead of seemingly copying everybody else’s ideas, and copying them badly.

Earlier this year, you may remember that a plan was launched to introduce ‘101’ as a non-emergency alternative to 999. I’m now wondering whether such a system has been employed in the US. If this recording is anything to go by, it’s badly needed:

Only in the USA.

It can’t have escaped your attention that, yesterday, John Reid seemed to be doing the job of the Prime Minister. In Tony’s absence, Dr Reid took his position chairing COBRA. Whilst the good people of the USA were addressed by their President, our glorious leader was tanning himself on holiday, so we were addressed by Dr Reid. In fact, Mr Prescott didn’t really do any of the duties of the Prime Minister in his absence – so why his title is Deputy Prime Minister, and quite what his day-to-day job is supposed to be, I’m not sure.

Guido appears to have discovered that the reason Mr Prescott wasn’t available to lead the country through a national crisis is that he was responding to an article called ‘Prescott really is in the hotseat’ from Wednesday’s Daily Express. Fantastic leadership.

In other news, would it be cynical to suggest that the airlines would quite like the cabin baggage restrictions to continue? Suddenly, they’ve got a whole new revenue stream, as they can realistically offer novels and newspapers at highly inflated prices, reasoning that people will buy them on board if not allowed to take them on board. Furthermore, the advertising rates in their in-flight magazines can shoot up, because they suddenly have a captive audience that largely ignored their offerings forty-eight hours ago. And without big, bulky bags, boarding becomes much quicker, and hence turn-around shorter. In the longer-term, the overhead lockers could be done away with, saving a huge amount of weight, and cutting fuel prices too. This could be highly, highly profitable for airlines… even if it does scupper Ryanair’s latest plan to offer mobile phone calls on-board. I imagine the newly-created market would be more profitable than that one anyway.

As I write this morning, news is just reaching sjhoward.co.uk towers of a foiled terror plot to blow up planes in mid-flight. In response to this, hand baggage has been banned on aircraft departing from the UK – all that is now allowed is a clear plastic bag containing travel documents. And medications. And glasses. But that’s it. Except for baby food. Oh, and wallets. But not much, really, no. Forgot to mention keys – they’re still allowed. Oh, and ‘small personal items’. Which I guess doesn’t include small personal explosives. And everybody’s being hand searched, and the clear plastic bags are being X-rayed for reasons that aren’t clear to me. US flights are having two searches, just to make sure, and you’re not allowed to take liquids on board. Except the baby milk, but you have to taste that to proove it’s safe. Books and newspapers are too dangerous to take on board, because you could give someone a pretty nasty paper cut. It’s beyond parody.

Really, this is quite a wonderful idea. Everybody is carrying an identical clear plastic bag containing identical passports and tickets. How long before everybody ends up with somebody else’s passport and tickets? That’ll complicate things a bit.

The terror threat level has been raised to ‘Critical’ – the highest possible level. Or at least, it has in some places. The MI5 website says it’s ‘Critical’, but the new exciting important Intelligence.gov.uk reckons it’s only ‘Severe’. Good to see a unified approach. And the police have just been ‘explaining’ the threat level. ‘Critical’ means that an attack is expected imminently. The police say they’ve foiled this plot, aren’t aware of another, but it’s possible. So they’ve raised the level from ‘Severe’, where an attack is ‘Highly likely’, to one where an attack is ‘expected imminently’. Even though threre’s apparently no specific threat. Yup, this is the new intelligence logic.

Why any organised group of terrorists would bother trying to smuggle bombs in hand luggage anyway, I really don’t understand. It’s far too risky. It only takes one of them to be discovered for an organised security response to prevent the others happening. There are many ways of getting explosives on to an aircraft that stand less chance of being discovered, as shown in Whistleblower a couple of years back (and I don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting those loopholes have all been closed). Why go with the riskiest option? Organsied terrorists wouldn’t.

Perhaps the new security’s a good thing. I got on a flight last Friday – and off at the other end – without having my ID checked once. My passport never left my pocket from entering the airport to leaving at the other end. There’s a lot of tightening to be done, if you ask me. But then, I flew with an airline that charged extra for hold baggage – they’ll be rubbing their hands with glee today…