Welcome to the final installment of New Zealand's most carelessly proof-read blog. Herein lie my top 10 PC World moments, to stay here a while and forever on Google cache.

1. ONE MILLION DOLLARS "Hello. My name is John McAfee, and I'm going to sue you for a million dollars!"

It's my first week at PC World Towers in Parnell, and the head of an antivirus company is barking down the phone from the US. It's early in the morning, and I'm the only PC Worlder in the office to take his call, and listen to the violent offence he's taken to a review in our previous issue.

I was unable to talk McAfee down from Planet Angry, but after slamming down the phone, he never contacted our office again.

I did learn one thing from the incident. "Its pronounced 'ma-CAF-ee', emphasis on the second syllable, rhymes with faff," I wisely correct people when discussing security software.

McAfee subsequently took his company public and exited after making big bucks.

According to Wikipedia, he now teaches yoga.

2. RAM RAIDS During my early days at PC World, myself and Bruce Buckman used to lay out and design the magazine on our Macs, on top of writing, reviewing and subbing (under editor Chris Barton; yes, we all ate gravel for breakfast). Thing was, you could never have enough memory for PageMaker, and less technical members of staff, loafing in the sales and admin departments, seemed to have more than they needed. You join the dots.

Of course, I've matured a lot since then.

3. MEETING THE SHAT It's one of the great regrets of my time at PC World, and my life in general, that a photo taken of me with William Shatner at an Intel IDF forum in San Jose never came out. This was before his ironic-mode comeback with Boston Legal. And although it was a morning book signing, he seemed to be several sheets to the wind, uncannily like Tim Allen's burnt-out Shatner-clone in the brilliant roman a clef Galaxy Quest.

After a brief speech and some Q&A, during which star-struck Intel and Dell developers actually asked him serious questions about future technology (sample reply: "Biotech? It's just like ... now ... DON'T EAT THE CORN!), the Shat started his "book signing". This consisted of him walking down the line of people hopefully holding up his latest master work, holding out his pen so he drew a continuous scribbly line across each cover as we went, wobbling but never stopping.

A PR materialised to say "Mr Shatner will not be signing at this time", and quickly started to lead him away by the elbow - at which point I grabbed him and he agreed to a photo, or at least came to a confused halt. I threw my disposable film camera to a passerby who snapped a pic of me grinning like an idiot and the Shat looking slightly panicked and sucking in his gut, but alas it never came out.

Of course, the Shat has matured a lot since then.

4. THE RELEASE OF DOS 5.0 Kids, ask your parents.

5. BROADBAND THAT WORKS Getting on Telecom's pre-release DSL trial in 1999. It was like driving a V8 down an empty highway. Of course, in time a half million others signed on without the infrastructure spend keeping up, and it soon became like being stuck in a Holden Astra during rush hour on Auckland's southern motorway. But for five minutes, it was the best feeling ever.

6. LOGGING ON TO COMPUSERVE Earlier in the decade, NZ PC World got its first internet account - a dial-up job, tied to a single, shared PC. The cost: $70 an hour.
Incidentally, Press F1 was already up and running, having pre-dated the internet in its 1000-member strong bulletin board incarnation (kids, ask your grandparents).

7. FIGHT THE FUTURE Upgrading my XT to a 286 for my first How To article (yes, it was that long ago). The debates of then and soon after - 4MB of RAM or 8MB? - constantly illustrate how much we underestimate the rate of change.

8. GETTING HITCHED When I mistyped the address of a mildly flirtatious email sent to our receptionist of the time, it landed in the inbox of another staff member who shared the same first name. One email led to another, and we now have two kids.

9. THE STAR TREK THEMED PC WORLD AWARDS. The annual PC World Awards evening often spun dangerously close to an out-of-control circus. But it was always a lot of fun, and the only time that everyone in the PC industry got together. More than three years after the final event, many industry veterans still have fond memories. The best - or worst - had to be the 1994 effort, MC'd by the late Peter Sinclair, that saw staff dressed as Star Trek characters, and the stage dressed as the deck of the Enterprise.
Pictured above (I was, um, probably off dancing or something) - Rear: Mark Evans (as little-known character "The Waiter"), Peter Kane, Bruce Buckman (quick-changed from Lieutenant Worf), Chris Barton (Captain Jean-Luc Picard, not Crusty the Clown), Rob Clarke (a slightly snug fitting Spock), Little Chooky. Front: Alan Bennett (father of Press F1), Mark Dalgarno, Sara Goessi.

