After several years of being fed up with Speed Hosting, I’ve finally upped and left. It wasn’t just their amateur approach to customer service, but the interruption to service that came too often, particularly to all the email to Martha and myself, which routes through their servers. So apologies if you’ve had odd or delayed responses to email recently … we had a 5-outage last week.

So we’re now with 5quidhost, who hopefully will turn out to be more inspiring than their name. They have very high ratings on some review sites (and not just ones from sites that turn out to be co-owned by the hosting service, like http://www.justhost.com/ do). I like their realistic attitude to support:

We prefer to handle all of our contact with our customers by e-mail, and we use it in the way it was intended: Prompt, timely, informal and information-rich. With no pointless delays, and no impersonal machine-generated responses to your questions. In emergencies, we do have a number you can call …

They also seem to understand Joomla and Drupal hosting, which could be important for the project I’m starting for CYFC. More on that another time.

I was slightly dreading having to transfer account, email and the complete blog history between hosts. But a big thumbs-up to cPanel (the software that most web hosts use): they have the ability to create complete backups, ftp it to a different server, and then recreate it all at the other end. That possibly saved me hours of work.

Two great subjects, and now Kester Brewin and some of the Vaux community are talking about them together, and therefore also probably talking deeply and using unusual words like ‘praxis’. And, wonderfully appropriately, calling it Apple.

Here’s a flavour of one recent post:

[Apple] is an evolving praxis around the core interconnected questions at the centre of human survival: how do we move beyond the perma-hunger of Capitalism, and how do we connect to an sustainable environmental agenda. Red Apple, Green Apple.

These do seem to be where the conversation about technology (tool-making and resource use) and theology have to go. In particular, over the last few posts I think I’ve personally hit upon a tension-space I want to map out more clearly:

Christianity has failed [in the public realm] because it failed to generate a radical economics. Marx failed because he failed to understand the human spirit.

I am not a Marxist. I am not chasing after an ideology. Rather, I think there may be some energy in the ashes of both ideologies, a burnt alchemy that may create hope from these twin failures.

Experiments, collaborations, conversations… we will attempt to traverse these failed spaces with failures of our own close by. Why? Because the only answer to ‘what is to be done?’ can be ‘not nothing.’

Yes indeed, Capitalism panders to some of the same human weaknesses that Marx(ism) failed to spot. It was mostly Christian voices calling for a fundamental review of our financial thinking as a result of the recent economic crises, not just tinkering with the role of banks. Those voices have gone quiet (or they’re not reported) and I’ve only heard Jonathon Porritt recently on this theme.

An important conversation, and one I’ll try to follow.

The roundabout at the bottom of the road had a makeover a few months ago. We didn’t realise that the time, but the up-market Hotel on the Park a few blocks away then kindly decided to sponsor a large Christmas Tree on it. And add lots of bright red lights. It was a most lovely festive surprise. Best wishes to all at the Park for your thoughtfulness.

(You can see where they got the idea and colour scheme from … here’s a shot of the front of the Hotel.)

Funny and pointed: Buy Nothing (read all the way down to get most of the funny stuff).

According to GOOD, where I saw this:

The effort comes from the simple insight that over the holidays we end up getting—and giving—tons of useless stuff. (Thanks, grandma, that Snow White figurine is lovely…) Green Thing even did a survey, which found that 96 percent of people have gotten a useless gift at some point. This stuff, of course, requires earth’s precious resources to make, yet most of it ends up as waste in landfills, junkyards, or a quick-to-be-forgotten box in the basement.

Buy Nothing reflects one of Green Thing’s seven sustainable actions, “stick with what you got“—the idea that our purchases are often the product of advertising and peer pressure, rather than genuine need, as we often forget to appreciate and use what we already own. The campaign features a dozen clever, irreverent testimonials by celebrities—from indie bands like We Are Scientists to actors like Sadie Frost—all vowing to buy Nothing.

This has got to be one of the craziest ideas in the world. Surely my finances are private to me. Why would I want to share anything of my personal finances with anyone else, especially someone I have never met on the Internet? Well this is where things are changing …

Zopa is a nice bank that doesn’t have any of its own capital, but instead connects people together. Its been going a while and people seem to like it. Makes a change from all the negative stuff about banking. Maybe banking could be nice?

I first heard about this form Reid’s post over at The Bureau of Crazy, who it saw it mentioned in the film Us Now, which he urges people to see “if you want to understand what social media is doing to our society.”

