Well I had a fine collection of rants building up in me and I was looking forward to spending some time unloading them onto you. But gentle reader, should one such exist, I have spent an entire day fighting yet another battle to maintain the technology in operation. This was a matter of considerable emergency and importance, as my wife’s technology had also ceased to function. The consequences could have been life threatening. To me!

Many of life’s problems are caused by the tendency of companies to swallow other companies. Our ISP of many years was swallowed in such a way, forcing us to change our email addresses at some inconvenience. That wouldn’t have mattered so much except that the new company were a tad casual in their billing processes, so that little random extra charges began to appear. This eventually led me to contact the telecoms ombudsman, who supported my claim to change to a new supplier, with no penalty charge.

Fine, the new supplier is excellent but it required another address change. I had noticed that a friend had acquired a domain name, and thus his address was independent of any ISP, so I too obtained a domain name. All went well for a while and I used an email service linked to the domain name. But then the host company decided to hugely increase the cost of the email service, so I relocated the domain name. But I used a different supplier for the email service – and they were recently swallowed by another company. They had just emailed me to warn me of the need to change the email server addresses in my email client.

But, although I carefully entered the new server addresses into my email client and, with extreme difficulty and tedium, into my wife’s Outlook account, no email was forthcoming. Fortunately the new company has a quite excellent and responsive support organisation, who were able to unravel the situation and advise me that I also needed (as I ought to have known) to change the addressing on the domain host’s site to point to the new email hosting service.

So another day for which I had much planned – some of which was a spillover from what I had intended to do yesterday – has almost passed. I have nether time nor energy left to write that which I had intended but I will leave you with a couple of things to reflect on.

1. I note with interest that lawyers have detected a fine new source of income in the potential prosecution and defence of people who use the freedom of the Internet to criticise others. Oh I see the dead hand of politics in this too but the lawyers will be the ones to grow fat on it. I had intended to say a little about lawyers and the harm that they create in society in my rantings but I will save the details of that for another day.
2. I see that the term ‘Deniers’ is right up there with ‘Heretic’ and ‘Infidel’ – someone who disagrees with us and should therefore be set on fire or beheaded. This is a sure sign that the accusers can produce no rational explanation for their beliefs but are desperate to prevent others from recognising that they are just deluded idiots.