Renewal: The very mention of this word causes irritation and apprehension amongst motorists across the land. Insurers have come under a lot of flak recently for their ever rising premiums, with the OFT calling the UK insurance market “dysfunctional”.

So, with this in mind, and my breakdown cover due, I eye my renewal letter with intense suspicion:

As you have been a Member of the AA for the past year you will qualify for our new Silver Membership when you renew. With this you get more breakdown cover at no extra charge, plus free extra benefits.

How lovely of them! It’s always nice to be rewarded for loyal custom, and at no extra charge! Wait, there’s a bit further down the letter:

…your payment details are shown in the box overleaf.

So, lots of extra benefits, at no extra charge? Well, not exactly: The adage ‘always read the small print’ most definitely holds true with the AA.

The price you’ve paid in your first year is for new members only, which for me, was £9.95 per month.  The renewal price quoted for me overleaf? £18.09 per month, nearly double the cost of my previous cover.  This is pretty far from no extra charge…

At this point it’s fair to mention that on calling their renewal team, and after complaining, I got this back down to just over £10 (with exactly the same extra benefits).

I left this experience however feeling as if the AA were trying to pull a fast one: Yes, it was stated in the small print, and yes, you should always read the entire letter front and back, but it did seem pretty poor on their part not to make this clearer both on the letter and at least within proximity to the price I was originally quoted a year ago on their website. Poor show, AA.

She’s back. Yup.

You’d think after receiving torrents of abuse via Youtube for the past year or so she’d think twice about releasing another video? Apparently not. It’s once again a lyrical masterpiece with poetic lines such as:

When we’re dancing real close, think I like ya
But when the lights go down low, I can’t find ya
Now, I can’t get you outta my mind, yeah
It’s a crime, yeah

When people moan about the state of the music industry nowadays I whole heartedly disagree, however after hearing this pile of excrement I want to shut myself in a darkened room and pretend I’m a potato. It’s mind destroying. A friend of the Facebook friend that posted this video rightly commented “I watched it with the mute on. It still sounded awful.”

I disagree with the amounts of abuse she is getting – if you don’t like the music, don’t listen to it. However it seems that the Youtube page of this video is flooded with ridiculous messages of encouragement for this naive teen. “Mrlovestardoll” (questionable username…) says “ I love this song! I have no idea why 80,000 people hate this,but i think this song is the best of hers!”.

It’s like picking the nicest turd, right?

This is the money I paid to go to the headquarters of Marie Claire for what they called “How to get into Magazines”. What was promised was an evening of champagne, canapés and career advice from Marie Claire’s editors. Sounded good, seeing as I have a journalism degree and have worked in the beauty industry for the last 4 years. Plus this was the first legitimate career idea I have had for the past god-knows-how-long.

My experience of events, certainly by L’Occitane’s standards, are flowing champagne, expensive food for everyone to graze on and more than anything, value for money compared to our ticket prices of a mere £10. This is basically the minimum I had in mind for an event run by such a high profile glossy magazine.

Kayleigh, a good friend of mine, agreed to get a ticket and come along with me – mainly for the promise of booze and a “goodie-bag” worth £55. I meet her at her office near Covent Garden and we wander over to MCHQ. Both of us starving, we stop off at a pub on Southbank and have a sandwich each, purely to not seem like such pigs when these promised canapés arrived. Scoffing my face with food doesn’t seem to be a fantastic way to make a good first impression, especially with a glossy.

We arrive into the building, find another 60 or so people all for the same event and make our way up to the 10th floor for champagne. I think it was anyway. We got herded into a tiny room (tiny for 60 people anyway) and handed a glass of bubbly. I soon found out I was allergic to this drink and started getting hot and itchy on my neck. I noticed some odd pot pourri on the windowsill. This was the selection of canapés. Some dusty corn snacks predominantly made of air. Thank goodness Kayleigh and I ate otherwise that selection of air would have been our dinner.

I grabbed a big glass of water and got half way through it before we were ushered out of this tiny room. All drinks were not allowed into the next room, so I had to put down my glass of water which was saving me from scratching my neck skin off and anyone who hadn’t finished their champagne – tough.

This next room was a Ryan Air lecture theatre. It was a dull grey room with banked seating, all covered in plastic imitation red leather – hence the reference to Ryan Air; nothing to do with being cramped and a overcoming feeling of death about the place.

