I clicked “next” and IE8 came up with a window asking me to choose my settings. I closed it and selected Firefox from the available options. Internet Explorer opened and downloaded Firefox. I installed it and the browser ballot window was still there. I closed the ballot window and rebooted.

The ballot came up again, but this time even worse:

This thing is horribly broken. Even when you have installed another browser it tries to force you back to IE. It didn’t delete the IE icon off the desktop or Quick Launch either.

A nice shade of red I thought. Unfortunately, Vistaprint can’t print red:

I included a few red and different colour items in the photo for comparison. I was a bit surprised at this as I had followed all the suggestions on the Vistaprint web site, and indeed the site itself seemed to render red correctly:

I contacted them and they kindly offered to try again. I sent them a few samples of the first lot so they could see the problem. The second batch turned up, and it was a slightly darker brown that the first. I contacted them again, and got this interesting response:

We currently do not have persons in place to check orders before they are printed nor shipped.

So they just press print and hope everything turns out okay.

They suggested I try converting the colour to CMYK, so I did. Sent them another proof, which again looked perfect on the web site preview. Third lot of cards turned up and sure enough they are still just as brown.

FFS Vistaprint, is it that hard to print red? Every cheap inkjet can do it, so why can’t you? How can your prints be so far from what is shown on screen? I can understand not being able to match colour to a professional level but we are talking completely different parts of the spectrum here.

FAIL.

Stupidity, American-centric ideas and the ability of people with too much time on their hands to enforce their personal preferences has not only driven a lot of good editors away, but it has also done a lot of damage to the content too.

If you compare the Japanese version to the English one the contrasting work together/I’m always right attitudes, as well as numerous other flaws, become obvious. I’m not going to waste my time any more.

Well, except perhaps on keeping the PC World article full of my own opinions. I never said I wasn’t as bad as the rest of them.

Anyway…

No. There are millions of pictures of non-black people being ridiculed (i.e. George Bush, Tony Blair, Bunker Brown, Nick Griffin, Wayne Rooney etc, etc), should these be removed as well? This has only come about because the 1st lady is black, if she’d been white, this would not have made the news.

Bob Todd

Recommended by 266 people

It worries me greatly that Bob does not appear to understand what racism actually is. The fact that 266 other morons apparently don’t either, and that said morons pushed this comment to the top of the pile, makes me despair.

Apparently this sort of thing is quite common. I hear people saying things like “I’m not a racist, but…” or “it’s just a laugh, they laugh along as well and make jokes about white people too.” As someone who has been a victim of racism I can assure you, dear reader, that these people are fucktards.

The picture of Mrs. Obama altered to look like an ape is racist because historically comparing black people to apes and implying that they are less highly evolved, less intelligent and less human than white people has been used by racists. Ridiculing people because of their actions or beliefs is fine, ridiculing them simply because of the colour of their skin (which they cannot do anything about) is racist. Calling someone a “paki” is racist because it is a term of abuse based on racial background, where as calling someone a “brit” is simply shorthand and not an insult. How people cannot understand this rather simple distinction is beyond me.

There has been criticism of attempts to educate kids about this kind of thing, calling it liberal leftist namby-pamby PC brigade nonsense, but clearly there is a very real need for it.

Send him home!!!!

[RulaBritannia], Bradford, United Kingdom

and

Yet again the system making me think its time to give the BNP a closer look.

Oh dear, York

and

DEPORT HIM!!!!

[cosmicKoalaK], London

or

Mr Binyam Mohamed should be sent back to Ethiopia ASAP.

Captain Mubbers, Britain out of EU!!

The list goes on. The problem is that the highest rated comments only need about 180 odd votes to rise to the top. Finding 180 people to log in and vote is not hard for any determined organisation. In fact, part of me wants to start a Facebook group for that very purpose.

The BBC must do something about this. It cannot be platform for the BNP and other extremists. I would recommend a Slashdot style comments system, with the key ability to reply directly to other people’s posts and rate them based on more than just “I agree”.

