Regent’s Canal
Poetic end
London Salary Boom
Good to know. I’ll be asking for a raise, then.
Remember, remember
Be* here!
So the folks at Be* have finally connected us to their ADSL2+ network and we’re surfing the net at crazy speeds of up to 14.8 Mb/s.
Hold on, I hear you say, shouldn’t you be zooming down the information superhighway at 24Mb/s?
Theoretically yes, but then there’s the small print*: connection speeds depend on line quality and distance to the local exchange. Obviously those wires precariously strung strung across the street aren’t quite up to the job, so we’re stuck with around half of what we’ve been promised. Still, not bad, coming from vanilla 512kb/s broadband.
Another point I’d like to make here once more is: why did it take Be* 9 weeks to hook us up? They promised 2-4 weeks. Surely this isn’t top service?
Hopefully, Be*’s customer care will improve over time. One way they could win my affection is by installing a brand spanking new copper wire from the exchange to our house. I’ve got just the tool in mind with which to do that (see picture).
* presumably the asterisk after their name indicates that Be* isn’t all it claims to be…
New Humanist is 120!
One of Britain’s oldest political and cultural journals is 120 this month. New Humanist was founded in 1885 and is still going strong (some say stronger than ever!) under Caspar Melville and Padraig Reidy who produce an excellent publication every two months from their Bloomsbury offices.
Catch the latest issue here or buy it at any one of these shops today.
For the record: I can’t say I’m entirely unbiased in my opinion of New Humanist, having been a previous editor of said journal myself. So I’m doubly delighted to learn that they have just been nominated for the Utne Independent Press Awards 2005, in the category ‘Cultural/Social Coverage’.
David Blunkett
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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.
