Let me set the scene for you, me and my family have used the Carphone Warehouse since we moved to Liverpool almost three years ago. We have bought eight mobile phones from them while we have been here, as well as having two mobile phones contracts through them. Last year we also decided to switch to their broadband and landline telephone deal which had been brought to our attention and it was a nice package for the price. Me and my sister had the contract phones and we decided that it would be cheaper to go to a Pay and Go service and cancelled the two contracts with them. The first contract was cancelled back end of last year without a problem and the second (my phone) was early this year.

My dad knowing that the last payment of the contract would not be as expensive he rang Carphone Warehouse and cancelled the contract and told them to send him a bill in the post. He then proceeded to cancel the direct debit through his bank account. The bill arrived promptly within a few days with a demand that it be paid by March 13^th dad then wrote a cheque and sent it back with more than a week to spare. The money left my dad’s bank account which then brought a close to our transaction with Carphone Warehouse so far as the mobile phone contracts were concerned.

On March 12th a debt collection agency rang our house, using a very threatening tone, on behalf of Carphone Warehouse saying they had not yet received payment of their bill. My mum explained to them that they needed to talk to my dad who was out at the time, she took down their number and said she will make sure he rings them back. When my dad got back he was alarmed by what my mum said and, displeased, range the agency back straight away.

In the conversation on the phone they referred to a letter that they clamed to have sent on the March 10th, however we had not received any such letter. A few days later my parents got a letter, which we presume is the one they referred to in the conversation on the phone and was dated March 12th. Interesting is it not, that the letter is dated the same day as the phone call, it does make you wonder if there actually was a letter sent on the 10th. What is even more interesting is that my dad was chased by a debt collection agency, not only before the payment was due, but also after the cheque had not only been sent but had also cleared.

My dad is sure that this has happened because of our post code. There is a housing estate not to far away from where I live nicknamed “Dodge City” because the residents were notorious for avoiding the tax man. You would have thought that any company would realise that someone with a title like “Reverend” or lived in a house with the address “The Vicarage” would be given a little credit for getting his finances straight. Dad has sent a letter to them demanding an apology for their negligence because something like that on his record could stop him from receiving financial help in the future. However, as yet we have heard anything from them, an as such we are now removing all further ties with Carphone Warehouse and its sub-company TalkTalk.

I have been planning to build my own computer for a long time, at least the last three years or more. It is only recently that I have started to get more money in my bank account to even consider making one. I have been looking at all the products I would like to by and thinking of the kind of power that I would like my computer to have. I want be able to build a computer until at least early next year so I can only guess at what will be available then but I have an idea of what I would get now if I could.

I would like the most powerful AMD possessor there is, at the moment it is the AMD Athlon 64 FX-60. I would like at least one terabyte of hard disk space (at the moment I can only do it with two hard drives or more) but there probably will be terabyte hard drives available to the public then. I most definitely want to make use of NVIDIA SLi because I do like to play the odd computer game from time to time. I definitely need at least two gigabytes of memory, but I would prefer more than four.

The problem is that all this stuff gets very, very hot. The possessor in my computer at the moment is a fake AMD Sempron 2800+, kindly supplied with my personal computer by iQion, has a temperature of over fifty degrees centigrade (it has been overclocked, but I bought it that way). My graphics card which is a passively cooled NVIDIA GeForce 6600 by Gigabyte hasn’t given me any problems, but it is hardly a high end graphics card like I would go for.

Most graphics cards today come with little fans to keep the card at a stedy temperature, but as they get more powerful, the more heat they make. This means that the little fans need to go faster and faster to keep them cooler but this means that they create a lot more noise than they used to (it is also why I have a passive graphics card at the moment). New graphics cards create far to much heat for passive cooling so to keep my system quite I need another cooling method, which is to use a water cooling system.

I should probably point out now that they do not actually use water, but they do use an alternative liquid which is more conductive than normal water. You might also be wondering if it is dangerous to have water so close to electricity, the answer is yes if you are not careful. Most water cooling systems are extremely good and it is not a problem unless you install the coolers badly. The next problem is that if you remove the little fan off the graphics card then the warranty becomes void. I have also found the solution to that, you can buy graphics cards with water cooling blocks built onto them, but there are not many of them at the moment and are very expensive.

Here is my plea to any company who makes NVIDIA based graphics cards, please, please make more graphics cards with Water VGA Blocks build onto them by next year.

I do not know if you have heard of Net Neutrality, but it is where your Internet Service Provider blocks, or at least slows, the download of the page you want to view. You might be wondering why they would do that, the simple answer is that it benefits them in some way.

You ISP might have a deal with a website related to the page you are viewing and will block the page you are trying to get to, therefore discouraging your from using that page. By doing this you will try to find another page with the information you want and you find a page that your ISP has the deal with and pages get through without a problem. For more details feel free to watch Net Neutrality Video on Public Knowledge for more details in an easy to understand format.

This is not so good, but what can we do about it? Currently not a lot because as far as I am aware there are now laws directly against it yet, but I am sure you can think of a few that could apply. An example would be freedom of speech, or more specifically you freedom to hear what other people are saying.

Although there are no laws against it yet, or any other nasty things that ISPs do to their services, it is not really something that should be done. For a start it is against everything the internet stands for, the freedom to exchange information between friends and strangers alike. I do not think it will be long before someone takes an ISP to court over this, and hopefully not to long after there will be legislation in place from doing this but for now we can vote with our feet. If you find that this is what your ISP is doing make sure you tell as many people as you can about it, make sure they know you know what they are doing, after all, most of what you will tell people will be going through their systems.

