rant

So I was feeling a bit left out, people post these mega useful things on Facebook about what they are doing, why they want to commit suicide and how they couldn't live without Facebook but I don't.

(Common updates to peoples status)

I wanted to be involved and I'm sure people will want to read what I have to say like the 73 (and dropping) who subscribe through Feedburner here on ImAFish. I read on Mashable, Digg or Techcrunch about Twitter almost every day and I will admit I've tried to stay away from it. Why would anyone want to read about what I've had for breakfast or how I curled the longest one off ever into the toilet afterwards.

It turns out people do like to know these things, weather it makes them feel more normal by seeing what others are doing or they are just generally interested I don't know. So I signed up to Twitter and configured it so I can post from my mobile phone, instant messenger and Mac dashboard. I had no excuse not to post.

I've never been a fan of Facebook (even though it sends me shed loads of traffic), in fact it pisses me off how I can't put my adverts on there (and I've tried hard - not that anyone clicks ads on Facebook) however I do already have a large number of friends on there that I'm sure are interested in my daily life. Fortunately there is a Twitter application on Facebook that will automatically update my status based on what I send to Twitter.

You will be please to know you can be expecting a lot more updates from me.

It's new year and you're looking to cut your outgoing bills but can you really justify that expensive gym membership? Without it you could get fat and die, or so they like to remind you. Here is a list of ways to help justify getting rid of that costly health tax.

1. Is it really worth what you paying? My gym is £45 a month, yes thats the same as a new Xbox game but without the fun associated with the game. Out of that £45 I not only get a gym but all the classes, a pool, line dancing and various other things that I'm paying for but don't use.
2. You won't get fat if you just eat less. This is a double bonus as not only are you not paying for the gym but your food bill is cheaper too. Just by cutting out the crap (McDonalds, KFC and Burger King etc) then you wont need to go to the gym to burn them off.
3. If you received a Nintendo Wii for Xmas then this is all you need to justify dropping that expensive fitness tax called the gym.
4. All your cool friends watch really lame-ass exercise DVD's to work out. It's that time of year when celebrities and r-tards bring out fitness DVD's that you can do from sitting in your sofa. Davina McCalls latest one is £11.98 on Amazon and even has a 20 second preview.
5. No kidding a gym is a depressing place. People who tell you otherwise are wrong.
6. OMG taking a walk is easy, I just park an extra 5minutes walk from work every day and not only get free parking but an extra 5 minutes of exercise! Thats a whopping 1300minutes (21 hours) of extra exercise per year plus £520 saved in parking costs.
7. The gym is not a natural environment. If you're a true geek then your PC/Mac/Xbox/PS3 is so don't try to kid yourself into thinking you should be at a gym.
8. Whilst we are on the subject of the environment just think how much electricity that gym uses to power all those machines! Think of the harm you are doing to the environment when instead you can take a carbon free run round the park.

Disclaimer: I quit my gym earlier tonight.

I've just been reading this article from The Register about how badly the BBC have messed up the iPlayer . The author writes about how the "iPlayer is of a multi-million pound failure that took years to complete, and was designed for a world that never arrived". I first wrote about the iPlayer back in July, two days before its launch. Soon after the launch I signed up to the beta and was accepted however my username and password never worked. After a couple of un-responded emails to the BBC I gave up. The press coverage since July had been minimum until The Register's article was featured on the front page of Slashdot yesterday.

I thought it would be worth giving the iPlayer another chance to see if it was really as bad as The Register said it was.

After visiting the iPlayer website for the first time you need to install some software - note you have to be in Microsoft Windows XP using Internet Explorer - if you are using a Mac or Firefox it wont work (also it wont work if you are one of the 600 Linux users out there either ;-)).

Installation doesn't take long and you can select what you want to watch through your browser.

Once finding something to watch and clicking download the application launches and the TV show starts to download. This took forever, I only have a 1mb connection but this 46% (125mb) took two hours before I got bored and just decided to finish this article. Whether this is the BBC's fault or BT's aggressive traffic filtering at peak times I don't know.

Anything downloaded in the iPlayer will only last for 30 days, this is because the DRM (digital rights management) attached to each TV show disables the video after this time (and stops you from doing other stuff like copying it to DVD). Why the BBC have done this I'm not sure, with the current backlash to DRM in the music industry at the moment it seems odd to do the same to video.

