Toms View of the World

New research has revealed that most takeaway food is high in fat, salt and sugar.

Well, duh…

Now, Lightwater Valley is a park I’ve been wanting to visit, well, since they opened The Ultimate in 1991- at the time the worlds longest rollercoaster (and still, I beleive, #2)

It only took me 17 years to get there…

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Thanks to Dilbert - the reality of being a geek - all anyone seems to want is your technical know-how…

(click to open in the main Dilbert site)

Whether this is true for dating however, I just wouldn’t know…

The BBC are reporting that the approx. 20% increase in the price of petrol in the last year or so is driving people off the roads.  This doesn’t surprise me at all - however in many cases I suspect this means that people are also travelling less, rather than switching to (in many cases, non existant) alternatives like buses and trains.

Despite the ever rising costs of motoring (partly thanks to the Labour government’s obvious policy of “fleecing drivers for every penny they’ve got”) the alternatives are still more expensive - the fuel cost increases also of course affecting buses, taxis etc.  Until public transport returns to state ownership and can be subsidised by the taxation raised from motorists, it will not be able to compete with the car - for no matter how much fuel increases in price, those increases will also apply to the public transport operators, who in turn will raise fares in order to remain profitable.

I’m unfortunately stuck with using the car for work as the showers in the building where I work are not working at the moment, leaving me with 2 options.  Drive in, or cycle in and not be able to freshen up when I arrive.  Urgh. (and walking in leaves me feeling equally unpleasant)

I certainly think twice about getting in the car these days, I’ve not visited any UK themeparks this year - the cost of driving to Alton Towers or Thorpe Park is a substantial part of the cost of the day out (plus travelling somewhere like that on my own just makes it prohibitively expensive - even if I’m meeting someone when I get there).  It’s also clear from the availability of offer tickets for the parks that I’m not the only one - the parks aren’t usually giving tickets away in supermarkets this early in the season, it’s obvious that guest numbers must be down substantially.

To anyone reading this in America - $4 a gallon is not expensive.  We’re paying £1.15/litre here in the UK, which converts to around $8.50 per US gallon for regular unleaded gas, and with the premium on Diesel, that’s closer to $8.75.

I’ve added a gallery of photos from my recent fun trip to Germany.

For some reason they’re not appearing on the photo index page, but I’m hoping that’s just a server-side caching problem of some kind…

Anyway, the trip included both me actually fitting in Silverstar (woo hoo!) and an extra semi-unplanned visit to Tripsdrill to take in their new wooden coaster “Mammut” - unfortauntely, although it’s a great layout, the trains are leaving a lot to be desired - hopefully the park are still tweaking things and it’ll get better…

Apparently, this weekend’s episode of “Click“, the BBC’s technology programme will feature a segment on the subject of Phorm.

Nod to CableForum for the info, and a nice writeup about the dissertation being discussed.

Click is usually available for viewing on the BBC iPlayer, accessable from the Click homepage.

My current ISP (Virgin Media) seems to be systematically trying to eradicate it’s customer base - by spying on them with Phorm, and now capping their bandwidth to high-bandwidth websites.

If you’re a customer of Virgin Media, BT or TalkTalk, please read this entire post, especially the parts about Phorm

Despite the fact that I pay a fairly high monthly charge (compared to most other UK ISPs) for my internet service, Virgin are announcing plans to cap the available bandwidth from their customers to some high-bandwidth websites. Unless those websites pay for the Privilege of serving VM’s customers unhindered.

Unfortunately the cost of changing ISP is quite high, as I’ll have to get the old BT line reactivated, and replace my wireless router too (I won’t be using BT as my ISP, and they are also planning a Phorm implementation) - but if it’s a choice between spending that money up-front, then paying less monthly (admittedly for a slower service) , or staying with an ISP that wants to profile every move I make on the web (and in any app which uses “the web” in the background, say, iTunes for example) for serving me targeted advertising revenue, and limit the bandwidth available to the kind of services which are designed to be used over broadband, I know what I’m going to do.

Back to Phorm…

I know the “official line” on Phorm is that it’s an anti-spyware/phishing type service - but I don’t need one of those from my ISP - and I’m certainly not willing to let VM profile my entire use of the internet when I alerady have an anti-spyware tool installed on my PC, which I have control over.

The way I see it - I pay VM for my phone and internet use - they are welcome to track what number I call (they need to in order to bill me), and which website I visit (again, I know this will happen in logs on the servers anyway - but the data isn’t used for anything) - they are not welcome to process that information (and the content of the pages I view/phone calls I make) to establish what I’m actually reading, and use sell that data for advertising.

Imagine if they did the same on the phone service - they’d listen on every phone call you make, and you’d get telemarketing calls like “You’ve been talking to your family on the phone about buying a new car from X- so we’d like to invite you to make an appointment to visit a Y dealership for a test drive of our new vehicle”.

What VM (and the other Phorm ISP partners) are proposing is to do exactly that with your web browsing activity. Listen in on you web browsing, and serve adverts targeted with that data in mind.

The bottom line is that if you’re a VM customer (or BT, or TalkTalk), you need to be aware of what they’re planning to do, and make a decision whether you want to stay with an ISP who wants to track your every move so they can serve targeted adverts to you based on websites you visit, and then cap your usage of high-bandwidth services.

There is a petition on the Prime Minister website about this - if you’re at all concerned about this, sign it.