radiac.net

Yes, that's right. It's that time of the year again. We both know you've been counting down the past 334 days, pacing up and down impatiently. I can see you in my logs, sitting there hitting refresh.

For the 9th year in a row, it's Christmas time at radiac.net. See, it's true, some things really are too good to miss.

And what do I have in store for you this year? Well, although I won't have time to do a new advent calendar, I will be running some of the old ones from the past couple of years. But it's not all recycled - I've got a couple of features planned, the first of which I am pleased to share with you.

Picture the scene. You're at radiac.net, like you are every day, and you reluctantly surf away to the BBC website to check the news. But what's this, this third party site couldn't afford to license the TCMI? Depressed at the lack of festive spirit, you close your browser, and go off and start binge eating mince pies to try to make your life suck just that little bit less.

But no longer! Fight the festive depression with...

Picture the scene. I've been stuck in a complicated telephone system, for 5 minutes, and have finally navigated my way to the option that I want.

I am put in a queue, and my other line rings. That's the line that's only ever for work or urgent stuff, so I reluctantly hang up on the queue, and pick up the work phone.

"Marks and Spencers and John Lewis have their Christmas decorations up", an automated voice says. I cannot repeat my side of the conversation, for this is a family-friendly website, but suffice it to say that I hung up.

I dialed the telephone system again. This time, remembering the buttons to press, I pressed them in quick succession. With my memory though, I of course got them wrong, so had to hang up and start again.

Finally got through to someone, only to be told that their computer systems were down. Niice.

So, Nintendo have finally given people with a way to convert their star points into wii points to spend on the virtual console. Great, free games! Only there's a catch: there's a limit on how many points can be converted by one person in a day. Not that that's going to be a problem for anyone, because they've also put an artificial limit on how many people can convert points over a certain (unspecified) time period, and they've already sold out.

I can't imagine any possible reason why they'd want to do this - it's not like it would be devaluing the wii store when you look at what they're actually giving away for your stars.

Let me explain. Having registered two consoles and 9 nintendo games, I don't have enough star points for one decent virtual console game. Well, I guess it's free, so can I really complain? Hell yes.

The conversion rate is 1 point for every 4 stars. At 250 stars for every game, that's 62.5 points for every game. Virtual console games start at 500 points.

To get their cheapest NES VC games, you have to buy and register 8 nintendo games - that's a £3.50 reward for every £320 you spend. For an N64 game you need to buy 16 games, spending £640.

Bear in mind that these games are from their back catalogue, that they bring in no direct revenue, and that they cost virtually nothing to distribute. The only loss they make on them is potential VC sales, but surely that's more of a loss leader anyway; get people using the VC for free, then release quality old content faster than new, as they've been doing all year.

This is worse than no free points at all - instead of losing sales, they lose good will. I don't feel rewarded, I feel cheated.

Lip service to loyalty.

I've been running off a T-Mobile 3G connection for the past few days, and it is annoying me. Sure, 500 kbps is pretty good for a wireless connection that's only costing me £5/month, but what's annoying me is the way they have a transparent HTTP proxy that compresses the HTML and CSS, inserts its own JavaScript, and reduces image quality, all in an attempt to save their precious bandwidth.

Fine in theory, but in practice a lot of the sites I want to visit now don't work. We're not just talking 'oh, it looks a bit pants' - although thanks to the loss of image quality, every site does. But I could put up with that. No, the problem is more like 'the images are unreadable', 'there are javascript errors', 'no style sheets are working', and sometimes even 'oh look, the page is completely blank'.

If you're going to intercept and fiddle with your customers data, the least you can do is to make sure you don't do any destructive changes. Nothing for it - going to have to set up a VPN.

It just wouldn't be Christmas without Die Hard.