I’ve been unconnected at home for about 36 hours, apparently, it emerged eventually, because Freeserve/Wanadoo/Orange/whatever they’re called this week has been been having “technical problems”.

But I only got that explanation from the Indian call centre after spending an hour or so getting directions to set up an entirely new connection on my machine (from a guy with an accent so strong that he had to spell out virtually every word), then on the suggestions of another “help” desk person buying a new £15 line filter, before someone finally admitted the problem was their’s not mine – all of course on national call rates that I was paying.

So anyone know of a fast, reasonably-priced broadband connection that is reliable AND has a decent help desk that doesn’t just mechanically read out long lists of directions wiithout having any idea what they are talking about? It will be a pain to change my main email address, but I might just have to do it.

Yes a terribly overused, hackneyed phrase, but in this case it might even be accurate – you might want to watch the Guardian website today, because it has announced that it will from this date be “publishing stories first to the web, ending the primacy of the printed newspaper”. That’s the grand announcement – when you dig around you find that the paper is starting with the foreign and city desks.

Initially, the change will probably only be noticeable to those who watch newspapers closely, since their websites have for years been using wire copy (AP, Reuters etc) to cover breaking news, sometimes quickly hacked up into their style by a very junior reporter or sub-editor.

But what the Guardian is planning is for the main stories — the material written by its specialist top reporters (and I suppose eventually potentially comment writers) — to be published as soon as it is ready, potentially half a day or more before they appear in print. In other words the Guardian will be a website that happens to have a print edition.
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The cash spent on internet advertising in the UK will outstrip that outlayed in national newspapers by the end of this year, a major buyer has predicted.

The related factors of growth in broadband usage and declining newspaper circulation appear to have justified the hype. “Reach is what advertisers want most,” says the report. “National newspapers still have lots of it, but less reach means less ad money.”

And it must be some further sort of coming of age when MySpace has its first UK “pop star” creation story, quickly followed by its first not-really-MySpace scandal.

I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair), [Sandi] Thom’s quirky single, is tipped to become next week’s No 1. Her rise is already the stuff of music industry myth.
Thom, 24, from Macduff, Banffshire, was awarded a million-pound deal with RCA/SonyBMG after broadcasting internet concerts from her flat in London. Audiences rose from 70 to an estimated 70,000 people during the 21 Nights From Tooting tour and included a top executive from RCA/SonyBMG, who signed Thom for a five-album deal.

Since I first heard this on Radio Four last night, and read it in The Times this morning, I suspect this will be a case of any publicity is good publicity. And good on her – I’m no music buff, but she sounds like a pretty pure singer/songwriter with a guitar, decent lyrics and a catchy beat.

… or you might go mad.

I’ve been trying to change the WordPress installation to get rid of the horrible 2.0 text editor – following Alun’s instructions (in the comments of this post), but the dreaded WordPress “enable sending referrers” block has been stopping me.

Then for unrelated reasons I had cause to reinstall ZoneAlarm (anti-virus etc). It kept the same settings, but viola … I could change the text editor.

I was going to write a triumphant post, then thought: “I’ll just change the number of posts on the front page as well.” You’ve guess it, I got “enable sending referrers”.

What I find really amusing are claims that computers are logical beasts.