My therapy homework for this week is to spend 5 minutes per day browsing a small store (not a large supermarket). Bet that sounds ridiculous.

I’m not sure I understand Open ID anymore. I had come to know of it as a protocol (in effect) allowing you to identify yourself via your closest, or most prized internet presence. So you can identify yourself via your blog. For instance I have an openid server plugin installed on my wordpress blog, so whenever I see a site which accepts an OpenID login, I simply point to my own blog and because I’m already logged in to my blog via a cookie, most of the time I won’t even have to issue a password. But now it seems that openid identities are being created by people outside of their primary internet presence, using public openid servers. I dunno, but this just seems to miss the point. Or maybe I never knew the point.

The calendar flicked over t0 march today meaning that virgin media’s carriage rights for sky’s standard channels expired.  It’s pretty funny, the channel number for sky one has been hijacked and replaced by a Virgin branded VOD commercial.  Another, Sky News has been replaced by a hillarious pun, the channel is now called “Old Sky Snooze” and is a static message spooling off that same memo signed by richard branson.

It’s all so odd.  It was only a week or so ago that are Telly was still just Telewest and it was all so friendly and inoffensive.

Susan has gone crazy, she’s now jumping up and down, screaming at the TV for being all tied to silly content providers.

Unlike a lot of people in the UK we get our TV via cable. I stress unlike, because from what i’ve always gathered, cable TV is a lot more prevalent in the US than it is here. Over here the 1 satellite carrier (sky, owned by rupert murdoch) is by far the biggest provider of “pay tv”.

But yeah, many years ago our pavements around here in sheffield were dug up and cables strewn underneath them and we ended up signing up to “Yorkshire Cable”, mainly I think, because my folks didn’t like the idea of having a satellite dish on the side of the house.. Some time afterwards Yorkshire Cable became Telewest. And now, just this month has become “Virgin Media”. It’s a merger of NTL and Telewest, who between them took over Virgin Mobile, for no other reason than to be able to market themselves under the Virgin brand. We’ve ended up with a TV service with one heck of an identity crisis.

Actually there’s more than just TV, we get from cable both phone and broadband too. Virgin have overhauled their tarrifs, naming them all after clothes sizes. ‘Cept, the actual meat of these tarrifs are sod all different from what we were getting from Telewest. They’ve been going around shouting about how its a brand new company with bold new ideas. Yeah right.

Today the funniest thing happened. Carreige rights for Virgin Media to show Sky’s general entertainment and news channels are due to expire next month so they have been in negotiation. Sky have been asking Virgin Media for double the price per customer for their channels and Virgin have declined. This now means that come next month we as virgin media customers will no longer be able to watch “Sky One”, once the hallmark of the multi-channel age.

But sheesh, soooo freaking what!! It’s one of the laziest waste of space TV channels around! Not a single piece of original programming, just american imports, which us with broadband can watch at will anyway.

So I say, good on you Virgin Media. You may not be offering us anything new, but out with bad rubbish is a good start.

This is their statement about the whole ordeal. Quite an oddity, because earlier today it was a standard texture page, now all the text is a bitmap for god knows what reason.