See What You Can't Do

So...i just checked my O2 bill online. I have never seen anything so complicated. There were numbers EVERYWHERE! The links made little sense and i found myself going round in circles. If this is deliberate in an effort to make us pay the extra 99p for Itemised billing then it's almost working.

O2 aren't completely useless - they provide you with a formula for calculating how many text messages had the letter 'e' in the body, but I'm still just left daydreaming of the good old days at Orange where i dialed 150 and was politely told how many minutes i had left this month.

The "Vista Trap"

So...a few reports i've read in the last few weeks have really got me rather annoyed at the response to Microsoft's latest operating system, 'Vista'. see here and here for example.
Basically these people are either trying to upgrade to Vista from Windows XP without performing a complete format and installation or they don't have satisfactory hardware to run it and they're not having much luck.
The guy in the first article pissed me off, mainly because most of his problems were related to incompatibility between his peripherals and Vista. It's all very well upgrading then discovering that half your kit won't work, but the same amount of work carried out before you did the upgrade would have led to an obvious conclusion that your hardware WAS NOT SUPPORTED!
One thing Vista is not is a poor-man's operating system. You've either already spent the money on a decent specification computer or you're going to have to and if you don't then keep your mouth shut when you find out that nothing works. 3rd party component Support for Vista exists and is exactly where it should be - in the new products. It makes little sense to invest heavily in Vista support for ancient products when you can lower the price of new products and encourage users to upgrade hardware with their new operating system.
If you can't afford to upgrade your hardware, DON'T BUY VISTA! There's no point. you won't gain anything except the enhanced ability to moan and complain because your PC now behaves tortoise-like.

Consider buying a 10 bedroom mansion and putting your old flat furniture in it. Clearly your furniture is under-specified and what's the point in having 10 bedrooms when you live alone? Sure, you can have some awesome parties but most of the time it's just not necessary and you'll soon realise that your old flat was perfectly sufficient.