I had a rant about PDAs some time ago, but if I were in the market for a new one at the moment, I would definitely be tempted by the Visorphone. Nobody surely wants a mobile phone that tries to be a PDA pressing heavily against their ear. However, a PDA that can also act as a phone (and wireless Internet browser) is a much more attractive proposition, providing you can ignore the “full ahead, knob factor nine” associations of wearing a headset.

Coupled with a keyboard and some stable Linux sync software, the Visor would be a mightily attractive gizmo. For a total price approaching that of my PC.

In the meantime, and with a smaller budget in mind, the Audioline Petit is too cool for words, but I’m going to try. One of my colleagues bought two of these recently and they are nifty as hell. The picture doesn’t indicate quite how small they actually are; I want one near my PC now. Jacked into the modem, I would be able to chat on the phone while typing this garbage (or more likely, repeatedly ask, “Sorry, what did you say?” while typing, “Hi honey, how are you?”). Providing I wasn’t online at the time (if I hate dial-up so much, I’m hardly going to buy a dedicated line for it, am I)?

If it was cordless too - for under fifty quid - I could answer the phone while cooking or washing up. Then I’d have to buy one.

This afternoon I read chapter 2 of Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing online and enjoyed it immensely. Even if you’re not starry-eyed at the thought of making millions off the Internet, have a look because it is an extremely well written and lively screed. Of course, we have never harboured illusions about the profitability of Big Bubbles. Not after we bought that bridge in London. (They now claim delivery will be next Tuesday!)

Rather as “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others” (Winston Churchill), I am currently trying to decide whether public ownership or private enterprise is the worst method of providing goods and services. Much like communism, it might be argued by radical economists that the reason capitalism fails is because it has yet to be properly tried (to which I say: preferably on a charge of fraud).

For strong evidence that competition often goes horribly wrong, one need only look at the UK telecoms market. In theory, if it is regulated at all, then it is strongly in favour of encouraging competition. In practice, British Telecom - it’s good to talk, though not to send data - dominates the residential sector. Frustratingly, they are rather good at what they do: the phone service is reliable, well-maintained and insistently discounted (even if this insistence springs more from the regulator than from BT’s largesse). BT Internet, much as I hate filling the coffers of a monopoly, is a responsive, reliable service to which my modem successfully connects at any time other than around 7pm, which is more than can be said for any of the “free” ISPs I once tried.

Unfortunately, in the larger scheme, what they do is Not Very Much. If you want to phone your mum in Somerset once a week off-peak, thank BT for a clear, cheap line that connects first time, every time. If, on the other hand, you want some extra services - such as caller ID, ring back or, in a fit of naked greed, high bandwidth Internet access - you will either pay heavily or not pay at all, because you can’t have it. When we’re talking about caller ID, a useful service that allows you to detect when your cousin is ringing and thus avoid lifting the receiver, the few quid a month they demand for this simple service that can’t cost more than buttons to provide is merely annoying. When you’re talking about ADSL - your only hope of escaping metered 33.6K hell - it’s fucking rude.

Unfortunately, BT have built up a nice little earner in providing ISDN (“turbomodem”) in recent years, and are extremely reluctant to gut it by encouraging people to switch to ADSL, even if (or because) it is unmetered and at least four times faster. They are even more reluctant to heed the call for unbundling of the local loop, allowing their competitors to locate equipment in BT exchanges. So they’ve responded to these twin threats by: * Charging a net price of £35 a month for ADSL lines (which translates to £40 a month retail to the end user); * Dragging their heels over opening up the exchanges and claiming that many have no space left - conveniently, the most popular, profitable ones. Because they’ve already been filled up with BT’s own ADSL equipment.

What this means to me - the consumer who is allegedly the whole raison d’etre for the marketplace - is either fork out or stick with my crappy 33.6K modem. And, thanks for offering, but I’m gonna stick with the modem. Forty quid a month is waaay too much for the pleasure of downloading banner ads and the odd MP3 double-quick. If it comes down to twenty quid, let me know and I may jump onboard the ecommerce revolution promised by Mr Blair.