Pictured left: Rob with PC Direct cofounders Maurice Bryham and Sharon Hunter. It seems hard to believe now, but during the 1990s local PC assemblers like PC Direct consistently held around 50% market share. This was before global economies of scale kicked in, with the rise of Dell, and HP, Digital and Compaq merging to become the HP of today. It's sure a lot cheaper to buy an international brand PC today, but life's a lot less interesting than when we had 20 or 30 brands to choose from.

10. SEEING THE WORLD: Getting shaken down for a bribe at Bangalore's airport; walking the Great Wall of China; being in London during the year 2000 and the optimism of the early Blair years; sitting on the deck of the Silicon Valley home of then Symantec CEO Gordon Eubanks, a former US Navy Admiral, as he swapped mysterious 'Nam-era espionage stories with ex CIA operative and Computerworld Hong Kong editor Don Tennant (now US Computerworld editor), as Eubanks' much younger wife screamed at him about the kids, and reps from a major US retailer cooled their heels in the living room, waiting for an audience (Symantec was wildly prosperous under Eubanks, incidentally, and his much more buttoned-down successor John Thompson); wading through shelves of pirate gear in Mong Kok; Japan; Mexico; Canada; New York, Seattle (I'll stop now).

There was nothing like the 1990s IT junket (and it is a hard habit to kick. After resolving to spend more time at home I'm shortly heading off to Shanghai; check out my progress on my new blog).

And that it from me.

Thanks for all your support during my time editing PC World (and iMag and >>FFWD, then lately back at PC World then as editorial director across our stable).

I'm leaving the building, but not IT writing. Catch my new KeallHauled blog here.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:52 AM | Comments ( 4 )

Yes, it was us. We destroyed New Zealand rugby, the self-worth of the Kiwi male and society in general.

The NZ Herald has the shocking details here (tip of the hat to Vital Marketing's Alec Brown for fwding the link):

Ex-All Blacks coach: PC world destroying NZ

I'm joking, of course.
Actually, the last time I met the ex-All Black coach in question - Sir Brian Lochore - it was at a do to announce he'd joined the board of local assembly legend PC Direct, one-time home of Maurice Bryham and Sharon Hunter. As history records (and stand by for me to bore you with much more history on Friday, my last day at PC World Towers) PC Direct did very well before sellout for squillions to Gateway.
But you know: getting into computers - bit of a nerdlinger, eh Brian?

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:35 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Office opinion is split on Sky TV's new MySky HDi box, which lets you watch and record high definition (HD) broadcasts. Or at least over its noise pollution. Ted reckons the whir of its hard drive and cooling system is louder than a PC, and major nuisance value. Scott maintains it's only "a bit loud" (though he adds that he lives on a main road and no longer hears the traffic ...).

Olympics go AWOL
There's also a political problem with MySky HDi. Back in May Sky TV CEO John Fellet told me he wanted to have TVNZ and MediaWork's channels TV1, TV2, TV3 and C4 onboard for Sky HDi, the better to mute Freeview HD's appeal (and the freebie platform continues to charge ahead; as of July 11, 123,903 Freeview decoders had been sold, for an estimated reach of 300,000 people. The pace will pick up with the Olympics - especially with Sony and others now selling widescreens with Freeview decoders built-in).

But as of MySky HDi's July 11 launch, Fellet had only secured MediaWorks' free-to-air HD free-to-air channels. TVNZ refused to sign on. So any one who wants to receive the HD versions of TV1, TV2 or the Freeview-only TVNZ Sports Extra - due to launch with the Olympics - will have to subscribe to Freeview HD (it is possible to run both services through the same TV).

Tour de HD
Our reviews editor is totally sold on MySky HDi overall, incidentally. He's Sky Sport 1 and Sky Sport 2 now look so good, he's watching the Tour de Drugs France ("Even though I hate cycling"), plus NASCAR, golf, and of course the All Blacks (Sky TV has spent tens of millions on new Sony gear to create an HD-capable outside broadcast unit).

We've panned Sky TV's digital broadcast a number of times. It often looks rubbish, with motion-blur whenever an All Black starts running with the ball (OK, that hasn't happened much lately) due to Sky's stingy compression, which allows it to stuff more channels into the same bandwidth. And Scott says the standard definition digital Sky Sport 3 now looks awful by comparison. But in their new high definition digital glory, Sky Sport 1 & 2 (and Sky Movies and Sky Movie Greats) have our reviews ed glued to his set. Scott says even sports events shot in standard definition but upscaled to 1080i HD for Sky Sport 1 & 2 are a great leap forward.

