Archive from April, 2007

Motorola Surfboard SB3100 cable modem not up to 10Mb speed

24 Apr 2007: With heavy heart, I’m about to say goodbye to my first, and extremely long-serving, cable modem. I can’t find a birth date for it, but I must have had it the best part of ten years, during which time Cambridge Cable/ntl/Virgin Media have increased speeds from “not that much faster than your old dialup modem, but hey, it’s always on!” to an impressive 10Mb.

The Ipswich Town website: cost effectively maximising income and reach, of course

20 Apr 2007: Fans on our mailing list were discussing the awfulness of our own (and most other football clubs’) websites. But “Premium TV provides proprietary ‘end to end’ solutions that enable content owners to cost effectively maximise income and reach through the creation and distribution of multi-platform digital products”, it says here. And who can argue with that?

Business Class, direct from London Stansted to Las Vegas: it does exist!

9 Apr 2007: I’ve got to the point where I could cry every time I hear friends say they’ve just paid five hundred quid or (much) more each for the privilege of hiking all the way out to Heathrow airport and flying cattle class to the States. There’s an airline called Maxjet which flies non-stop (yes!), from Stansted (yes!), as business class only (yes!) at fares closer to economy levels (yes!). Their publicity, however, is so terrible that I’ve only ever come across one other person who’d even heard of them. Maxjet flies from Stansted to New York, Washington and Las Vegas. The Las Vegas flights are non-stop too! Most other airlines going to Vegas force you to change somewhere rotten, making a [...]

All you need is Love

5 Apr 2007: A lot of people, including me, got very excited about the Beatles’ Love CD when it came out. Wow: a remixed, remastered Stars-on-45 Fab Four Mash-Up overseen by Sir George – how exciting was that prospect? Sadly, the product didn’t live up to the expectation. But when you see the show, you realise why. Because then you see the Love CD for what it is – simply a soundtrack to a show. And in that context, it fits the bill perfectly. A Cirque du Soleil performance needs a swirling, fast-changing, continuous soundtrack, and that’s exactly what Giles Martin has created, using The Beatles’ music. Listened to in your living room, it’s the equivalent of listening to 90 minutes of Motty [...]

Liza Minelli in Vegas: oh the glamour, darlings

4 Apr 2007: Short of an Elvis comeback, what could be more Vegas than seeing Liza Minelli? To be honest, we assumed the tickets would all have been sold, but wandering down to Tickets2Nite on the strip at 10.30am – when it opened – we were amazed to find they not only had a few tickets for that night, but they were half price too! The AmEx was out in a flash. And what a great show (at the soon-to-be converted Luxor theater). Sure, she’s a, er, veteran, and it was easy to feel slightly concerned for her during her occasionally alarmingly breathless anecdotes between songs. She turned the stage over to support acts on a couple of occasions to give her a [...]

Spamalot in Las Vegas – review

2 Apr 2007: So after seeing Spamalot in London during the preview week last autumn (unintentionally: I just booked tickets online, not realising it wouldn’t even have “opened” when we went), guess what happened this month? We went on holiday to Las Vegas only to discover it was preview week for the latest “permanent” venue for the show – the “Grail Theater” (sic) at the Wynn hotel. Of course we pitched straight in for tickets, if only so I could say (and how nerdish is this?) I must have been one of the first people in the world to have seen the London and Las Vegas productions. The main difference is that the production seems to have been shortened a little, to a [...]

What happens in Vegas

2 Apr 2007: Just got back from a great week’s holiday in Las Vegas. There’ll be separate posts on some of the people and places, but for now, here are the three things we heard or saw which made us chuckle the most: 1. “Are you 55 years old or better?” 2. “We apologise for showing you footage of someone smoking, but this is a live news feed from Iran” 3. “Italian food so authentic you’d swear you were in New York” Also, this was fantastic: “After the break, the answer to the question everyone is asking – just who is the mystery guy spotted on the shoulder of Lindsey Lohan?” (Cries from all Brits watching: “It’s Robbie Williams, you dipstick, and who [...]

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