What competition do BT have for high bandwidth net access? Well, NTL are rolling out cable modem in selected areas (though not yet Manchester). The cost? £40 a month…

Competition, it seems, is emphatically not about giving the customer what they want, regardless of the £240 a year they might be willing to pay. Instead, it results in companies that: * won’t sell you what you want because they think you should want what they sell instead; * won’t sell you what you want because less than a million other people want it too; * would rather charge lots and sell a few than charge a bit and sell lots; * insist you pay through the nose even though they and you know that the product costs peanuts to produce - and if you won’t pay, the other suckers will do nicely; * would rather pluck out their eyes than sell something that is better than what they’ve already made a killing on for the past ten years; * will sell the same thing as all the other companies, with a confusing tariff to hide their own surcharges and prevent any form of meaningful comparison; * aren’t interested in you and your petty, grasping needs because they’re doing alright, Jack, so you get jack too.

To take another example: public ownership gave us British Rail. Private enterprise made it worse.

It was depressing enough to watch Three Kings on video last night, discovering how America: * can never fight a war for justifiable reasons; * can never properly win one; * always leaves behind a bigger mess than there was before, usually involving the deaths of more innocent people. But after it finished, we accidentally caught the end of A Life Of Grime on BBC1, one of those identikit docusoaps that invites you to marvel at how awful other people can be (rather than how awful you yourself can be). This one follows environmental health inspectors from Sheffield City Council (what’s left? council tax accountants?) as they gratuitously handle dog poo, dead rats and domestic waste. This episode focused on a Mr Springfield, an elderly tenant who had, for reasons known only to himself, chosen to fill his house from floor to ceiling with bags of rubbish. So the men from the council politely asked him to tidy up, for the sake of his neighbours and before the local mice population overdosed on all the cholesterol. They popped round several more times to ask again, but always found him out. So then they broke in to take photographs. And finally, they evicted him - on to the streets - while a smug Jobsworth from the council reiterated over and over for the cameras how it was not “normal” or “healthy” to furnish your house in wall-to-wall litter.

Well, he’s right there, even if he hasn’t quite figured out the implications. For my part, I don’t follow Sheffield City Council logic. If a man is so badly disturbed that he actively prefers to live in a rubbish tip, he’s hardly likely to comprehend or entertain a request to tidy up (and indeed, Mr Springfield told them loudly to “fook off”). Nor will he have much truck with legal notices (he claimed they were using a “bent fooking court order” as he walked away along his new residence - the pavement - with three carrier bags). Making him homeless hardly seems likely to address his psychological issues. And they say many homeless people are mentally ill - was that before or after?

Is this the only course of action available to the council? They have the legal power to forcibly enter Mr Springfield’s house and evict him, but not to forcibly enter, tidy the place up (which has to be done anyway before the next tenant can move in) and provide some proper help for him?

Oh well, I assume he will be less of a burden now on the council’s (likely minimal) homeless shelters than he was on their environmental health department. And home help services are so expensive to provide, as we all know…

Mr Springfield, with his grey bristles and grizzled jaw, reminded me strongly of our local action hero, Reg Temple. Reg is also a pain in the side of the local council. Every man needs to find a hobby once he retires, and Reg has decided his will involve hounding members of Trafford council to the grave and beyond (most probably, theirs’ and his) over every local development issue. That’s when he’s not proposing to remove Sale, Timperley and Altrincham from the borough altogether. (“I am not a political man,” says Reg.)

Reg is a key member of several local action groups, such as the Friends of Brooks Drive, Save the King George Pool and Campaign for a Free Timperley (OK, I made the last one up). One suspects all these groups share a common address, committee and, indeed, member - one “R. Temple of Timperley”.

Oddly, the local rag seems to be conducting an obsessive love affair with Reg. Indeed, if he were female and forty years younger, he would be open to the suspicion that he must be sleeping with the editorial team. Reg seems to be the equivalent of a naughty bit on the side for the paper, because normally it is busy rimming the council’s arse.

