Sponsor's Message

Firstly, here's a guy that's sailing *very* close to the wind. His trademe auction has a very interesting title and would seem to be encouraging potential purchasers to flout this law.

There's also good reason to believe that the advertiser is in breach of section 2.a of this section of the copyright act.

Besides, as I discovered last night when I made arrangements to watch Junkyard Wars on Discovery at 8:30pm, SkyTV is still so useless that they can't even get their programme listings right. Instead of the advertised programme, there was something called "Trauma".

Any thoughts that I may have been a little hasty in cancelling my Sky subscription a year or so ago have been quickly dispelled -- it's still overpriced, repetitive, low-quality material pitched at a grossly over-inflated price.

Now, did you see the great revelations made by Paul Brislen over at IDG?

Yes, it seems that almost all the non-business users of Telecom's JetStream DSL service are using the JetStream Starter option and not the hideously overpriced broadband options.

In his Friday Fryup Paul reveals that Telecom only has 13,000 broadband customers -- once you've taken out all those JS-Starter users.

Following up on this embarrassing exposé, Richard Wood over at the NZ Herald has put Telecom in the hotseat and left them tongue-tied for an explanation.

I just love the way that, when challenged, Chris Thompson from Xtra is quoted as saying that it was all a question of "nuances and words".

Get a grip Chris -- even your own TV ads clearly state that "JetStream Starter is not broadband". Does anyone from Telecom actually watch the Xtra ads???

And finally, have you downloaded the full Fanimatrix movie from Fanimatrix.net yet?

I did so yesterday and I have to say that, for what amounts to an amateur production, it's very good indeed.

(puts movie critic hat on) -- okay, so there are simply too many fight scenes, but they're generally very well done. The chase scene takes up far too much of the 16-minute flick and the plot was notable by its absence.

However, the ending is good (unexpected) and I'd have to say that I'm rather impressed by what these guys have done, given their limited resources and timeframes.

The MPEG version is a three-hour download on JetStream Starter and it's really worth burning to CD in VCD format so you can play it on your big TV with the audio fed through your stereo (or home theatre) system.

If you don't have any VCD-burning software then try VCD Easy. Although it's now a commercial product, there are still older versions around which are completely free and the demo will allow you to burn smaller clips like The Fanimatrix to disk without any worries.

If any Aardvark readers want to share an opinion on today's column or add something, you're invited to chip in and have your say in The Aardvark Forums or, if you prefer, you can contact me directly.

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