DSLR Vs. iPhone — Fight!

Posted on by
Reply

So I recently bought my first ‘proper’ camera: A Canon 550D and it is a joyous, wondrous thing, but my love of photography has only really developed since I’ve had an iPhone.

My first ‘Hey this is kind of cool’ moment actually occurred with my Nokia N95, which had a Carl Zeiss lens and took photos well enough to pique my interest. I started a Flickr account and joined a few groups.

Then came the iPhone. Like a lot of people I got interested in faux Lomography via Hipstamatic. I loved the immediacy and quirky outcome.

Next came Instagram, which changed everything. Like a combination of Flickr, Twitter and Hipstamatic, it made me want to go out and take photos. The 3GS gave way to the 4S and with the jump in quality, my interest increased exponentially.

So now here we are — a proud owner of an iPhone 4S (and an Olloclip,) AND a Canon 550D, but which is better? Sounds like a silly question doesn’t it? Fair enough, I’ll get my coat …
BUT WAIT! Let’s take a look anyway:

They say the best camera is the one you always have with you, so the iPhone wins.

Ok? Go home. Nothing to see here.

More detail? Sheesh, fine.

Round One — Quality
Let’s get this one out of the way straight off. The iPhone doesn’t really stand a chance here. Despite being phenomenal quality for a camera phone, with improved lenses, better sensor and 8Mp, the DSLR is always going to take the iPhone out behind the school, slap it, and take its lunch money. Better optics, better sensors, and in the 550D’s case, 18Mp, means it trounces the iPhone in this category.

Result: DSLR wins, hands down. As good as the camera in the 4S is, it can’t hope to compete.

Round Two —Versatility

Difficult round this one. Obviously the DSLR is more adept at handling different lighting conditions and has a wealth of lenses available to cope with everything from wide angle landscapes, close up portraits, long range telephotos to fisheyes and everything in between. Add to that the vast array of flashes, tripods, remote release hardware and all the other gadgets – well, you’ve got a pretty versatile setup, providing you’ve got the cash.

On the other hand the iPhone is available at around the same price as I paid for my Canon 550D (SIM free,) and you can kit that out pretty cheaply. It also has a stock of accessories, including my personal recommendation of the Olloclip by PhotoJojo, which is 3 lenses built into 1; a wide angle lens, a fisheye and an amazing macro lens, which gives you DoF of about f/1 or so.

Of course the iPhone’s biggest advantage in this field is it’s extensibility via apps, of which there are no shortage of for the iPhone’s camera; from instant ‘in-camera’ effects like Hipstamatic or Powercam, through easy click-to-coolify post-processing apps like Swankolab, Camera + or Snapseed, to ones for more advanced users like 645 Pro, Filterstorm (more on that in another post,) and The Photographer’s Ephemeris. This allows for image editing on the fly whilst out and about, (I do a lot of my edits for Instagram on the train to/from work,) as well as an almost unlimited amount of styles and looks.

Also, although it’s a bit unfair to include this in a photography test, the iPhone is also a phone, a portable games console, a PDA, internet device & lots of other things besides.

Round Three — Portability

The Canon comes with a neck strap, making it easy to carry around with you, depending on the lens you have mounted. I also bought a pouch for mine, keeping it safe and hoistable over one shoulder.

The iPhone fits in a pocket.

Result: The iPhone, being smaller and lighter, wins this one.

Round Four — Ease Of Use

Again, another difficult round, but more due to the unfairness of it.

On the one hand we have a device made by a company that prides itself on innovative, intuitive interfaces so simple and transparent, that people who have never seen one before can pick it up and use it.

On the other hand, we have a company that also makes photocopiers and printers. Not traditionally known as paragons of user interface design.

Office Space printer scene

Smash it!

To be fair, the DSLR has a lot more going on. It’s taken me some time to get used to changing a load of settings before firing a shot and I usually forget and start shooting with the white balance off, or the autofocus in AI Servo mode or something. There is a quick settings change button and I’m starting to use that a lot but there’s still a load of buttons, a menu system, a scroll wheel and the half depress of the shutter button to remember when composing shots.