Broadcasters like Channel 4 are paid for advertising they sell in between shows, the BBC on the other hand is funded by UK license payers. Why would then the BBC need to protect something that has already been paid for by license payers? This makes the BBC's decision to restrict access to TV shows seem bizarre. Whether a technology sales man has sold DRM to the BBC or its poor management I don't know.

The iPlayer is not a bad application, it works and albeit a bit slow you do get to watch shows for up to 30 days after broadcast. The problem however ultimately is not the program but the reason for its existence in the first place. There are plenty of other easy ways to watch video online - Flash (YouTube, Google Video etc) and Bit Torrent (The Pirate Bay, Mininova etc) being the main two delivery methods. So why would the BBC invent their own content delivery method when there are perfectly good/better already available?

This leads to the only reason for the BBC iPlayer and that's DRM - a reason we have already pointed out is irrelevant because of the unique way the BBC is funded by license payers. It annoys me as a license payer because it seems the BBC have invented a problem, then spent almost £5million solving it.

I will admit I've done it, I get a newsletter I don't want to read and either its not easy to unsubscribe or it requires too much downward scrolling so I've just hit the 'Report Spam' button in Gmail. I know its bad tricking the spam filter into thinking something I most likely accidentally signed up for is spam but its just too convenient.

(Is reporting spam too convenient?)

Everyone hates spam, and I love the fact Gmail does a good job in filtering out the junk but it seems everyone sends newsletters now. I booked a holiday online with some obscure company last year, now I get weekly emails from them asking where I want to go next? I once booked a dance event tickets through Ticketmaster, now I get emails asking if I want to see Bon Jovi - not even targeted advertising.

It goes on and on and on, some make it easy to unsubscribe others not so easy. The most recent culprit to Gmail spam has been Facebook, I get daily emails asking if I want to be super poked or if I want to turn my friends into Vampires by biting them. It all gets too much, Facebook does provide a link to find out about not getting these emails but it simply goes to the application overview - hardly useful.

Here are some examples:

1&1 want me to visit their site, find my log in details, navigate to Newsletter Settings then unsubscribe - is this too much to ask when Report Spam is just one click?

When trying to unsubscribe from Nectar emails, they want my email address and account number - shame I cant memorise my account number.

Trade Doubler write their emails in such a small font that its impossible to read the unsubscribe part (I believe it says something about logging in and going to settings - account information - mailing options.)

Not everyone gets it wrong:

Ebay give you multiple ways to unsubscribe.

To unsubscribe from box.net you just click the link which sends you to a page saying you have been unsubscribed - easy.

Has anyone else been tempted just to click report spam instead of actually unsubscribing to a newsletter?

I sell a few items here and there on Ebay, usually when I'm short of cash or feel the need to get rid of some junk. This month I'm just short of cash and with going on holiday in early October I thought it was time to raise some funds. After looking round my room I decided I no longer needed my MDA Vario as for me it has been the lamest phone ever.

By getting rid of the phone I no longer needed my GPS Receiver so I put both items on Ebay. I knew roughly the value of the GPS Receiver so I put that on with 'Buy It Now', the phone on the other hand I wasn't sure about so just listed that with a standard auction. The GPS Receiver went after a few days and the phone finished at a nice £97 on Sunday.

I was suspicious of the phone buyer almost immediately as the user had only joined Ebay in the past week and had no feedback. Second they did not try to pay until the following morning when I got this email:

I have pointed out various parts that made me even more suspicious:

1. The email has come from paypal.fundtransfer@inbox.com rather than service@paypal.com .

2. The header reveals more about the email not originating from Paypal.

3. Unusual characters showing that the fraudster cannot get the character encoding right.

4. I had been paid £10 more than needed in an attempt to get me to post it.

5. The ultimate give away was the frigtard trying to get me to post it to Nigeria. This country is renown for its '401' scams and fraud problems.

After logging into my Paypal account (not through a link in the email) there had been no payments and it was the final conclusion that someone was trying to make me a victim of fraud. I reported the incident to Ebay and they instructed me to file a none payment on the item however this can only be done after 7 days meaning I would have to wait that time then relist the item. So much for a quick sale.