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:53 PM | Comments ( 9 )

One of the more surreal sights in our new telco environment was Telecom Chorus staff wearing Vodafone T-shirts to celebrate the launch of Vodafone's Red Network.

Now Vodafone GM of Fixed line & Broadband, David Joyce, says his company is working with Chorus begin testing Vodafone's new, super-fast VDSL service at the Ponsonby exchange in Auckland. Testing will extend to five further exchanges over the next five weeks.

Continue reading " Telecom gets to work on VDSL ... for Vodafone and Orcon " »

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:57 AM | Comments ( 0 )

If you're heading to the Olympics, keep your BlackBerry close and - cough - respectable company.

The Sunday Times reports a top aide to British prime minister Gordon Brown met a woman at a Shanghai disco then, after a couple hours of dancing, took her back to his hotel. Next morning, his new friend was gone - along with his BlackBerry. Officials say the episode has all the hallmarks of a honeytrap set by Chinese intelligence. Read the Times full report here.

Google to buy Digg
Speaking of intrigue, TechCrunch and others are reporting that Google is in talks to buy Digg for $US200 million. For the past three years, the article aggregator (and by all means, feel free to be multicontextual and Digg this story) has earned its living through an ad contract with Microsoft - one of Ballmer & co.'s few wins in their online ad battle with Google.

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:58 AM | Comments ( 0 )

I've been fooling around this afternoon with Telecom's new T-Stick, an 8cm long 3G cellular broadband modem that looks like a fat thumb drive and plugs into your laptop's USB port. (It's official name is the Sierra 597 Wireless Compass USB Card; as a useful bonus, it'll also work as a straight 1GB memory stick.) All necessary driver and connection software is on the T-Stick and self-installs within a couple of minutes. Literally, all you have to do is jam the thing into the side of your notebook and wait. A simple software screen lets you connect or disconnect with a click.

Download
The T-Stick's rated download speed is 800Kbit/s*, and using the broadband speed test on Consumer's website I repeatedly clocked around 660Kbit/s. That's pretty good, at least in terms of doing what it says on the packet (rated download speeds are usually fanciful maximums, usually only achievable at an off-peak time, with still weather, while standing directly underneath a transmission tower during the right stage of the lunar cycle).

660Kbit/s is still pretty modest next to my DSL account however, which, despite me living in a street serviced by crummy landlines, usually hits over 3Mbit/s. Yet it was still reasonably snappy for web-surfing, and played YouTube videos smoothly. Unless you want to chug down major chunks of data, or do something interactive like online gaming, the speed's fine for most mobile use.

Upload
With upload speed, I topped out at 511Kbit/s - interestingly, well above Telecom's rated 300Kbit/s. Bear in mind that any kind of broadband speed testing is something of a dark art. Your experience will depend on how close you are to the nearest 3G-capable cell tower, the weather, and how busy the network. But again, it's good to see a telco being conservative and realistic in its product rating.

Payload
The T-Stick costs $49 if you sign-up for a two-year, 1GB a month data plan, you pay $1 a day for your first six months, and for the remaining 18 months you pay $56 a month. A no-term 1GB plan costs $67 a month from the get-go (see the official guff, plus a 3G coverage map, here).

Vodafone's equivalent product - the Vodem - which more or less shares all the strengths and weaknesses of the T-Stick - is cheaper to run, and free if you sign on to a $49-a-month two-year term contract with a 1GB cap. But if you opt for the freedom of a no-term 1GB plan, your Vodem will set you back a steep $299 (see all Vodem plans here).

Stuck with the Stick
As with the 3G iPhone, the two-year contract thing gives me the heebie-jeebies. In the iPhone's case, Apple will doubtless have better models out within six months, or a year max. The T-stick will also get outmoded, fast (which is maybe why it was launched, almost completely un-noticed, smack in the middle of Vodafone's iPhone blitz). It runs on Telecom's CDMA 1x-based "EV-DO rev a" network, which has now entered a sunset phase. It'll still be around for another couple of years, but investment and upgrades will be focussed on Telecom's new GSM network, which will go live in November (and run in parallel with the old network). For similar reasons, I'm not a fan of notebooks with built-in 3G cellular radios, from either Vodafone or Telecom. Cellular wireless is a very fast moving area. Look for both carriers to have mobile data networks that rival DSL speed within a couple of years.