With the iPhone, I tap to focus. If I’m being particularly creative, I tap and hold to lock the focus and exposure. If I’m being REALLY creative I’ll use 645 Pro app to have the power to lock the exposure, white balance and focus separately, as well as have the choice between evaluative and spot metering and have a live, onscreen histogram giving me feedback as I shoot. Of course, at that point, I almost might as well use the DSLR.

The bottom line is that although the DSLR comes with an easy-to-snap full auto mode, if you buy one and only use that, you’ve wasted your money.

Result: With great power, comes a great big manual on how to use it.

Round Five — Ease Of Sharing

Many of the apps mentioned previously on the iPhone contain easy sharing, either through a native app or often including sharing to other apps/services like Instagram, Flickr, 500px and Facebook. If you want to, you can take a pic, edit it and share it online in about 2 minutes with 3 or so taps.

Sharing photos from my Canon 550D involves plugging it in to my Macbook Pro, importing the images into iPhoto or Aperture, then editing them in either Aperture or opening them in Adobe Bridge, then Camera Raw, then Photoshop to export to a jpg of reasonable size, then importing them back into iPhoto and synching my iPhone to get the new pics onto it, THEN using the same simple processes on my iPhone to share them. Basically, a lot more work. My camera does purport to support Eye-Fi, allowing wireless sync of images to my computer or “Upload them to an online service via wireless LAN”, but does not guarantee to be able to support all functions and doesn’t say how to upload directly online or which services support it. For all I know it would still be a case of synching to my computer, then using the Flickr uploader or iTunes to my phone again.

Result: The iPhone’s apps take the red tape here.

Conclusion:

It’s pretty simple really. If you want a phone that can take pictures and a lot more besides, an iPhone is a good investment. It can be a great inroad to photography, as I’ve found. Having a single, static lens is like having a prime lens – if you want to reframe your shot, you need to move because you can’t zoom in. (Digital zoom is about interpolation of pixels – essentially zooming in to the little coloured squares you already have, so resolution suffers, unlike with optical zoom,) You can experiment with apps for lots of different looks and with iOS 5.1 it’s easier than ever to go from lock screen to photo. It’s lightweight, you generally have it on you and it is capable of taking interesting and creative photos and editing them all on the same device.

However, if you want more control over your settings and therefore how your shots come out and also high quality, then a DSLR is a no-brainer.

Blography

Posted on by
2

As a quick follow up to my post on photography, I thought I’d share a few snaps. If you’re a friend on Facebook, follow me on Tumblr, Twitter or Instagram, then you may have seen these already. In which case I won’t be at all offended if you skip on through.

Photography – A New Passion

Posted on by
Reply

Ever since I’ve had my iPhone, back from the 3GS, I’ve gotten interested in photography. Helped along by apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram, my love for the art has grown exponentially in the last few years, to the point where today, I got my first DSLR.

Photography is a good fit for me, like writing, and like writing, it’s taken me far too long to figure it out. I loved writing at school, particularly composing short horror stories, mostly involving men running around with chainsaws and the like, but due to a sensitive nature and some harsh feedback, I recoiled from writing for a long time.

In terms of art, I’ve always been interested. I love drawing, but find it frustrating that I can’t draw as well as I can picture things in my mind. I’ve bought numerous books on drawing and anatomy, but have never quite got my head around human anatomy or perspective past the basics.

My next major foray was into 3D graphics. I thought it’d be great if the computer could handle the perspective that I struggled with when drawing, which it did, but came with a whole new set of challenges. I originally wanted to go into animation, but never got around to doing much actual animation, as I got caught up in the modelling, texturing, lighting and rigging that needs to be done before you can move a character.

Eventually my burning desire to be a 3D artist in the games industry was snuffed out too – looking back it was my artistic shortcomings that let me down despite good technical knowledge – but I learned a huge amount, no least in the importance of good lighting in a scene, as well as the ins & outs of Photoshop, which I’ve used previously for everything from painting to editing other people’s photos, to now editing my own.

So now we’re back to writing, which I’m learning to love again and finding a voice in, and photography, which handles all the anatomy and perspective, has the immediacy that 3D and drawn art lacked, but comes with another host of things to learn and challenges to face.