In front of each chair was this “goodie bag”. Nothing particularly good about it. Inside – a sample set of Dermalogica’s face routine products, a nail varnish, eye-liner, and two lip glosses. Dermalogica – I shouldn’t really use, working for one of their main rivals in the business, the nail varnish and one lip gloss was Marie Claire’s own brand anyway, the eye-liner not to my taste and the last lip gloss being from L’Occitane – one which we actually don’t do any more. Fan-fucking-tastic. There was also a “helpful information pack” included, which was a cardboard wallet containing one A4 piece of paper telling us how amazing their mentoring scheme was. No contact details, no insider tips.

I really started to wonder whether the whole experience was worth it, whether it was going to carry on falling from its pretentious 10th floor offices and smack itself on the concrete below. And, of course, it fell.

There was a line-up of around 5 editors of different positions in the magazine, from the Editor in Chief to a Beauty Assistant. Each of them spent around 15 minutes telling us how they got into the business which is all very well on paper, but none of what they said was that relevant. The Beauty Assistant, for example, only got into her job because her CV got mixed up in the wrong pile and she got chosen for a job which she didn’t apply for. No real tips for the average Joe there, thanks a lot.

After listening to 5 life stories, we then had 5 minutes of questions. I managed to ask one, though I had a moment of reflection during that 1 second before they chose me. What if I fuck up asking this question? This could be the one chance I get to get an insider’s look into working in a glossy, have I thought this through? And by the time all that had gone through my head with a million and one scenarios which resulted in me kissing my possible fantasy career goodbye, it was my turn to speak. So I start shaking like a hyperactive child.

5 minutes later – after some pretentious pricks of girls ask ridiculous questions with name-dropping – just before the editors shot off and hid from the general public again, they dropped in that all insider tips that were mentioned in this event were going to be published online. I sat there in awe. Why the hell did I pay £35 to do all this when I could have got it all at home anyway? By the time that I had gotten out of my uncomfortable cheap airline seat, the editors had ran off.

I looked around at the other girls. Some of them really tried to dress to impress, almost as if you could read their little fantasy in their head. As if they would say “Hi, I saw how amazing you look with your generic Top Shop outfit and we here at Marie Claire thought, wow, we need to have that girl on the team, please start tomorrow where we’ll whisk you away to Milan for the weekend and you can pretend you’re in Ugly Betty”. Nggn.

So. Screw Marie Claire. I think I still ideally would like to work as a Beauty Writer/Assistant/whatnot however it will be definitely not with MC. If they cannot be bothered to put any effort into something which us consumers paid for then what would they be like as a company to work for? Christ on a bike. The only good that has come out of it is being able to look back on it and be thankful I went. Purely because if I didn’t, I would spend the next few years wondering “what if”. That’s it. Not because of the killer champagne, the dust mite canapés or the Ryan Air room. Fear of regret.

After all that, the score now is Heather 0 – 1 Career Hunting.

Ed Miliband is peculiar. Since his Labour leadership victory almost a year ago, he has been persistently dull, unflinchingly bland, distinctive in his brand of average offensive each week in PMQs. The show has grown more disappointing with each nasal performance, and as predictable as Ed’s look of hurt incredulity with each passing question.

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When I was seventeen, my 6th form ran a sort of prospects day, where, with hindsight, my school attempted to shoehorn the majority of us into universities. A nice lady from Leicester’s De Montfort University came and extolled upon her impressionable audience the virtues of higher education. She promised she wasn’t trying to sell her institution to us, but we came away knowing more about what De Montfort offered than anything else. She said many nice things, but the message indelibly scraped on my brain was this:

“People who go to university will earn on average £400,000 more than those who don’t.” (more…)

Apologies for lack of blogging, I am however back on form. So the arches have been erected, the bunting has gone up, and the bigots and juveniles have come out in force once again. Yep you’ve guessed it, Marching Season is upon us.

Rather than delve into centuries of history, I’ll present the short version, for hundreds of years the Protestant community has marched on the anniversairy of the Battle of the Boyne, displaying their loyalty to the crown. The problem comes in that many of the routes on the “Queens Highway” as it is referred to by the Lodges of Orangemen pass through or near Catholic communities, areas known as flashpoints. Trouble has already started brewing in areas of Belfast with rioting breaking out last week resulting in a Press Association photographer being shot in the leg. Media have been warned to stay away from these areas, which will be ignored however I think a ban should be imposed on media from braodcasting these images. That may sound a little contradictory coming from a journalist but I honestly believe that media coverage of this rioting only adds fuel to the fire.