So I checked it out, and it all looks good. You name the interest rate that you’re willing to lend at, and then Zopa manage the rest, including checking credit ratings for borrowers, and chasing any defaulters if that happens. We’ve decided to give it a go and lend So now all I need to do is just need to get round to filling in the right forms …

For several years now, most of my music listening is done either from my iPod (particularly commuting to work on the bus, and when running), or through iTunes when I’m at my desk.

About 18 months ago I decided to rate all the music sitting in these systems — and I’m still not finished. But I’m getting close to the end, and am starting to enjoy some of the benefits. I thought I’d explain what they are, in case others can benefit too.

One of the problems with piles of CDs is that it can be difficult to get round to listening to most of them. Hunting through the racks, unless you’re very organised, can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience. (And probably impossible if they’re in piles spread around the house …) Having them all copied over to a PC can make it easier to find them quickly, and browse through the collection.

But what if you could just ask to hear some great music that you’ve not listened to for a while? Sounds like a perfect job for a computer, with its perfect memory. And iTunes can indeed do this … if you tell it what you like. And thanks to Apple it’s easy. Rate a song from 1 to 5 stars in iTunes or an iPods, and then you can use that in a ‘Smart Playlist’ that updates itself whenever you make or change a rating. So, I have an “Unrated” playlist that selects a random hour-long selection. This is what it looks like:

The first line selects those less than 1 star – ie, those not rated. The second knocks out some long radio recordings that I’m not interested in rating, as I only listen to them once. The third line ignores Classical music, which doesn’t work very being rated track-by-track. The fourth line only gives me music, not video or podcasts, neither of which I want to play multiple times. The 250MB selected at random could easily have been 1 hour selected at random.

So, that gives me a playlist I use when I’m on the bus, rating on average 30 minutes of music a day.

Then the fun begins. Create a “My Top Rated Least Played” smart playlist that looks like this:

And, bingo, 3 hours of the music I like the most, but have listened to least recently. Great for when I’m returning from work and am too tired to read a book, or rate music, and instead just want to relax and enjoy some great music. Result!

(In this case, the playlist is selecting anything more than 4 stars, but you can pick what you like. You might be wondering why I don’t just pick the tracks with 5 stars? It’s because I’ve turned on some little-known features of iTunes that let me rate in half stars, and/or on a scale of 1-100. So I have quite a few that are about 4.5 stars. This is beyond most people’s need for detail!)

Back after another week staying in Annapolis.

Good finds: City Dock coffee have another shop down off State Circle, with bucket chairs and even a very comfy settee in the window. But sans wifi. Free wifi outside Duklaw‘s at Arundel Mills, where we had very tasty Buffalo Chicken snacks. Five Guys are also great.

Poor choices: the Middleton Tavern by the bay with the outside fixed seats had only so-so food, and slow service. The in-house Starbucks wasn’t worth it, but their Maxwell House coffee + Vanilla milk was the much cheaper and more satisfying choice.

(I came across this in an article, and I thought I’d jot the main points down here, so I can find them again later.)

• There are 30 million incomes in Britain
• the top 10% (3m people) earn on average £105k before tax (so that’s me out then)
• the top 1% earn on average £253k
• the top 0.1% (30,000 “super-rich”) earn more than £500k a year, with an average of £1.1m

The combined income of this 30,000 is £33bn – or 4% of all personal income in Britain. Slightly obscene? I think so …

Source: David Goodhart, Prospect, Aug 2007.

the disk drive and its packaging

As part of the Apple TV upgrade, I ordered a new laptop-style hard disk from dabs.com. It’s all of 9.5x70x100 mm big (according to Wikipedia). But it came in a box just slightly larger than necessary: 90x250x300 mm! That’s only 1% of the volume of the box. OK, there was a style of bubble-wrap around the drive, but even allowing for that, it would have been less than 10% full. What a waste of plastic and cardboard, dabs. Have you not heard of the reduce, reuse, recycle mantra?

(And, yes, I have now signed up to Freecycle locally, to make sure we have the best chance of reusing anything we don’t need. For some things, ebay is just too much work …)

Version 3.0 of the iPhone OS was released yesterday. People were saying it is only marginally useful for Touch owners, but is a no-brained for iPhone owners. I went ahead and upgraded anyway, knowing that soon enough new interesting apps would force me to upgrade at some point.

I’ve found it to be a bit quicker for some tasks, but there has been one addition that I’ve read about in any review. When playing a track in Music, you can now make it run at double or half speed. Neat. This will help me to clear the backlog of podcasts I’ve not got round to listening to.