Exciting times.

 

Here’s a couple of shots from my new Canon 550D – descriptions contain camera settings for tech junkies:

Listening - My cat Hobbes' earRusty BBQ grill

Instabillion

Posted on by
Reply

So Facebook bought Instagram for $1 Billion — twice its estimated value. It’s been interesting to see how many people were secret market analysts, now popping out if the woodwork, because Twitter is awash in the kind of backlash unseen since Hitler decided to expand his franchise into Poland. (I thought I’d get Godwin’s law in early.)

There are two main camps so far: Those who think Facebook will ruin Instagram as we know & love it by changing it, adding adverts or otherwise Facebookifying it, or possibly just shutting it down entirely, like they did with Gowalla.

A small subsection are jokingly blaming designer @maxvoltar, who worked on Gowalla just before their acquisition by the monstrous book of faces and who then jumped ship to work on Instagram.

The second camp are the secret market analysts who have decided, in their wisdom that one billion dollars is the exact incorrect amount that Facebook should have paid for the company. Few have an amount to hand that would have been correct but there is a general consensus that a billion is not a real amount of money, unless you’re Doctor Evil.

My favourite retweeted comment so far has been: “Kodak goes bankrupt but an app that runs your phone pix through filters to allegedly improve them is sold for $1B #inothernews”

This shows a complete lack of understanding of market economics and really, the capitalist society we live in. I’m no market economist, but anyone with more than a few firing neurons can see that this is the sort of stuff you find behind a male cow.

Firstly, if Kodak are so great, why is no one buying their products anymore? I seriously doubt the people that RT’d that have recently run out to buy Instamatic film. Perhaps if Kodak had kept up with the times and produced a great app with fantastic design and UX that was engaging and relevant to today’s app savvy photography consumers, instead of relying on a dwindling film-based market, then maybe they wouldn’t be filing for bankruptcy.

Secondly, I’m not sure how that is Instagram’s fault, which I feel is somehow implied there.

Thirdly, to call Instagram just a photo filter app is missing several points entirely. For a start it means you don’t understand what a social network is. Instagram is a social sharing site. The filters are pretty much incidental. A hook to get you interested, at best. The community is what keeps people coming back. There are lots of filter apps that don’t have any social capabilities and no one has offered to buy them for a billion. Coincidence?

Also it badly insults a hard working team of people who have built up a company with a userbase of millions from nothing. Are they an overnight success story? Comparatively, sure. But I would put money down that Kevin & the crew have put in some long hours, faced tough decisions and been worried sick about whether they’re going to make it and on occasion, if it will be even worth it if they do.

I love Instagram and use it a lot. I will continue to use it unless Facebook fuck it up, at which point I’ll drop it for something better. But I’m pretty sure I’ll cope either way.

To say you don’t think they’re worth the money? Sorry but it’s not your call. The market decides value. The whole thing smacks of jealousy, to which I have this advice:

You might want to consider setting up your own company making vinegar from your sour grapes and see if anyone snaps you up.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me in the comments.

Happy Easter

Posted on by
Reply

Happy Easter.

Or Oestre, Ēostre, or Ostara as she was originally known, from which we derive the word oestrogen. Originally women were honoured as the progenitors of life but men are weak, jealous things. Honour became worship, became obsession and those men that were rejected convinced themselves like half a species of Gollums, that they must gain power over that which they coveted.

We created new gods, that spoke only to men allowing us to speak with authority from on high. We created a system of money that was controlled and supplied by men, allowing us to create a hierarchy of citizenry, based on arbitrary wealth. We created institutions of education that was available only to men and created another subset by which to judge people.

So Oestre and her gender-kin were shoved aside – subsumed in the image and name of Lug, the sun god. Or Osiris, Baal, Yahweh or any of a number of versions on a theme. Men saw the sun and saw raw, destructive power, only later discovering that the method behind the power was a creative force – adding atoms together to create new compounds. They put spin on their god of power by showing people that it was the all-powerful sun, not the tidal moon, that grew their crops – a fact that was apparent to both farmer and king alike.

