Every year, as summer nears, I start running regularly.

Every year, after I start running regularly, I get a cold and the weather reverts back to winter.

It’s uncanny.

Vodafone offers an online account management facility, which allows you do various things relating to your phone account including making a prepay payment.

I registered for the site months ago, and I remember it as a painful process. First, they require that your password is at least six characters long and contains at least one number and one letter. That’s fine – I tend to create cryptic passwords anyway – but for some reason whatever I was entering wouldn’t get accepted by Vodafone’s site and I ended up having to invent some bizarre password which I didn’t keep a record of and instantly forgot.

Again, that shouldn’t be much of a problem in itself because Vodafone offers a convenient “Forgotten your password?” page which allows you to reset your password by entering your mobile number and your date of birth. Pity it doesn’t work.

I’m reasonably confident that I know my own birth date, but I entered it three times in different formats (Vodafone suggests the newbie-confusing “Y-M-D” format, but I also tried “D-M-Y” and “M-D-Y”) and every time it rejected me. After the third attempt, it locked me out of the site for 24 hours. Great.

So now I have to top up using the over-complicated and tedious phone service system. But that’s another rant altogether.

There’s several occasions during the year that I really miss having Sky TV: the All Blacks season, the NBA Finals, and cricket season.

As a result I’m becoming quite out of touch with sport, which makes a Sky subscription very tempting at certain times of the year. However, I’ve been refusing to subscribe for a few reasons:

1. The subscription options are poor. 90% of the reason I would subscribe to Sky is for sport, yet I can’t just pay for the sports channels.
2. It’s expensive, in my case. To subscribe to basic high-definition Sky with just sport, it’s over $90 per month. That’s a lot for a few extra hours of TV per week.
3. Nothing is negotiable. You can’t customise anything. You can’t “install” it yourself. You can’t get out of any fees.

The last one – nothing is negotiable – is the kicker for me. Sky won’t let you customise your subscription package to get rid of all the crap channels you don’t want. They won’t waive the joining/installation fee even if your residence is Sky-ready and you’re smart enough to plug in a decoder all by yourself. And, if you join whilst they’re running a “special deal” (at the moment it’s “only” a $50 joining fee for My Sky HD) then you’re tied in to the service for 12 months.

Personally I don’t think joining fees and minimum contracts are acceptable when it’s clear that they exist only for bonus profit. Sky has nothing to lose by allowing me to subscribe with no joining fee and no minimum term (perhaps with a 28-day notice of cancellation).  The fact that they outright refuse to negotiate is why I’m not going to be giving them any of my money any time soon.

Then again… I’ll still be missing it when the New Zealand/West Indies test match is on next weekend.

I found it extremely frustrating when saving a batch of images to disk that Firefox would insist on virus-scanning every one of them, consequently causing the browser to lag.

Fortunately, there is a cure. Point your browser to about:config, and look for this entry:

browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone

Set it to “false”.

Highly recommended if you regularly save a group of small files to disk in a short amount of time.

It’s been almost four weeks since Mighty Ape launched and, at time of writing, Google has indexed over 50,000 of our pages.

Meanwhile, Cuil – despite its claim to be the biggest search engine in the world – hasn’t even indexed our home page. Furthermore, a Cuil search for “Gameplanet Store” thinks that our old “Used Games > PSP” page is the most likely page that people will want to visit.

When Cuil first launched on July 28th this year, I made an effort to try it out. After a few dozen search requests it was clear that I was wasting my time. Three months later, it doesn’t seem to have improved at all.

And it seems I’m not the only one who thinks so… in three months, Gameplanet Store received one visit per day from Cuil. We get more traffic than that from various sites that I didn’t even know existed.

How much longer can Cuil continue to pretend to be something it’s not?