A recent BBC Wonderland documentary prompted me to write this post. Alison Millar spent four months following the bands of the Shankill Road, in particular a young boy called Jordan, an aspiring drummer. Despite growing up in Northern Ireland, I had a relatively limited knowledge of the Troubles as a child, coming from a mixed marriage I was told religion didn’t matter, that everyone was equal. After watching this documentary my belief in this statement has only been reinforced. Despite the deeply rooted prejudices on both sides of the community, this compelling documentary reveals that the Catholic and Prootestant communities are not all that different; both are proud of their histories and want to celebrate their beliefs and traditions, neither want to return to the dark days of the Troubles.

Last year saw some of the worst rioting on Belfast streets for ten years. In total 47 people have been charged, including a 29 year old Spanish man who admitted to dropping a concrete block on to a police woman’s head. It is bad enough when people from the same neighbourhood are at war with each other, but now that someone who does not understand our history and a journalism graduate to add insult is taking part in this violence is utterly disgraceful.

It really makes me angry that orchestrated violence is becoming a common occurence in this province again. My opinion on these acts of violence is that those involved need to grow up and shut up. All they are proving by resorting to rioting is that they do not have the intelligence or maturity to discuss their issues like civilised people. It is so frustrating to people like me who represent the future of Northern Ireland that this deep rooted bigotry is being passed down through generations and hatred is being bred into the youth. From looking at footage of these riots it is clear to see that the majority of them are youths, following the actions of their peers. It is disheartening and stirs anger in the majority of the people of Northern Ireland, this is not what we want.

Okay, so this is kind of exciting…

USB 3.0  - 5Gb/s
Thunderbolt – 10 Gb/s
Domestic TeleCom’s Optcal Fiber – ~14Tb/s

obviously all dependant on distance.

However the latest discovery, and current front page news on BBC’s News portal

Researchers have set a new record for the rate of data transfer using a single laser: 26 terabits per second.

This is pretty cool, imagine data streaming rates that fast?  If the UK is to keep up with the rest of the developed world availability of high speed internet is something the government really need to be looking into, there are places in the UK where broadband is still unavaiable (5% of the country as of the Ofcom survery in 2005, but that page lists the limited avaiability of other services, such as DAB, and DTT too.)

<rant>

The average UK internet speed is 2.95 Mb/s according to Broadband-Expert.

Look at internet speeds around the world, on this handy infographic.
Why is it countries like Japan and Korea can reach average speeds of 61, and 46 Mb/s respectively?

Why is this when such a greater wealth of technology is available, admittedly it comes at a cost, but is it not worth it to have a high speed infrastructure?

More information here.

</rant>

Okay rant over, and some of this information is pretty cool, I look forward to the day when this sort of technology is readily available

Ash

So, one of my friends has pointed me towards an article on TechCrunch about NFC (Near Field Communication).  The article largely points towards NFC payment as just a fad that will never take off, and goes on to make a few points that frankly I disagree with (especially with reference to the UK).  This blog post will be my analysis of this article.

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So today I have done my first ever app review. To be honest, I find people complaining about changes to Facebook really dull and I just tend to roll with the punches. Until now.

I enjoy Facebook in a desktop scenario, generally speaking. I even liked it on my iPhone and would often grin at Android users who complained about it on their respective phones. Recently though, things have started to change and I’m beginning to fall out of love with Facebook. In fact, this morning I harboured a massive desire to take my phone and ram it unceremoniously down Mark Zuckerberg’s cock.

Gone are the days where I look forward to updates as I dread time and again the ways that the app will become clunkier and more frustrating.

My home screen is weeks out of date with old profile pictures.

My feed randomly decides its own format. So with all the naïveté of the non-techie fool that I am, I tried logging off and on again. This in itself is a lengthy process but things took a surprising turn when the in the act of logging out, Facebook not only crashed but forced my phone to restart itself.

I wrote a review giving the app one star, which at present is more than I feel it deserves. I’d really like to know where Facebook decides how best to update. Is it derived from focus group feedback? What sort of consumer research actually goes on? At present I am next to a lamp that has a better social networking interface than the current incarnation of Facebook for iPhone.

In short, Zuckerberg, sort this sack of shit out, or it won’t just be your cock I tear to shreds.

After a short stay in hospital (thank you gallstones) and being off work and housebound for a week I have discovered something I should have seen long ago. The Channel Four drama Mo charting the life of the politician Mo Mowlam and her battle with a brain tumor is without a doubt one of the best dramatisations I have seen since Gerard McSorley’s portrayal of Michael Gallagher in Omagh.

If you haven’t yet watched it, this is one not to miss. Julie Walters gives an unflinchingly honest portrayal of the first Minister of Northern Ireland who was the driving force behind one of the most historic moments in the bloody history of the province. I remember being nine years old and watching the news footage from Stormont, even at that age I was aware that something had happened that was going to have a big impact on my future.  A definite one to watch.