• iTunes itself
• Quicktime
• Apple Mobile Device service
• Bonjour Service
• iPod Service
• iTunesHelper startup task
• QTTask startup task
• Firefox plugin
• iPod Classic drivers
• iPhone drivers
• Apple Software Update

Grand Total: 276MB

Actually, they removed the DNS Resolver service from iTunes 8 (wtf – Windows can already resolve DNS).

On top of all that, iTunes itself contains half of MacOS. OSX font rendering and associated fonts, graphic rendering elements etc.

You also have every supported language installed, and support for every Apple device (iPod Classic, iPod Touch, iPhone, AppleTV), network sharing and streaming… The list goes on.

I could just about forgive all this if there was an alternative, but if you own an iPhone or an iPod Touch there isn’t. Apple decided to encrypt the iTunes database and make it impossible for 3rd party software to work with their hardware.

Nice one. You broke the most important page on your site.

Anyway, time to refute some of the bullshit:

We don’t need “tougher” citizenship tests, we need tougher border control…

We have over 2 million unemployed, why on earth would we need ANY immigrants??

We should :-
1) Remove all illegal immigrants without hesitation.

2) Change the definition of Asylum to mean providing a place or safety for as long as it is deemed to be required – NO right to citizenship, ever..

3) If we have a skills shortage, train our own people first…

We are a small island, we need to limit our population..

Slightly Right Of Ghenghis Khan

Why should we need more people when we have unemployed? This is the often touted “we should have 100% employment” argument. It ignores the fact that you are never going to match every person to a suitable job, based on the skills required and a reasonable salary for them to live and look after their family on. It also ignores the fact that if you force people to do shitty, demeaning jobs with no prospects it tends to lead to things like depression (and time of work), as well as driving them to a life of crime. You can’t really have the media, particularly adverts, telling people that they need stuff and should aspire to things on the one hand, and on the other hand tell them they are worthless and should accept their lowly lot in life and bloody well like it.

So, on to point (1). If we knew where illegal immigrants where, we could remove them. Unfortunately, we don’t, and it’s not exactly easy to find out. Plus, it takes years, even in the simplest cases, to decide asylum cases. If you think it’s easy to figure out who is genuine and who isn’t, you need to give Asylum and Immigration a call immediately.

As for (2), you are pretty much guaranteeing that asylum seekers spend their life on benefits, scrounging off the rest of us hard-working Brits if you don’t allow them citizenship. After all, non-citizens cannot easily get a job (in fact, by default there is not even a right to work for asylum seekers). It wouldn’t stop them using public services either, such as being housed (for free, since they can’t work) or getting treatment on the NHS. I suppose we could just kick them into the gutter and let them die quietly, but that goes against my liberal wishy-washy-politically-correct-namby-pamby feelings of compassion towards my fellow human beings.

So, back to the first point again with item (3). Unfortunately, it takes many years to train people to do complicated jobs. Also, people don’t tend to do too well at leaning things they have absolutely no interest in. You can’t just mould people like clay into any shape you want.

I was just saying today how the popularity of Harry Potter gives me some hope that children are still interested in reading, but now I realise that Harry Potter may just be a gateway text for the Daily Mail. Maybe we should ban reading.

First, there is the down-time. For months my site would randomly go offline for a few hours and then come back. Messages to tech support via the ticketing system or direct email were always ignored. Things got really bad when I tried to set up automatic backups in WordPress, which would take the site down at the time of the backup for about an hour. Even with backups disabled, a few hours of downtime a week was not uncommon, and it was often during peek times.

Even when the site was up, speeds were pretty poor, especially PHP stuff like the blog.

I have already mentioned that the support staff just tend to ignore you. Eventually I did get a reply, when a misconfiguration caused my mailbox to grow to over 900MB. I don’t actually use the Weycrest mailbox, I just have a re-direct, but it turns out that if you don’t specifically disable the inbox then copies of all re-directed messages end up in it. Eventually they finally responded to an email about this and I was able to fix it. Their response was by no means quick though.

