Cameron gives Brown the two finger salute

I walked into work the other morning only to find a load of blokes in suits who sat us down and explained how we would have to work for twice the number of hours for half the pay with a grand total of one week in holidays. Per decade.

They told us it’s the same everywhere else and nobody would even think about re-employing our sorry posteriors this side of Cheetham Hill. Which sucks just a bit.

The good news is that, for the next couple of months at least, we get free drinks in the canteen and can address customers with as many expletives as we like . Plus, we get to wear slippers and dressing gowns to make us look like Hugh Hefner without consequence or recrimination. Up to a point anyway.

Don’t you just love the Conservative-Liberal coalition?

A pointless little politics-related thought/mildly amusing quip there. Anyway, I’m here to tell you that for the time being I’m gonna publish all my Retro Yakking stuff here at Illarterate instead, mainly because I plan to wind that project down for good. Don’t worry, though, because I won’t just disappear from the face of the earth like last time. Or maybe I will, who knows?

I really should get that blogroll up and running again, plus there’s a whole bunch of housekeeping with regards to archiving old projects. I shall get round to that when I have the time and resources, but for now, console yourself in the fact I’m not rotting six feet under unlike certain street sweepers. Ciao for now.

I am aware there are numerous people who have, for various reasons, become disgruntled with blogging host Today.com.

Some time ago, the company laid off a rather large section of its most popular and active writers, leading to numerous speculations over their ultimate motives. Well, I am here, at the risk of being lambasted or even losing my Today.com account, to put the record straight and say to these people — in the nicest possible way — what the heck did you expect?

Now, I am quite fortunate (?!) to have been screwed over in the past by certain web hosts by virtue of neglecting to read the small print, blundering blindly forward without a care in the world, and am not one of the said bloggers laid off by Today. At least not yet. I’d like to think, however, that my (bad) experiences have given me a little bit of insight about how the business works – you scratch my back, I scratch yours; you get nothing for nothing and any other such cliche you could care to mention.

When you sign up to Today.com, you enter into an agreement that basically means you represent Today.com by the very fact your blog is hosted under their name on their server. If you violate the Terms of Service, you can expect to be notified and perhaps even warned, just like in the real life workplace.

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As a bit of a follow up to my earlier piece on Wikia, I’ve gone to the trouble of outlining some specific things you ought to know when creating a Wikia wiki. Don’t see these articles as a personal attack on Wikia, who, on the whole provide a very good service. Consider them a rant against the general over-reliance on advertising at free content websites, something that’s becoming increasingly prevalent in this current economic climate, and something that cheeses me off slightly.

Look out for more posts on this subject in the future and perhaps some sort of archive bringing all my Wikia pieces together.

I’ve witnessed the downfall of Wikia due to its increased reliance on advertising first hand in the past year. Whilst I don’t want to dwell on the events of precisely one year ago, I decided to breifly revisit the subject with a general account of what happened from my point of view. It can be found here, and is the first piece I’ve published at HubPages.com, an online content hub (as it were) for writers and businesspeople to post articles.

It’s been somewhat painful, though I hope to have exorcised one or two demons. Hmm, I know that’s unlikely, but it was nice to vent my spleen again.

The date was set – Teletext, the digital medium often seen as the spiritual successor to the Internet, would be switched off along with the analogue signal in 2012.

But now that date has been brought forward two years thanks to poor financial performance, possibly caused by the rise of the Internet.

In the next few years, analogue television will be phased out as one by one, the old transmitters are switched off. A campaign to ensure people are aware of this has been in force for a good while now, and OAPs have been able to claim a Freeview set top box free of charge. Unfair, I want my MTV! Well, maybe not as MTV has never been on free-to-air television.

Worse still, we now have to put up with this ‘interactive television’ thing. Now, I will concede that it does have its plus points and has improved markedly since its early days, but it has some major flaws.

The most annoying of these is the fact you can no longer go directly to a specific Teletext page. For example, if I wanted to see how the England cricket team were doing, I would punch up page 341 on Ceefax, but if I do the same on BBCi, I get the ‘page not found’ message. The page does exist, but I have to go through an extra menu to find it, wasting precious battery juice and increasing the risk of RSI. Please fix this now, BBC.

Technical issues aside, I miss the old pixellated aesthetic. Everything on interactive is clean cut and of photo quality, sometimes to the detriment of loading times.

But I miss the old teletext weather maps of Britain, Bamber Boozler’s blocky face and the cruddy flashing advertisements. Yes, I never thought I would miss those, but I do.

Maybe it’s a bit like losing a beloved pet that you’ve grown up with, through good times and bad. You think it’ll always be there, but sadly it does have to end. Teletext has far outlived arcade video games, numerous game consoles and other associated electronic media of its time to still be with us today… just about.

It’s a British institution that many will be sad to see the back of. Will interactive TV fill the void? Probably never.