I will most likely continue to use Ebay as I have not lost anything this time however this is only because I know what to look for and how to spot this kind of fraud. Perhaps Ebay needs to do more to protect its users, unfortunately I'm sure its not very simple.

In part one of my problem with DVD's post I talked about my frustration of buying a DVD then having to wait through 2 minutes of film about telling me of how I shouldn't steal the DVD I just brought.

It seems this bugs a lot of people from the emails I get and earlier today I stumbled upon this image:

Lets hope they will get the idea at some point that they can't treat their paying customers so badly.

Indisputably the two biggest social networking sites are Myspace and Facebook though there are hundreds of others out there. Myspace was the first to hit us with the freedom to collect friends and customise our pages in horrible ways and now Facebook has graced us with its rigid structured approach to fun.

Could this freedom exposed in Myspace be its biggest downfall? I'm going to look at some of the features of Myspace that have ended up frustrating users and where Facebooks approach has countered this.

1. Music - This has to be the single most annoying feature of Myspace. The net has opened up music in a whole new way that wasn't available before and though the music companies are only just catching on sites such as Myspace have helped pioneered ways for new DJ's, artists and bands to grow an audience.No one loves all music, in fact most people would agree that 99% of music is crap.My 99% of crap music will be different to your 99% of crap music which is where the problem is.Myspace allows people to put their choice of music on their page then annoyingly plays that track every time someone views it! If your like me and have iTunes playing music when your on-line the last thing you want is some annoying emo band's song starting to play about how they want to kill themselves when the only thing you really want to do is leech some more friends off them or view some pissed up photos.Facebook on the other hand doesn't have the facility to add music.

   An iTunes plug-in that shows your current track would be nice but it certainly doesn't need to play it!

2. Customisable themes - Myspace gives users a lot of control when it comes to changing the layout of pages, I'm sure they did this in good will and I'm sure they never expected some of the monstrosities that have been created as a result. Allowing non design minded individuals to add animated gifs, brightly coloured backgrounds and rearrange content to make almost unnavigable websites seems insane!According to Alexa traffic rankings Myspace is the 5th most popular site worldwide (7th in the UK), meaning that one of the biggest sites on-line adears to hardly any web or accessibility standards. Facebook may look more boring but at least the navigation is consistent and easy to use.
3. Adverts - In general I don't have a problem with adverts, there are in many cases a great way to provide a service for free, ImAFish certainly wouldn't be around without help from our sponsors. While Myspace does not over do it with the advertising it is owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and its primary goal it to make money for its shareholders. I find it interesting that many of the people on Myspace are against globalisation and capitalism yet they use one of the biggest tools out there to help News corp please its shareholders.Though I'm sure its only a matter of time before Facebook is brought by either Yahoo or Google and the site has already had fears of data mining similar to Myspace. Facebook has also been used in the U.S. by Universities to pin-point illegal parties however this is not such a problem in the UK as the legal age for drinking is 18 and not 21.

Facebook is far from perfect and has some pretty big internationalization issues (why are there only American school options when picking how you met a friend - what the hell is grad school and why is University not on the list?).

It will be interesting to see if these issues keep people on either Myspace or Facebook and what the future holds for these social networking sites as people get bored.

When buying a product or service the experience is just as important as the item itself. Whether it be the shop or website, finding out about a product, buying, unwrapping and setting up, its all part of the value adding aspects of shopping. I want to feel happy and confident about the product I have brought especially if its a large amount of money, this is where Comet fails.I went with my parents yesterday to Comet in Shrewsbury to buy a new TV. They had seen an LG one advertised with £200 off and as ours was almost 10 years old it was due a replacement. Soon after entering the shop we were greeted by a salesman and were shown the TV advertised. I wouldn't normally shop in Comet but the TV wasn't a bad price so couldn't really argue.

We found out the usual stuff about the TV and had a good look around it, my parents had the sense to ask if there were any similar models and we were shown a smaller more expensive Philips TV, instead of simply saying it wasn't as good a deal we were told to stay away from Philips TV's as they were going to pull out of the TV market in a couple of years and start selling pharmaceuticals!