But the sun god is a hungry god and men turn hunger into greed. If a coin can be earned, a man will want all the coins and will formulate a plan for doing so. If a person can be turned into a second class citizen, then a man will want to sit atop all men and claim them as his subjects. Women were already in the bag. How much better to claim men, with their education and wealth, as subjects?

So here we are. Stuck in a society where might makes right and money can buy you an education or a get out of jail free card, depending on how much you have. Stuck buying things we don’t need on holidays that used to mean something but now serve only as a way to keep people spending money on symbols of the old ways, lost to common knowledge, the money filtering always upward. Yet to learn that combining (fusion) creates more power than dividing (fission) and that principles for atoms can be applicable to people, due to people being made from the same raw materials as the rest of the universe.

My intent is not to subvert anyone from their chosen religion or create dissent, just discuss some hopefully interesting ideas. Feel free to comment below.

Happy Easter. Enjoy your chocolate egg.

 

 

Interested in reading more about these ideas?

Oestre 

From Hell

American Gods

zeitgeist

I’m a bad person

Posted on by
Reply

It’s true. You know how I know? There’s a really easy test and all it involves is a minor restatement of the title, dropping the moralising adjective.

I’m a person.

If the above statement can be applied to you, congratulations — you’re a bad person. Or are you?

We’ve all done things we knew were bad, or wrong, or possibly even against the law, but we did them anyway, because presumably the pay off was going to be worth it and our assessment of the risk of being caught and castigated was low.

We use intellectually self-aggrandising reasoning to relieve ourselves of shame and blame:

“But I drive CAREFULLY while breaking the speed limit, unlike those other speeding assholes. They’re the ones the law was really created for!

It’s a normal part of human psychology to do this. It’s called cognitive dissonance and part of its effect is that we are unable to believe we are bad people for doing certain bad things.

Obviously we have all done things which we are actually ashamed of too. Hey, I never said humans were simple creatures. The idea of morality, especially a fixed, consensus morality is one of the most complex abstract concepts around.

There’s the old philosophical constructs that try to prove morality is innate:

There’s a train hurtling down a track towards an innocent person. You can pull a lever which diverts it onto another section of track, missing the person. Do you do it?
Now the lever will divert the train onto a section of track with 5 innocent people on it. Do you let it hit 5 people or 1?
Now the 5 people are all convicted murderers. Do you pull the lever or not? Now one of the murderers is holding a baby. Pull? Don’t pull?

But here’s the rub — morality is fluid, based largely on circumstance. Watch any action movie to see what Hollywood thinks ‘normal’ people might be forced to do in extraordinary circumstances. Even if it is, in part, innate, a large proportion is learned through parents, at first, then peers.

Really, the only difference I see between ‘good’ people and ‘bad’ people, is good people feel bad when they do something bad. In fact showing remorse for their crimes is part of the requirements for paroling prisoners. So the next time you meet someone who tells you, “I don’t have any regrets,” avoid them like the plague as they are definitely a bad person.

Edith Piaf was obviously some kind of sociopath.

First in a long line

Posted on by
1

My daughter turned one on Saturday. While it’s not unheard of for a 37 year old man to have kids, it still feels kind of amazing and weird to me.

She changes pretty much every day, but for the longest time she seemed to just be this little pink thing that ate and slept, rinse and repeat.

Now she pelts around the house in a walker, has teeth, responds to stuff and babbles away like there’s no tomorrow.

Yesterday was very tiring and confusing for her and myself and @MrsNarshada too. She, of course, got spoiled, but not too spoiled, which I was glad of.

She was particularly confused by her new ball pit, which I initially assumed my in-laws had hired for the day, but no, it was a present. What confused her was when she picked up a ball in each hand, but then couldn’t figure out what all the rest of them were for.

20120326-093931.jpg

There did seem to be a theme to her toys — a tambourine, maracas, two xylophones, (I think technically they were glockenspiels,) and an array of electronic toys that chatter, play music and sing — and that theme seemed to be “kiss goodbye to any hope of peace and quiet dad.”