For those of you who have tried getting your site to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines you will most like notices that it is imposible to get your site to follow it exactly. There is one section that makes it imposible to get right, keyboard access, checkpoints 9.4 and 9.5.

Checkpoint 9.4 is to “create a logical tab order through links, form controls and objects.” If you are running dynamic content systems like I am, you just cannot do it, it would meen that every time I added a new post to my blog I would have to change every link in every post on my blog, and even then I would have problems. Every article is on multiple pages, which means that the tab order will be different on each page. I could make a script that would disect the HTML and add a tabindex tag to each of the elements that needs it but for all that is worth I might as well let the browser work out the tab order itself.

Checkpoint 9.5 is “provide keyboard shortcuts to important links, form controls, and groups of form controls.” This one is imposible to do, on my keyboard I have about 35 keys that I can safely use for keyboard shortcuts if I do not want them to get confused with other keyboard shortcuts the browser already has (for example Ctrl and S is Save). I counted 83 elements on my homepage that would need a keyboard shortcut, something just does not add up. My keyboard seems to be missing 48 keys, if anyone finds them please email them to me.

I am sure you are all aware that His Tonyness wants you to take the bus to work and what ever else to help keep pollution levels to a minimum. I can understand why he wants us to do this but I do not understand why he thinks we will. Here are a few reasons why I will only use the bus when I need to.

Cramped

I do not know if you are tall enough to notice, but I am 6 foot tall and I cannot fit into the seats of the bus. I understand that there is only so much room, but I need more of that room to fit into the seat. I end up taking to seats because I have to sit side on blocking anyone from sitting next to me. One of my mates was 6 foot 5 last time I asked how tall he was, and watching him trying to sit in a bus seat is really funny.

At peak time before 9 am and after 6 pm, when most people would be using the bus is when they are at their worst. Not only are rows of seats to close, but the seats next to each other are too. I do not travel often at these times but when I do I hate it I cannot fit my backside in the chair when there is someone next to me, it is just not possible. Also with the UK rapidly increasing waist lines this problem is only going to get worse.

Smokers

I hope you have never experienced being sat in a bus with someone smoking pot at the back. I have and it is horrible, the smell is awful and it gets stuck in your clothes so you carry it with your for the rest of the day. Being 19 it is also hard to explain to the police why you smell like you have been smoking pot.

I also have it in for smokers on the bus. I have not seen anyone smoking cigarettes on the bus but sitting next to someone who does is pretty bad especially if you are going a long way.

Time

I live right at the end of a bus route and I have to go all the way around the area I live before I get to my house. I have timed how long it takes to get to town both in my car and on the bus. I can get down town in quarter of an hour in my car but it takes three times that on the bus.

Boredom

This leads on from being cramped and the time it takes, being bored is my pet hate about being on the bus. On the bus there is nothing to do, there is no TV to watch or music to listen to. In a car you are driving and you do not notice that the time is passing as much if at all.

I have noticed that some people have been successful at stopping their boredom by playing on noisy things like phones or iPods. Why is it that people with these things cannot hear this thing that is stuck in their ear and have to turn it up so load that everyone else can tell that you have an iPod?

Litter and Graphite

On busses there is always someone who has signed the back of the chair in front of you or left what looks like a half eaten pasty on the floor. Have you ever had the experience of being stuck to your seat because some dick head put some chewing gum on the seat? It is really bad especially on the older busses.

That pretty much rounds up why I really do not like the bus, the only advantage I can think of is that it is cheaper than the car. It costs me £2 to get to and from town by bus, it costs about £3.50 in the car but going be car is so worth the extra cost.

I have been having some problems with my phone recently, I keep forgetting to charge it when the battery gets low which can make it difficult to use when there is now power. So I would like to see an applicatation that will tell you roughly how long the power left in the battery will last rather than a number of bars that meen very little to me. Using this system I could then get a better idea of when I need to charge it and when its not worth the effort of finding the charger. The application would also be able to tell you roughtly how much power you are using an hour, how long the phone has been on since it was last charge and how much it was charge. If anybody who makes mobile phones reads this feel free to make one for the Nokia N60 (the phone I have at the moment) and add it to your own phones.

This is probably the best First Person Shooter game through a browser I have ever seen. Normally when using stuff like Sockwave FPS games they really suck with poor graphics quolity and what not but this one is far better. It is called Phosphor and has a simaler quolity to a game that you would find on a PSP or Nintendo DS which is really good through the browser. Its only in Beta 1 and only has one level but I have been playing it for a few hours and I have not had any problems with it. My only niggle is that the weapons take to much health from you, by the time you turn round to face the bot your dead.

I was checking out my stats for this site and I found something I do not like. Someone has typed “Matt Wells is an Asshole” into Google and I am ranked number one for that so thank-you very much Google!

At least it makes up for it, if you search for Matthew Wells I am listed number five

Our cats are now about nine months old and here are a few fairly recent pictures of them bothing, doing what they do best. Resting!

My Cat JD

My Sister’s Cat Buddy

I have had a Freeview box for quite a while now and I tend to watch channels like Five, Men and Motors and FTN a lot, and I am starting to see some really shit adverts. The ones that annoy me the most are like the current Head and Sholders advert about how it has been voted the best anti-dandruf shampoo in some magazines. They have recorded the advert in a language other than English and have someone else speek over it in English and the lipse are out of sync with the actors on screen. People have become very aware of this in cartoons and it puts people off, so why haven’t companies relised that is will be just the same with normal videos.