It is rare that a week goes by without at least one article on Reg and his latest campaign. On one memorable occasion, readers were greeted with a front page photo of Reg sitting in a meadow, looking like nothing so much as the grizzled elder of a tribe of chimpanzees. On another, a long letter from Reg described his epic battle to force the council to clear up some illegal flytipping. Ordinary mortals such as the rest of us might timidly ring the Trafford 2000 helpline (if we ever gave a toss about life beyond our garden fences in the first place) but Reg goes straight for the man at the top when it comes to waste disposal - council leader David Acton! But suddenly he is thwarted as “up pops Geoff Marsh”, the Head of Environmental Services (them again)! Thrills! Chills! Snores!

Council members have perfected the art of giving interviews to the Messenger regarding Mr Temple’s outbursts with a fixed grin on their faces that somehow carries into print. It is quite conceivable that David Acton has a wax doll of Reg on his desk, into which he violently jabs long needles while issuing a steady stream of bland assurances to his victim over the phone (he may also be planning to Ascend into demon form and devour the residents of Trafford).

One issue that particularly occupies Reg’s attention is Brooks Drive or, to give it its full designation, “historic Brooks Drive”, a bridlepath running from a roundabout on the A560 near Baguley to…nowhere much. Once (in 1860) it was a granite paved, 25 foot wide, tree lined avenue; now it is a muddy track where people only go to dump rubbish.

Lest we sneer at Reg’s petty provincial concerns too much, let us remember that Trafford Council’s idea of environmental improvement is to encourage Tesco to build a new supermarket three miles away from an existing store and 300 yards from a large branch of Sainsburys. Truly, we get the enemies we deserve.

Normally, I think any attempt to deliver true “multimedia” (trans.: stuff that doesn’t require the ability to read and we know is therefore more attractive to the unwashed masses) on the net sucks donkey parts, but this preview of U2’s forthcoming single, “Beautiful Day”, is the first Realplayer example to impress me. Clear sound, thumping bass, no pops, clicks or dropouts…

Unfortunately, I suspect this has rather more to do with my employer’s recently installed ADSL line than any sudden remarkable improvement in the technology of online music. Still, the song isn’t bad, especially for a Monday morning.

Truth in advertising:

• ”freedom - you can’t say no to our new autumn collection” goes the tagline of the latest desperate attempt by M&S to win back any customers who still have all their own teeth. How exactly does “freedom” correlate with being unable to refuse? Did they mis-spell “fascism”?

• According to Popbitch, Sam Fox’s publicist says of her forthcoming album: > “The music is similar to the band Garbage”

  Delete two words from the above quote to uncover the likely truth.

Egotism appears to be firmly back in fashion within rock music. Whereas once it was sufficient in interviews to burble something along the lines of: > “We’re not bothered about being `the best’ or selling the most records. We just do what we do and if people like it, fine.”Now one has to go for the throat and make it absolutely clear how knee-tremblingly awesome you are: > “Actually, I do think we’re a fucking good band. Knee-tremblingly awesome, in fact. Yep, the best band in the whole damn world. Bathe my feet in scented oils, mortal!” Or: > “Den is such a good songwriter, he really is the best. I don’t think there’s anyone to touch him really. I do violently assault anyone who says otherwise because, honestly, those people know shit.” …Which is usually from the drummer - just the kind of authoritative, independent opinion you were seeking.

Recent Q interviews with the likes of Travis and Coldplay seem (from memory - because they were waaay to dull to read properly even once) to bear this out. Travis in particular have a bad case of the thin air at their current rarified heights depriving their brains of oxygen and their critical judgement of reality. An acoustic ditty that bears a passing similarity to an actual tune, rerecorded enough times to fill an album, does not constitute an immortal body of great art. Arse, maybe.

Perhaps it’s a uniquely Scottish disease; in the current issue, Marti Pellow - who attempted a Dave Gahan-style heroin makeover but failed to impart the same necrophiliac Modal glamour to the terminally drippy Wet Wet Wet - says: > “The world is a better place with me in it.” …without stopping to ask my opinion or anyone else’s.

The crucial difference with egotism this time round is that apparently it’s now a democratic and equalitarian attribute that anyone can claim; justification is strictly optional.