(*A quick note on notation: 1000Kbit/s - Kilobits per second - equals 1Mbit - megabit per second. To confuse things - this is the IT industry, after all - modem speed is also measured in kilobytes - KByte/s - per second. There are 8 bits to a byte, so 1000Kbit/s equals 125Kbyte/s. Telecom hashes things in its T-stick press release, which claims the Stick can pull 800KByte/s).

Posted by Chris Keall at 1:37 PM | Comments ( 0 )

Theresa Gattung has resurfaced. But not in IT, where her reign at Telecom saw the company's share price fall from $7.75 to under $5 as she underinvested in broadband, backed the wrong cellular network standard, badly miscalculated David Cunliffe's resolve to push through deregulation, wore bad 80s power suits, let Telstra run rings around Telecom's Aussie investments, made ill-advised comments about confusing customers being an OK marketing strategy and, worst of all, maintained a je regrette rien attitude that saw her stubbornly persist with the aforementioned failed strategies. The only thing I'd give her points for was hocking off the Yellow Pages before Google eroded too much of its value (even if that windfall was mostly squandered on a special dividend). Still, I have to admit she was fun to write about.
Her new thing is wool.

More:
Gattung warms to wool industry
Gattung to chair new wool company

Posted by Chris Keall at 10:11 AM | Comments ( 1 )

When John O'Hara lost 18.5 hours' worth of email access during the YahooXtra Bubble upgrade fiasco, he was not content with the week of free internet offered as blanket panacea (which O'Hara valued at $15), he took Telecom to the Disputes Tribunal. And last night O'Hara emailed to confim the Tribunal had awarded him $1,000 in compensation for the time - personal time, not work time - that he lost trying to reestablish his connection to his Xtra mail account during the August 07 disruption.

Continue reading " Reader scores $1,000 compo for YahooXtra Bubble fiasco; maps easy way for others to follow " »

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:19 AM | Comments ( 2 )

Apple says the 3G iPhone sold one million units worldwide during its first three days (enough to overload Apple's activation servers). Local PR refused to break-out NZ figures, so I conducted a scientific survey of two stores on Auckland's Queen Street. A sales rep at Vodafone's 171 Queen Street store - scene of the world-first 3G iPhone sale - said his shop had sold out.

Continue reading " Hang the price: iPhone 3G sells out in NZ [UPDATE: analyst questions worldwide "sell out"] " »

Posted by Chris Keall at 12:21 PM | Comments ( 4 )

The high profile Rod Drury will be slightly less so from today. The Xero founder has officially signed off his blog after "5 years, 1626 posts, 3 companies, 3 children and 10 kilos". (He doesn't specify if that's 10kg up or down. The mystery remains: Segway polo - a path to fitness?)

Rod (above centre, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak left) says in his final entry: "Most of the goals I set out when I started I've achieved, and there are not enough hours in the day to get through what I need to get through - especially with a young family and growing business."

Certainly, Rod's blog was central to publicising the work of the New Zealand Institute and it's call for a publically-owned fibre optic network - elements of which were adopted by the ever-pragmatic John Key when he announced National's broadband policy (read Rod's take here).

Xero is still finding its feet in the emerging software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. Its latest results were mixed, with more customers but less revenue than expected, and Xero shares are below their issue price. Given that, I'd say there's plenty of reason for Rod to keep putting himself and his usually switched-on opinions out there. It's good for the company image and all (he'll still be offering occassional online commentary, but now for Xero's team effort, a blunter environment that's more likely to make messages look self-serving. Your SaaS product held up by lousy broadband? Call for the government to fund a faster roll-out!). So put your blogging shoes back on, Mr Drury.

Incidentally in one of his last posts, Rod takes a typically candid pot-shot at Google Docs, noting angrily that there's no team folder function. My wife and her thesis supervisor also gave up on Google Docs last week. And here at PC World Towers, I had a stab at using it to share the Excel file we use for workflow management. I found Google Spreadsheets was fine for sharing new worksheets, but had trouble importing even simple formulas from existing Excel files (it's supposed to. Google says it's working through "known issues"). Right now, Google's not pushing Docs too hard. Perhaps because of the bug issues; maybe because it's keeping its power dry under Google Gears (which will let you create and edit documents offline) is out of beta. Either way, it's giving Microsoft a lot of time to catch up.

Posted by Chris Keall at 9:14 PM | Comments ( 0 )