I’ve been attempting to buy an Ebook reader from WHSmith over the past couple of days… with “attempting” being the operative word.

The WHSmith website sensibly allows you to enter a delivery and billing address for your goods, and so I opted to have the reader sent here to PC Pro Towers.  The website took my order, the confirmation email duly arrived, and all was well and good.

Until a day after I placed the order, I received an email saying:

“Unfortunately we have been unable to obtain name and address verification from the card issuer for this transaction. As such I would appreciate your assistance by faxing to us a copy of your bank statement. (Please note that we do not need to see your current balance).”

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Bustling through Victoria Tube station this morning, the ticket barriers seemed a little more crowded than usual. Which is to say, rammed to the rafters, rather than merely heaving. 

What caused this extra congestion? A bomb threat? Signal failure? No, London Underground has “decided to do its bit for the environment” by turning off “unnecessary” escalators to save energy.

The very same escalators that recently had their zero-watt poster slots replaced with dozens of energy-chomping LCD screens. Which lead down to the lobby containing another half dozen, six-foot LCD screens showing bigger versions of the same video adverts. Which leads to the platforms, with six newly-installed, ginormous projectors blasting video ads on to the platform walls.

If that’s London Underground “doing its bit”, Victoria’s going to be a seaside resort before we know it.  

Last week I opened Facebook to find the following status update from one of my friends:

“Ilana Drunk with love people with I love. I love m best friends who talk. Farmers weekly f***** hell.”

(And before the pedants start commenting about my over-zealous use of the asterisk, she was so inebriated she’d even managed to misspell the f word.) 

I should explain that Ilana is a writer, and a bloody good writer at that, having had her first novel published by Orion and a second on the way. She’s not normally the type of person who litters Facebook updates with jibberish. But until someone fits a breathaliser to her mobile phone, she will probably continue to make a proper Charlie of herself with booze-laden Facebook updates.

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There’s a wee frisson of excitement every Wednesday morning on the PC Pro newsdesk. For Wednesday is the day that brings the esoteric bag of brilliance that is the Advertising Standard Authority’s latest batch of ajudications.

More often than not, the only tech interest is BT and Virgin Media using the ASA to settle their latest petty dispute over whose dad is actually biggest. But occassionally, just occasionally, the ASA delivers a verdict of such sumptuous entertainment, that it earns a round of spontaneous applause from even us world-weary cynics. 

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We’re all keeping a close eye on the financial markets at the moment - not least to check whether our mortgage company has just moved into Number 10.

My first port of call for financial news has traditionally been The Financial Times, but the online pink pages have recently been usurped by Google’s quite exceptional Finance site. (There’s a UK version of the site, too.)

Not only does this collate all the latest business news (including the FT’s) into one digestable lump, but it presents the latest market data in such an effortlessly customisable fashion that it should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. 

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Roughly a quarter of all phones are discarded with enough personal data left in them to identify their owner, according to a new study. Given my recent experience, I’m surprised that figure isn’t somehere in the high nineties, because deleting data from a modern phone is like trying to clear sand off a beach with a pair of tweezers. 

My esteemed editor recently handed me the Nokia E71 he’d been testing. Because he’s a stickler for reviewing kit properly, it was stuffed full of his personal data, including his Exchange email, text messages and contacts.

Once I’d sent an email to our publisher with Tim’s recommendation of a huge pay rise for the hard-working, irreplaceable, online editor, I set about trying to wipe the data.  First, I formatted the memory card, but it seems all Tim’s personal files were stored on the phone’s internal memory and, oddly, there was no obvious way to format that.

 

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With the Chancellor perfecting his Private Frazer impression (”we’re doomed”), the chances of the Government handing over a fiver, let alone the £5 billion needed to bring fibre to the country’s cabinets, were remote. 

So it will surprise absolutely no-one that a Government-commissioned report into so-called “next-generation access” has reached the heady conclusion that the Government would be best advised to do chuff all. 

“There is little evidence that, in the short term, UK consumers will experience a detriment due to the lack of an extensive NGA network,” concludes the report’s author, former Cable and Wireless boss, Francesco Caio. Perhaps he should try getting out a bit more, because if he ventured even 50 miles outside of his comfy London office and started talking to people on the edges of BT’s rural exchanges, he would have found plenty of homes and businesses that are struggling on sub 1Mb/sec connections.

This very morning, in fact, Cisco released a report that claimed only Japan has the broadband quality to cope with next-generation web apps. The UK fell below the threshhold required for today’s apps, let alone the ones coming round the corner. 

 The case for public funding is debatable; the fact that Britain’s broadband network remains woefully inadequate is indisputable. 

An update to ZoneAlarm Internet Security was released the other day. I could tell because my PC started nagging me with an intensity matched only by my four-year-old daughter when she wants to watch Fifi and the Flowertots during the football.

So I succumbed (to ZoneAlarm 8, not Fifi) and spent the next three hours trying to unpick the carnage that descended on my brand new Dell laptop, after the installation stalled midway through, leaving me with no other option but to reboot the PC.

Upon reboot I found myself in a ZoneAlarm no-man’s land: not quite in ZoneAlarm7, but not fully over the border into ZoneAlarm 8 either. The ZoneAlarm icon sits proudly in my System Tray, informing me the security is “up and running” but that the “UI is still initialising”. Every time I attempt to open the software, I’m met with a Windows error message informing me the application has crashed and Vista is trying to find a solution. Guess what? It doesn’t.

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BT was quietly confident earlier this year when it told me that a £10 device would significantly increase the speed of many people’s broadband connections – and judging by our tests, it’s absolutely right.

The iPlate (or interstitial plate, as its mother would call it) has boosted the speed of my home ADSL connection by a staggering 63%. Before I connected the easy-to-install device over the weekend, the actual throughput of my ADSL Max connection was averaging around 1.9Mb/sec, according to repeated tests at Speedtest.net. Now, that same speed test is reporting an average download speed of 3.1Mb/sec. All for doing nothing more than spending 10 minutes undoing a couple of screws and popping the plate in my master phone socket.

I should explain, for those that now rush to Broadbandbuyer.co.uk (who supplied our iPlates) and order an iPlate for themselves, that the speed increase didn’t happen instantly. In fact, straight after I’d installed the iPlate I rushed on to Speedtest.net and was crestfallen to find it had made absolutely bugger all difference to my download speed. However, I did notice whilst rifling my router’s settings that my modem’s synch speed – the maximum theoretical speed your physical connection can achieve – had risen from a paltry 2Mb/sec to a far healthier 3.6Mb/sec.

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I was thumbing through the first ever issue of PC Pro today, chortling at how young everyone looks and how much the state-of-art laptops of the day cost (£3,500, since you asked), when I came across this:

Quite possibly the most tasteless, ill-conceived and downright stupid advert for a PC company I’ve ever seen.

The company in question is called IPC Direct, which is, to the best of Google’s knowledge, no more: no doubt thanks to its genius advertising team.

Have you seen any worse? Let me know on comments below if so.