Slashdot smartarses, dontcha hate ‘em? Always ready to reply to Ask Slashdot queries with something like: > “Don’t be so pathetic and useless, Linux is designed to be hacked to do what you want! A High Availability solution is easy: just use ifconfig to move the IP, then install your app on a shared disk (which is trivial to set up in Linux). You could add some basic heartbeating to monitor the active server if you want extra reassurance, perhaps using SCSI target mode across the disk link. You would only need a few scripts and a brand new disk driver - simple!”Where the hell are these people on the Linux-HA list then?! So bloody clever, it seems, at dashing off all the vital enterprise features missing from it at present, such as volume managers, HA, hot swap hardware drivers and journalling filesystems. The fact that most of this stuff only exists, if at all, as experimental, prototype or pseudo- code, surely indicates that we must currently have a bunch of complete bozos working on them. Honestly, can’t they even write a new set of drivers in a day?? (Well, someone probably did but Linus changed the API the day after.)

There appear to be a staggering number of individuals on the Linux scene, whom I have come to identify as “probable bullshitters”, ever willing to casually mention some fearfully complicated, bleeding edge project that they’re currently engaged upon. It does their descriptive powers credit that they are able to make these tasks sound so awesomely godlike, but perhaps not so much their real skills when all they are doing, once you strip away the jargon, make a few informed guesses and - occasionally - have insider knowledge, is installing a standard application and performing a little reconfiguration that is only slightly outside the box.

E.g.:
“I’ve pioneered a new technique in media data extraction via a powerful backend algorithmic sorting mechanism. It was tough but thankfully I am blessed with the powers of a minor divinity. No no, don’t kneel. Just bow your heads slightly and I will anoint thee.”
Means:
“I’ve hooked my MP3 player up to an Oracle database, using an open source util.”

And if they have managed to achieve something on their own, you can bet that another tool easily locatable via Freshmeat will do the same thing much more elegantly and can be set up in half the time. But then I guess the gods Create rather than Reuse, don’t they?

… from the fuel “crisis”:

“It is not the very poor and it is not the very rich. It is the people in the middle who feel aggrieved - just the sort of people we need to appeal to.” - Unnamed government minister

Normally, the people in the middle only exist to be squeezed by those on either side until they die of asphyxiation. After all, the “middle of the road” is where you most often find the sad, pink and white remains of dumb animals. But here in the UK, the mediocre, fair-to-middlin’ mass holds sway! The mob must be appeased! Sacrifice more principles to the mob!

It’s surprising that the film Gladiator did not lead to the revival of the Roman arenas here, particularly after the remains of a female gladiator found in London indicated that such places used to exist. I’m sure William Hague could make it the central plank of another “Back to the good old days” policy.

Big Bubbles takes a hardline view on those participating in the current UK fuel “crisis” (Mondeo Man couldn’t fill up and drive to a sales meeting in Bradford! Crisis, crisis! Oh save him, save him! The humanity! etc). With petrol duties and tax so high, we can see only drastic action necessary to tackle the problem:

TAX ‘EM ‘TIL THEY BLEED!!

And then…

TAX ‘EM SOME MORE!

Fuel tax, road tolls, tyre tax, wiper tax, little fluffy dice tax, “my other car’s completely unnecessary” tax, VED, VAT & Volvo tax, opening-the-car-door tax, Sunday driver tax, too fucking lazy to walk tax, driving at 40 in a 30mph zone tax, driving at all tax, tax, tax, TAX!

Pull those whinging hauliers from their cabs and tickle their feet mercilessly with fine hairs ripped from the chests of angry Welsh farmers! Put tin tacks under the wheels of taxi drivers and more tin tacks on their seats and then say, “How d’you like them TACKS, then?”! Slaughter the cud-chewing cattle who every day pour through the sliding doors of Frankley Services on the M5 in search of a burger and a Twix, their polluting injection engines gently cooling and leaking oil on to the tarmac outside! Twix tax! Drag the oil barons out of their grim refineries and BURN THEM AT THE STAKE with their own barrels! And finally, bend Mr Blair over on live TV and radish him without mercy for failing to promote taxation as the essential green policy it so rightly should be. And yes, this is one point we do want to hammer home.

Finally, the Daily Mail offices will be fumigated with exhaust emissions and encased in tarmac. We think their writers enjoy that sort of thing. But we know we will.