I’m kidding, kind of. We were very grateful that so many people came over and bought presents. We were also lucky to have a very warm, sunny day — which oddly was also the case on her actual birth day — plenty of food and drink, good company, and basically a good time was had by all.

20120326-094306.jpg

20120326-094422.jpg

Commuters: A Field Spotters Guide

Posted on by
1

Amblers
With no sense of urgency, Amblers, despite being on a morning commuter train, apparently either just ride the rails for fun; wandering the lonely platforms hither and thither on a whim; or else have a job to go to but probably as something quite hippy-fied, meaning they can just get there as and when they feel their chakras are aligned properly.

  • Result: Get out of my way.

Shamblers
Shamblers may, at first glance, seem like Amblers, but don’t let their general lack of speed fool you – Shamblers have somewhere to be, but apparently been told to shuffle there as inconveniently as possible to other commuters. With no sense of their surroundings generally, Shamblers will lope along in front of you, somehow taking up the entire concourse and cutting off your flight plan/exit strategy, whilst managing to get approximately nowhere.

  • Result: Seriously, are you actually TRYING to get in my way?

Turnstile Twats
They’ve been to this station a number of times before – perhaps every day for the last several years, but the sight of a ticket turnstile still renders them incapable of rational thought. Rather than have their ticket ready, they will wait until the last second until they are required to present it and then — and only then, will they start rummaging around through their invariably jumble-sale outfit with at least forty pockets, the mere existence of some of which baffles and amuses them. They will turn out these lined marvels with wonder, stopping to gaze in awe at a crumpled and used piece of tissue etc.

Double points if you have to rummage around in a bag. Triple points if it doesn’t occur to you to move out of the way to let others through.

  • Result: What are you, retarded?

Sudden Stoppers
They will, for no reason apparent to man nor beast, suddenly stop for no reason. Generally in a doorway, so that you have nowhere to go. If you don’t have your wits about you, you could end up being inadvertently intimate with them.

  • Result: Inadvertent surprise sexual encounter, ending in abuse and possible litigation.

Aisle Bargers
Headstrong, fancy-free and armed with a complete lack of spatial awareness or depth perception, despite owning the prerequisite two eyes and (presumably,) brain, Aisle Bargers will wade clumsily down what is always a constricted gangway with gay abandon, assaulting all and sundry with limbs, bags, hips and their arse, in no particular order.

  • Result: British politeness generally means no one says anything, so they get away with it. Here’s hoping they pull that crap on the Paris Metro, or better yet, the New York subway.

The Platform Ponderer
Another close relation of the Ambler and also shares characteristics of the Sudden Stopper, the Platform Ponderer, will stop suddenly, often near a timetable screen, drop whatever they are carrying — an overladen backpack, a briefcase, a child — and stand, looking confusedly around, as if a train station is both entirely new to them and also they last place on earth they expected to find themselves after disembarking from a train journey. Normally they will find the most inconvenient place to act out their befuddlement, such as the dead centre of the platform, or again, just in front of a doorway. Sometimes they will need to catch a connection but seem to have no skillset of how to discover what platform it might be departing from, which means they can turn into a …

Last-minute Larry
With all the self-perceived importance of someone that was born into aristocracy and who is about to defuse a bomb, they have scant seconds in order to make their train and woe betide anyone who gets in their path. Last-minute Larrys have been known to take on an entire train’s worth of commuters, who are all heading in the opposite direction — cutting a running swathe through the throng like a lone hero against a rampaging hoarde of orcs.

  • Result: Carnage. Oh, the humanity.

The Bag Reserver
We’ve all done it. It’s the passive-aggressive way of signalling that you’d rather not have anyone sit next to you, thank you very much. Extra douche points if you only begrudgingly move your crap after all other seats have gone & a pregnant woman is glaring at you whilst entering the first stages of labour.

  • Result: You want another seat? Buy another ticket, jackass.

The Aisle-side Sitter
The Aisle-side Sitter takes the passive-aggressive tendencies of the Bag Reserver and skews them in favour of the latter. Sitting on the aisle side sends out the message, loudly and clearly, that you are more important than the rest of the peasants on this rolling carriage of sweaty proletariat.