We went back to the LG TV and he started explaining the ports on the back, when he got to the PCMCIA slot he told us this was for TopUpTV (the TV had a built in Freeview recorder) though my parents weren't interested he explained that for £7.99/month we could get TopUpTV. Up to this point I had stayed quiet however I thought it would be useful to point out that this service didn't exist anymore for new customers and that it had been replaced by the £9.99/month TopUpTV Anytime service that required a £200 Digital TV Recorder. This would render the PCMCIA slot useless however I was told this was wrong and must be thinking of another service!

My parents decided to buy the TV even through the BS it was still a good price. The salesman had shown the good quality of the TV picture, sound and general build. My parents were happy that they were getting a good TV for the price. Though I was dubious of the salesman I have several LG PC monitors that have worked fine.

It got to paying and the salesman told us how he didn't believe in hard selling however there was the option of the extended warranty. If it wasn't for this article I was reading on digg last week I might not be writing this rant but this is where the good buying experience in Comet died.

After explaining how great this new TV was we were then told why we need the extended warranty and how Comet's extended warranty was better than the others as it would replace your TV if it had over three dead pixels. Even though our house is full of LCD displays my parents still wanted to see an example so we were shown a TV with a single dead pixel. The salesman explained how annoying that dead pixel was, my parents agreed until I pointed out that this wouldn't be covered in Comets extended warranty as it was less than three dead pixels. The salesman then explained that most of the time when you get one dead pixel you will get more come in the same area!

It came to a lose - lose situation, either buy the TV under the knowledge that it will break and get dead pixels or fork out another £180 for the five year warranty. This is where Comet have killed the buying experience, after buying what was described as a good reliable TV they have now been told that in fact the manufacture is not to confident in its product.

My parents didn't go for the extended warranty but clearly weren't happy that spending £600 on a new TV was a good buy.

Following on from my rant about dvd’s I have run into another thing that bugs me tonight – shop opening hours.

I’ve bin told that since time began Sunday was a day of rest, for religious folk it was time to go to church, for many others it was time for a lie in or participate in Sunday football leagues.

Shops were not allowed to open, in more recent years the government has been kind enough to let shops open for 6 hours on a Sunday. At the time people laughed thinking “who would want to shop on a Sunday”, well it turns out that my local Sainsbury’s is just as a busy in those 6 hours on a Sunday as it is most other days.

So why not let supermarkets and other shops open for as long as they like?

Why not have 24 hour shopping like we do for the rest of the week.?

It seems stupid to me that shops cant open for as long as they want, why does the government set opening hours anyway? Surely in such an economic environment opening hours should be set by demand rather than the state?

If people want to do shopping at 8pm on a Sunday (like I wanted to tonight) then it seems silly for shops not to be open to suite peoples needs. There may be problems at first in recruiting staff but people will soon warm to the idea and I’m sure unions will keep a close eye on working hours. All of this could be backed up by government legislation – not that it isn’t in place already for most working scenarios.

I can shop at Tesco’s online at 8pm on a Sunday but I can’t drive to my local store? It seems insane! Many people I know find shopping to be therapeutic, I quite enjoy going round my local Sainsbury’s discovering new food. And for people that want the money, let them work more on a Sunday.

Would I want to work Sundays – well it depends if they need IT consultants at the weekend but it doesn’t mean others wouldn’t want to work. When you see your week as 5 working days out of 7 it doesn’t matter which of those 5 days you work, many people already know that, why should shop workers be immune from working normal hours on a Sunday?

I don’t buy a particularly large number of DVD’s but when there is a film I have liked or have been recommended I might be convinced to buy the DVD. I brought Serenity last week because I loved it at the cinema and have been a huge fan of the TV show - Firefly.

After unwrapping and sticking it in my DVD player I’m then forced to sit through almost 2mins of adverts that cant be skipped telling me that piracy is stealing and that copyright infringement supports global terrorism. I have just spent £12 on a DVD, I don’t need to be told that piracy is bad because I just brought it!

Talk about preaching to the wrong people but the film industry have it all wrong, why does someone that has just brought a DVD then need to be told not to steal it? It’s annoying that the film industry can get away with alienating their customers so much and it’s hardly surprising so many people are turning to the Internet to get content.