Fighting Ninja Turtles

Hello, Hello! My Powerbook of 4 years finally decided it had enough of this computing business, packed it in and left me high and dry.

Fortunately, I was smart enough to make sure I only backed up my laptop once every six months thus negating the need for a serviceable backup.

So now let’s survey the damage: In addition to the loss of data, I am now $500 in the hole for the repair job. The thing had a dodgy DVD writer and inverter so they had to be done as well. I also ended up purchasing a new portable hard drive for $290.

Since all the source files for the new Wordpress site were sitting on my laptop including all my software development and portfolio work it looks like a lot of things I wanted to do and get down will be permanently shelved.

In case you are wondering (probably not) I’ve decided to descend to the dark side and use my Vista computer as a temporary replacement.

Can someone please explain to me what’s up with Telstra?

As the largest Telco in Australia are they that cash poor that they need to run Ad’s on the front and content pages on their web site to generate revenue?

In addition to the 3 highlighted Ads there were another 4 further down on the home page. Throughout the site several Ad’s were dotted throughout the site mainly next to the navigation bar.

Now compare this with iiNet:

Nice and clean and very web 2.0. ‘Nuff said.

And to a lesser extent Optus:

The site features lots of AJAX and other interface tricks. Honestly, a bit too elaborate even for me. My only dislike of the Optus broadband site is the fact that it’s based on the Nine MSN portal. But once again they don’t serve up advertisements on it. Also, the web mail service has Ad’s which is annoying but the web mail site is shit anyway so I guess it doesn’t matter.

The point of all of this? Well firstly how can a company that has some of the brightest minds screw something as simple as a web site up so badly? As they say, first impressions are usually the ones that get remembered. If I was a potential customer I’d refuse to give more money to a carrier who expects me to pay a huge fee and sit through advertisements on a customer portal.