Cuba mobiles
The Register reports on the difficulties faced by Cubans who want to buy a mobile phone.
I can certainly confirm that there were very few people with mobiles in Cuba when we were there: mostly cab drivers with the usual belt-pouch/mobile combo. But given the huge cost of owning and using a mobile in Cuba, perhaps the real question should be: why would anybody want one? Most Cubans seem to get on just fine without a cellphone.
I think it’s one of those things we in the industrialised world find hard to comprehend these days: the notion that one would not need/want to have a mobile phone. The last anti-mobile die-hards among my friends and acquaintances succumbed to mobile telephony within the last year. How long before not having a mobile will effectively cut you off from normal social and economic life? Maybe we’re already there, but in Cuba, at least, you can see how the pre-mobile world worked just fine…
UPDATE: This item on textually.org makes me wonder whether my assumptions about the pointlessness of mobile telephony in developing countries might be a little exaggerated.
Be Updated
Today is the day I was supposed to be connected to Be Internet, according to an email I received from them last week. Regular readers will notice that this is two weeks later than the maximum connection time they original stated (2-4 weeks).
And while I have finally received by ‘Be Box’, containing the new modem and accompanying cables and software, it doesn’t look like I’ll be connected just yet. The reasons are numerous, but basically they seem to boil down to two things: complications involving BT, and complications involving Be’s call centre.
BT delayed the connection by a few days because it didn’t hand over the “tie cables in your local exchange”, according to Brett Coles, Head of Member Services at Be.
Be’s call centre, which I can only asssume is somewhere on the Indian subcontinent (judging from from the stilted English and dodgy phone connection), is the second bottleneck in the connection process. While they are fairly swift at replying to emails (the 0870 number entails an endless wait and numerous dropped calls) they never seem to understand what the problem is, and provide inadequate, scripted answers to questions.
I’ve noticed this problem with other telephony services providers recently (e.g. Vonage), and it seems inexplicable to me that a company would allow such an inefficient (and for its customers frustrating) service to occur, just for the sake of a few pounds less on call centre staff wages. Zen, my current ADSL supplier, connect me to a human being within seconds of placing my call, and they are ALWAYS able to sort out my problem. I suppose that’s what I’ve been paying extra for…
Finaly update, hopefully, tomorrow. From my new super-fast 24Mb/s connection. Fingers crossed.
Initial Citylink
When you pay for courier delivery, presumably you expect the couriers to a) keep your item safe and b) deliver it to its destination. Initial Citylink, those clowns with the yellow and green vans, not only forced me to cycle up to god-forsaken Merton at 8am on a Saturday morning, having failed to deliver my package by 16:00 the previous day; they also managed to lose the package in their own warehouse, and then keep me waiting half of Saturday for a phone call that never came.
Why not simply use Royal Mail? If they don’t manage to deliver your package to you personally, they’ll leave it at the nearest sorting office, which is likely to be a hell of a lot closer than some upstart’s depot. And so far – touch wood – Royal Mail have never lost any of my post. Then again, would I necessarily know it they had?
How times change: ID cards
“Instead of wasting hundreds of millions of pounds on compulsory ID cards as the Tory Right demand, let that money provide thousands more police officers on the beat in our local communities”
– Tony Blair, 1995
A car that runs on air
Could it be true? Could this Smart-clone actually become a viable – and virtually pollutions-free – substitute for other motorised private city transport?
According to its makers, the MiniCat runs on compressed air and can do so for over 100km, at a maximum speed of 110km/h. Of course you do need to input electricity somewhere, be it when recharging at home from the mains or in the process of compressing air that is then filled into the car at a petrol station. But having done that, the car produces no extra pollutants while driving.
Oil companies should be very worried about the MiniCat, if what its makers claim is true.
Machine Oracle III
Lech [Walesa] : LEECH
[Spanish Health Minister Elena] Salgado: SALAD
Caption contest
Machine oracle II
The word processor suggests:
[Pakistani President] Pervez [Musharraf] : PERVERSE
Be Where?
A month ago I placed an order for a Be broadband connection. They promised delivery in “2-4 weeks”. Over 4 weeks later I’m still waiting for my super-fast 24 MBit/s connection. I’ve written to ask them what’s going on and so far I’ve only received an automatic response saying they’re looking into my query. Otherwise: nada. I’m beginning to think that Be are either a scam, or useless.
Machine oracle
Today’s suggestions from the spellchecker:
[Dominique de] Villepin: VILLAIN
[Kevin] Spacey – SPICY
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About
Musings of a wire reporter in Geneva. Feel free to contact me with your questions about journalism, Switzerland, or anything else I write about on this blog.