  • Result: If you’re that important, shell out for first class, asshat.

The Newspaper Nuisance
An average broadsheet takes approximately half of a full arm extension to read properly. The space to the side of a train seat is about four inches. No please, rustle that shit right in my face again. I probably won’t set fire to it while you’re still holding it. Probably.

  • Result: Buy a tabloid. Or better yet, a paperback. Or a kindle. iPad. Anything.

The Table Hog
One of the most insidious types, table hogs combine the worst aspects of The Bag Reserver and, on occasion, The Aisle-Side Sitter, with poor spatial design for maximum frustrative effect. Spreading themselves out over the public transport version of an occasional table that was designed to just barely accommodate two entire cups of coffee at its widest end, provided you could balance them together, the Table Hog may also use aisle-side sitting tactics to maximise their space quotient. Typical objects to assist include bags and briefcases, as usual, but also drinks and half-eaten sandwiches — basically anything that would make you feel icky to move aside. The worst offenders sit aisle-side, put their feet on the seat opposite, their bag on the seat next their feet, food & drink on the table and are idly leafing through a magazine or business papers on the empty seat next to them, thus taking up four entire seats AND a table for one person.

  • Result: You appear to have mistaken this public-use booth for a private table you reserved at a restaurant. Dipshit.

But all of these pale in comparison to the ultimate blight to commuting:

Train Cyclists
If you’ve got a fold-up bike that you can stow away somewhere — we’re all good. You’ve already shown you’re considerate to other passengers right there. However, if you board a train with a full sized bike, you are, incontrovertibly, an asshole. You will either block the doorway & have to move it at every stop, or worse, LEAVE IT IN THE DOORWAY UNATTENDED & GO SIT DOWN, meaning other people have to negotiate their way around the damn thing in order to get on or off. And we’re all too polite to do what we should and throw the fucking thing to the floor because it’s someone else’s property, even if they care so little for it that they’re happy to balance a two- wheeled object on a moving carriage!

  • Result: Get a fold up. Or a skateboard. Or better yet, try walking so you don’t continue to be an inconvenience and a hazard to traffic and pedestrians alike once you get off.

Did I miss any? Tell me in the comments.

Moving: The Ninth Circle of Hell

Posted on by
3

The adage goes that moving is one of the most stressful things you can partake in, some of the others being listed as getting married, experiencing a bereavement and getting divorced.

Well I’ve gotten married, (I know … crazy woman!) and if my stress levels at that event were plotted on a graph, it would be akin to a minor earth tremor — a blip at best in comparison to the 7.8 magnitude stress-quake that moving house causes me.

Having never yet been divorced and hoping not to be, I can’t comment on the comparison. All I will say is that if someone correlated the divorce rate of couples and found a direct, possibly even causal link between the higher number of times they moved house during wedlock and an exponentially proportional increased likelihood of divorce, then I for one, would not be shocked at the findings.

Moving house is inherently stressful, containing as it does, all the worst parts of travel — the endless hours in cramped confinement, the boredom of the road and the possibility of soul-draining delays — without the relief of arriving somewhere new, with the intrinsic glamour of the unknown, and through all this, you have to lug all your shit. All of it.

Don’t forget that even before the actual bone-gnawingly awful moving part, you have to spend days, if not weeks, preparing. Packing your accumulated life into cardboard boxes that instantly become too heavy to lift and have inexplicably weak bottoms, like a baby or incontinent adult – their contents spilling at random all over the street or inside the car, like an overly-inebriated friend who will awake the next day wondering why everyone is mad at him.

During this packing phase you will be living essentially a pauper’s existence, sitting on lawn chairs because the sofa is already disassembled, eating leftovers off paper plates, so not to open any new food in case it suddenly spoils in transit and because the crockery is already ‘safely’ ensconced in musty old newspaper, which you’ll be tasting for days after they’ve been unpacked.
Next comes frantically cooking everything in the freezer before the move, or possibly barbecuing the entirety of the rapidly defrosting mass at the other end, convincing yourself that pawning your rotting matter onto other people who are unfortunate enough to live near the spot you blight with your existence, is somehow ‘neighbourly’. Here, eat this partially defrosted pattie of death, you proffer, which now has traces of dust, cardboard and fecal matter sealed into it by the feeble glow of a briquette — and let’s be friends. You can borrow my lawnmower, or drill, or cup of sugar, or, for the right price, an immediate member of my family.

