As anyone who has tried to keep a diary or write a blog will know, writing regularly is a challenge, especially when each day consists of get up, go to work, get home, eat sleep, repeat and nothing (particularly interesting for others) happens.

The usual stock-in-trade of the Mac Head blogger like me are Apple releases or moans, but apart from the iPhone 4S (which is more or less exactly the same as the original ’4′) not that much has happened really – just lots of profit and patents.

Work is bizarre at the moment but if you know where I work, you will know it’s not something I can really blog about and remain employed.

Home life is OK but unless you want to hear about my new sofa, which I doubt (although I might poll to see if you do!) there’s not much to write about .

So there you have it, I am leading an unexceptional life and not much is happening in my world, hense my lack of posts recently.

I can start making shit up if you like? No, didn’t think so.

Rest assured PJ fans, I will find something to moan about soon.

I particularly love this reaction to Chilian soldiers at one demonstration:

A demonstrator pulls down his pants in front of riot police during a 48-hour national strike in Santiago on August 25, 2011. (Victor Ruiz Caballero/Reuters) #

]]> http://pushingjelly.co.uk/2011/10/18/protests-worldwide/feed/ 1 http://pushingjelly.co.uk/2011/10/09/iphone4s-tariff-bizarreness-from-o2/ http://pushingjelly.co.uk/2011/10/09/iphone4s-tariff-bizarreness-from-o2/#comments Sun, 09 Oct 2011 17:51:39 +0000 Brad http://pushingjelly.co.uk/?p=595 Being an O2 iPhone customer I was eager to see what their tariff prices are for the new iPhone4GS

The first thing I noticed is that they are offiering a 12 Month contract – obviously ready for the upgrade debacle when the iPhone5 is launched.

Secondly they are listing the data as a bolt-on which include Tethering and Visual Voicemail – from £3/month for a measly 100MB through £6 to £10/month which includes 1GB of data allowance, Wifi and a paultry 50 MMS’s.

Reading between the lines it looks like you don’t get Visual VM unless you get a data bolt-on “All our data Bolt Ons include Visual Voicemail and Tethering for iPhone.”

It’s when you start to crunch the numbers it becomes interesting, which if I am reading it right has all the tariffs (except the unlimited) are more or less the same when you factor in the cost of the phone. In fact the 1200 minutes tariff is cheapest of them all!

Here’s a little chart that demonstrates what I found.

So if I stick with O2 (which is likely taking a cursory look at Vodafone’s tariffs for the device) I’ll be signing up to the 12month 1200 minutes tariff and saving myself some cash.

I guess in respect for Steve’s Buddhist beliefs, I should probably say moved on.

You could tell that Steve knew he wasn’t long for this life by the way he was getting his affairs in order, in fact it was amazing that he held on to the CEO position for so long into this latest bought of his illness.
Pancreatic Cancer rarely has a good outcome and it’s treatment is very invasive and life changing.
The years that he had after diagnosis were a (painful) gift, and if you listen to speeches he gave I think he understood this, he seemed changed almost humbled by the reality that we are visitors on this planet and have a relatively limited time here and how we use that time is up to us.
Money can make you comfortable, sure but it can’t buy you well and doesn’t guarantee happiness.
It’s the love of friends and family that count, everything else is secondary.
Everything.

So a chap in America died today, he was a complicated mix of business-man, artist, inventor, perfectionist, some might say tyrant or even genius.

Under his direction, a whole lot of other people have produced some really neat stuff that have informed, entertained and helped millions of other people around the planet, frustrated lots of us and have made others rich (or at least kept some of us gainfully employed for the last 25 years).

So thanks Steve, you know – for all the stuff, it’s been cool.

More about Bertrand Russell here

The traffic will be obscene, the tube trains will grind to a halt and work will be unbearable as news organisations always are every four years – this time especially so with it being on home turf.

Then there’s the opening ceremony, oh how I look forward to missing this event. I plan to be somewhere sunny and away from a TV or WiFi.

After Bejing what can we do that will come anywhere close?

I can see it now; Double-Decker Danny Boyle, the event’s creative director, will get the cast from Slumdog to do their Bhangra party piece while Some corgies are chased across the athletics field by Cannon and Ball. Makes you proud just thinking about it.

I can’t wait to watch it on Sky plus when I get back in the country just so I can set it on 2x and drink it in to the tune of ‘Yakety Sax’ (think Bennie Hill).

Just cos I am old and grumpy, it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

It is worth mentioning before I rant that although I work for the papers, I am just a techie and my pay grade dictates that I am told nothing about anything.

All the opinions expressed here are based on reports from around the media and my own experience of news organisations. I most definitely am not party to any of the issues causing the company so much controversy at the moment. I feel I had to write some sort of disclaimer on this post because I am truly fearful of the lynch-mob mentality that is going around at the moment.

Well this is a mess isn’t it?

The feeding frenzy that the media sharks are indulging in a the moment has already resulted in 200 innocent people losing their place of employment (they are however not out of a job yet), and if the muck spreading doesn’t stop soon I suspect many many more good people will be in the same situation.

Mr M. has never been popular with the liberal masses but this is beginning to look like victimisation on the part of the Guardian and BBC.

Anyone who has a beef with the M family, Mrs B. or N.C. generally have given up reporting just the truth, but are now just plain making shit up to stick the knife in further.

People who haven’t been hacked (IMHO) are just believing what these morons are reporting and then going on BBC news and saying it must be all true and how terrible it all is and how disgusting.

I’ll tell you what is disgusting. The media spending millions of pounds and days of airtime covering this story when thousands of people are starving, thirsty and perishing in Mogadishu.

Looking on the BBC news channel the crisis unfolding in the Somalia is nowhere to be seen, the front page taken up with the ‘scandal’, you really have to dig to find it in “World news-Africa“. That my friends is ‘disgusting’.

To my knowledge no-one has died due to the actions of the NoW. No-one was physically injured by these events.

I agree, the actions of an number of independent contractors working at the paper was at times deplorable – at best a gross invasion of privacy and at it’s worst they hampered the progress of the Millie Dowler investigation and gave false hope to Millie’s suffering parents who were under such mental anguish I can’t begin to imagine how it felt.

These people, however amoral, didn’t kill Millie. It seems to me they are being vilified by the press more than the individual that did (and a number of other poor souls).

The commercial pressure placed upon all news organisations to come up with the next big story is immense. NoW were not unique for what they did, just for who their owner is/was.

I find it unbelievable that none of the other national newspapers have used private investigators, none have used blagging to obtain pertinent information for a story and none realised that most mobile phones voicemail services and answer machine have four digit security codes that are rarely changed from the defaults. These practices are probably widespread in the industry.

There is always more behind these headlines than we are told. Somewhere someone is playing chess and we are all the little ones at the front.