On the subject of configuration, the Plesk control panel they picked is crap. It’s slow, it takes ages to navigate and the layout is far from helpful or logical.

The final straw came when my email was down for a day, as near as I can tell. I send repeated messages to Weycrest, but got no response, so decided to move to kNET Hosting. More on them in a moment. While I was moving all my stuff over, Weycrest finally responded. The email was a bit surprising:

Paul

We will no longer provide support for email forwarding. If it works, fine, it doesn’t well its hard luck I’m afraid.

From now its  case of “your mileage will vary” and “use at your own risk” as we cannot guarantee mail delivery to every provider in the world.

This madness has gone on long enough, and its getting kind of ridiculous what we are expected support for £14.99 per year and provide the web hosting as well! We spend more time resolving mail issues than anything else.

It also highly likely that by the time your account comes up for renewal, email will require an additional support package costing at least £15.00 per annum.

Sorry, but as it stands, its just not commercially viable.

Easiest solution for the time being is for you to switch all your email hosting over to Gmail (ie Google apps for your domain) rather than forwarding to it and use your domain with Google. This can be done by adjusting the the DNS settings in Plesk.

Failing that we are happy to cancel on a pro-rata basis, however you have only another month or so left to run.

Best Regards
Paul Lee
Weycrest.Com Limited

So, they basically gave up. What worries me is that the usual way this works is you provide an expensive but reliable service for businesses. You then sell off some excess capacity as cheaper hosting plans, with limits to prevent them ever interfering with your business customer’s service. The cheaper accounts benefit from using the same high reliability services are the business guys, and you get the benefit of extra income and maybe even some early warning of any potential problems (since you have a more diverse set of users, more people looking at things etc). We do something similar with tech support systems where I work, and it’s a good system.

Needless to say I have cancelled my account and am waiting for a refund.

Now, on to kNET. I paid by PayPal (should have used card, PayPal fees are ridiculous, sorry guys, next time) and a human being verified and set up my account within half an hour. I moved everything over, changed the DNS settings and waiting. Small panic when the MX records changed but I was still not getting test emails. kNET responded within 5 minutes, at around 21:30 in the evening. That’s what I call tech support.

The move has gone smoothly. kNET use cPanel, which is a lot better than Plesk. Their server seems fast and reliable. It’s early days, but fingers crossed I have found a good hosting company.

I sat down and did my research. Spent hours checking specs, reading reviews, blogs and forums. Eventually decided I’d like a Subaru Justy. It’s a “Kei” car, a sort of taller super-mini. Having arthritis the extra height makes it much easier for me to get in and out, and it’s pretty spacious on the inside too. The 1 litre rubber band is economical, if not particularly exciting. The Twin Cam version really looks the part too.

So off I went to the local dealer, had a test drive and was impressed. I tried out the Suzuki Splash but was not particularly taken with it, and although I like the Mitsubishi Colt it doesn’t have that Kei car hight advantage. So, decision made, I check my finances and decide to accept a loan from my mum so I can give the dealer the full amount in cash, and avoid paying interest on a loan since Subaru are one of the few manufacturers not offering 0% finance. Actually, that last point should probably have rung alarm bells in my mind, but I figured Subaru are a performance oriented brand and so maybe didn’t think they needed to go that far.

Actually, it turns out Subaru won’t budge even an inch. The dealer told me that Subaru instructed them not to offer any discount what so ever to anyone taking up the scrappage scheme offer. That £2000 is supposed to be on top of any existing deals or offers. To add insult to injury, Subaru are keeping the £250 from the VAT reduction. This at a time when every other manufacturer is disparately trying to entice the customers by offering massive deals and nothing-to-pay-for-a-year-then-0% finance.

How the fuck Subaru expect to sell any cars is beyond me.