Then, when you do reach the other end, you still have weeks of screaming:

“Where, for the love of fuck, is the (x)?”

Where (x) is some suddenly-vital-to-life-as-we-know-it MacGuffin, such as the TV remote, your blood pressure tablets, your good shoes, or the family pet, as all around you, half rummaged-through boxes lay scattered and strewn, giving your beautiful new home the Dresden look. It’ll be weeks before the house gets back to normal and there’s a good chance a few treasured items will disappear during the process too.

Even though this time we tried to do it like adults and hire a moving van with associated strong-backed men to do the hard labour, instead of making several trips with a Peugeot 306 filled to bursting, (do-able across a city, but across country? No thanks.) we miscalculated the number of boxes required to house the unimaginable tide of crap that we own, which seems to have quadrupled since the last move and at least doubled since the arrival of our progeny. That being the case, I had to drive once more back across the country, having already done it once to transport the family to the new location, fill up the car with the dregs of our belongings and then turn around and drive back again.

So I’m never moving again. I figure if we feel like a change I’ll apply to the landlord and council for permission to burn the place to the ground and build it again, brick by brick.
That has to be easier.

It works!

Posted on by
3

For those of you who don’t know, we’ve recently moved across the country and perhaps once I have to stop going for a little lie down due to post-traumatic stress every time I think about it, I’ll blog about that particular episode.

Anyway, moving meant changing ISP, as there was no way on earth I planned on giving my old ISP any more of my hardly-earned money for any longer than necessary, seeing as how they speed capped us seemingly on a whim, at the drop of a hat, or at any change in air pressure anywhere in the world.

After several calls to tech support at my cost, going through the usual inane crap, (see previous post,) and an engineer visit which accomplished squat, it was decided we were being speed capped legitimately. According to them we were going over our daily download limit, which appeared to be around 48Kb, and they were perfectly within their rights to cap us, as outlined in the small print of the contract in a typeface so small, it was written on half a grain of rice and could be perused at my leisure through any electron microscope I happened to have handy, provided I’d first dredged the Alabama swamp for the dead badger they’d stapled it to the underside of, for my convenience.

Seriously though, my wife @MrsNarshada could watch a couple of episodes of Poirot on iPlayer during they day and that would mean we would get capped for five hours at a time, making the Internet unusable in the evening. When I say unusable, I don’t mean ‘a tad slow’, I mean in order to send a tweet — a mere 160 BYTES of data, (OK, I know it’s more than that due to meta data and Twitter’s XML formatting,) I had to turn off Wi-Fi on my phone and use 3G.

The ISP’s solution was to upgrade my broadband package, (naturally,) to an unlimited one.

“But for how much?”

I said.

“An extra £3 a month,”

they said,

“and we’ll knock off £1.50 a month off if you have paperless billing.”

“10Mbps to 30Mbps and unlimited for £1.50 a month?”

I thought,

“That’s either a great deal, or else they’re completely fleecing me at the moment.”

“Plus the £40 activation fee …”

they said.

“I’m sorry,”

I said,

“I could’ve sworn you just tried to charge me to activate a service I currently pay you for the pleasure of not being able to effectively use?”

They dropped the charge but still required a new 12 month contract. When I explained that we would be moving soon and couldn’t commit to a new contract as I didn’t know if they served the area we were moving to. I’m paraphrasing, but their response was akin to:

“Dunno then.”

I asked to be put through to cancellations.

20120315-113254.jpg

This time we’ve gone with Sky, who offer a ‘truly unlimited’ service and have kept me up to date with emails, texts and even tweets as to my service. We had a phone line problem but dealing with their tech support involves the bare minimum of teeth-grinding and was resolved swiftly. Impressed so far.

Now hopefully the offline-shakes should go away shortly.