There is a dolphin just off the coast at Canvey Island at the moment, head towards the Lobster Smack pub and hop over the sea wall.

Onspeed is a tool for speeding up web access. This is useful if you are on GPRS (i.e. pay on bandwidth services) as it uses compression to reduce the size of web and email transfers.

I tried it out last year as I do a lot of GPRS access, but found that web pages are still too expensive to really use, and email can be screened using download headers. It was also incompatible with the anti-virus I was using at the time.

Around Xmas it started popping up an alert window telling me to pay to upgrade to get a better version. Every time I connected. So I removed it, and found the web browsers seemed to start up quicker.

But the most annoying part is the email I just recieved saying that the year of service is up. They were going to bill automatically. If my card details had changed I could click a link and change them. To cancel though you have to phone up to their national rate number. In fact:

Please note: to cancel your automatic renewal, you must call ONSPEED. Requests via e-mail, fax or post will not be actioned.

Well thats lovely isn’t it. I sign up online but can’t cancel on line. I spent 5 minutes waiting in a queue to cancel this. I could write them a letter but they will IGNORE it.

Think carefully. Do you want to want to get involved with a company that doesn’t respond to written requests to stop charging you?

Last year, the UK Film Council announced that it was spending £11.7m of lottery money installing digital film projectors in 209 cinemas.

In return for the new equipment, the cinemas have committed to providing more screening time to showing a greater selection of more specialised (ie non-Hollywood), classic, and foreign language movies.

That was over a year ago. So what has happened? My local cinema hasn’t expanded it’s range of films yet.

*update*
I emailed the UK Film Council and recieved this response:

Odeon Southend falls into the South East section of the DSN rollout, which means we anticipate the installation should take place towards the end of this year.