Chris Thompson   Chris Thompson on the internet

I think it is about time I write a little about my work, and about my office. It’s only fair really, considering I had the cheek to moan about it a few weeks back; about the moving around, about the cleaning up, and the updating. I wrote about how I hoped it would be nicer, when it was all done; I hope things would be able to run a bit more smoothly. And thankfully they do! The mission was a success. Things have been updated, and they work – and they work very well.

On the work front, a lot of this new smoothness can be chalked up to the business broadband. We had initially been worried that, with quite limited business sdsl availability in our area, we wouldn’t be able to go for the ideal internet connection, but in the end it worked out. The new internet is not only a lot faster than our previous one, but it doesn’t seem to disconnect as much either. There were times before where you could be working, and out of nowhere, and apparently for no real reason, you would get cut off. As long as I haven’t just jinxed it, it seems to be the case no longer.

Our telephones were also updated, which was almost as needed as the internet fix. Mostly this is because our phones were the most out of date things in the office. Probably even more out of date than Jack’s Tottenham shirt, which is yellow and very, very dated. Now our phones can do all sorts of fancy stuff. It is a little bit like these voip phone systems that you can get, and can do a lot more than just serve as a telephone. Fancy stuff.

Tomorrow is the big day. Wembley. The NFL, over here in England. So there is a lot to look forward to, and I’m growing more and more excited by the minute.

I have not had the best of days today, and it was made worse by a phone call I’ve just had from BT. Let me just say that it really annoys me when you get called by your service provider about deals and offers. When I was at uni, it was Virgin – they called me on a number of occasions about some sort of package where I could get television and phone included, whereas I only had the broadband. The thing is, it is rather easy to cancel broadband when you finish the year and move out – but the phone, and the TV is another matter. And then you have to consider the fact that there is always a minimum contract agreement, which would go on far longer than my tenancy.

It might sound pathetic, but it just annoys me. Being called by BT, with them offering me some supposedly fantastic deals on their new BT home phones, it annoys me. I have been using BT here for a while now, and they have been okay. The internet is sometimes quite slow, we sometimes get stung on the occasional phone bill, but for the most part they have been okay. But that doesn’t mean I want to get called about new phones. If I want new phones, I can shop around for them myself.

There are so many specialists and websites, and shops out there – places like this telephone system website – that make it so easy to get that sort of thing anyway, that now more than ever you don’t need people selling you things down the phone. It’s the same with internet. You have telecoms and the like, but more than that, you have television adverts, you have the internet in general: you can use the internet to research the internet, and find the deals you want. If you want sdsl internet, you can research and get sdsl internet.

So rather than go through the process of turning them down, I simply hung up. And after the day I’ve had today, it felt quite good, too!

I went to London today. One of my friends gave me a lift. But I popped into his house for a cup of tea before we went, and he showed me his new, rather wonderful phone system. I must admit, it was pretty fancy. Quite big – bigger than you would expect from such a modern, technological masterpiece – but yes, pretty fancy indeed.

It could play music, among its many and varied features, and it could also be used using only your voice, with no need to dial at all. It had a bluetooth headset that looked quite impressive in itself. Needless to say, he was quite proud of it; happy to be showing it off.

The city was quite fun; we did the whole tourist thing, we went to a few shops here and there, had a late lunch/early dinner. And it was quite a nice day. When I got back, though, almost automatically I had to fire up the broadband and looked up those fancy phones. Not to buy one myself, not really – more just out of curiosity.

Before long I had started looking into Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, which I tend to do more and more now in the build-up to its release. If you’re into computer games, and in particular first person shooters, this game looks like it’s shaping up to be particularly wonderful.

We have SDSL at work, which, in short, means things are more peachy there than it is at home, when it comes to the internet. Unfortunately, we have exceeded our bandwidth limit, and are now limited to what is quite a sedate pace. For browsing websites and things, it’s okay, but it takes forever to load up a video on You Tube, and watching anything on iPlayer is currently impossible.

And it’s not just iPlayer – it’s TV Catchup, too, so in our present state we can wave goodbye to television over the internet.

When you consider that you don’t need excessive speeds for IPTV to work in the first place, it’s a bit of a shame. You just need some speed, and I suppose at the moment, our punishment is that we do not have any.

Things like BBC’s iPlayer are very handy when you’ve missed something on television, and you want to catch up. You could watch the whole of the world athletics championships again, for instance – which I have been doing, from time to time, at work, when I want to break up a particularly boring task. It helps to keep me sane. It helps the days go by that little bit quicker.

But it would certainly help to be able to watch it at home if I wanted to, too.

Graphic design is something that I thoroughly enjoy dabbling in. I’ve loved it for a long time – right back to when I was about fifteen. Although saying that, when I first started, calling it “graphic design” would not do. The first images seemed to consist of dragging a few pictures together, slapping a bit of text on and calling it finished.

That first program was old, and pretty rubbish. When I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop, I found that using it was so much fun that I practised, and fiddled, and messed around nearly every day. After a while I was producing things that were actually pretty good. And over the years, I’ve continued to work with the program – even if it is just messing around, or producing background images for my desktop, or profile pictures for my friends. But it has paid off. Because now, rather suddenly, I’ve got a chance to really call myself a graphic designer.

Now I could potentially be producing a magazine for my friends business – a business that seems to be going quite well. He’s set up an office, it’s starting to get rolling quite nicely, and it’s really quite exciting. I’ve been to check out the office, and had a play on the computers, and it’s pretty cool stuff. With leased line providers, there is nice, fast internet available already, and it all feels so professional. I told him as much.

Business SDSL availability can sometimes be more lacking than you might like, apparently, which makes it quite difficult sorting it all out. So it wasn’t as simple as just rolling into the office and ordering any old internet. He had to research into all the available broadband companies to make sure that he didn’t get ripped off, and was ordering a package that could actually be of use to us if this thing snowballed – which hopefully it will.

It has just occurred to me that I have been babbling on about my own internet woes, when all around the country there are people who can’t even access the internet. This article over at the Guardian website shows how there is a plan in place in the UK to introduce a tax on phone lines, which will apparently allow greater internet access in the countryside. Obviously there will be split opinions. There will be those who have their fast internet, and don’t know the troubles of trying to use it in the country. There will be those who just don’t want to pay even more money for no immediate benefit to themselves

But then you notice that it’s only £6 a year. It’s not very much really. And if it can help with places that don’t yet have internet access, or help increase the speed of slow internet access, or help with sustaining a connection that has a habit of disconnecting for no good reason – then is it not worth it? In the past, I’ve lived in the middle of nowhere – and the internet out there can be infuriating. Frequently, you can go for an entire day without connection, and just as frequently it can cut out for apparently no reason other than that you are living in the countryside, and that’s just what happens.

Now they are saying that half the country will have access to super fast broadband by 2012, which is quite good going, I think. To think that here, now, we’re talking about homes all over the country having 10MB broadband, when, back only five or six years, it was unheard of to have anything near that in homes, is quite staggering.

Day after day, technology advances steadily on. And I find quite incredible. Here in the era of the iPhone, it’s quite easy to lose sight of the fact that, not so long ago, we relied on a wireless for entertainment, and had to spin the dial on a phone. Now in a matter of minutes you can buy BT Synergy business phones, and talk to friends and family from the garden if you want to.

And there are companies out there that cater for all this sort of thing, companies like Brite Telecom, when, fifty years ago the word “internet” didn’t even mean anything.

It’s quite easy to take it all for granted.