I've been distracted from writing opinionated and ill-informed articles for a little while now. Why?

• The implosion of my last job through a lack of work.
• The discovery and joining of a new place of work.
• World of Warcraft.

Mostly the latter.

Unfortunately my work at JR dried up, thanks to a customer who ran in to some problems with other vendors and sent their plans up a certain creek minus rowing implements. After three months of driving Polly mad (and playing too much WoW) I regretfully found a new job. So I'm now working for Inspired Gaming Group, working on the platform that runs the distributed gaming machines and generally corrupting the nation's youth (or rather pub-goers and old ladies playing electronic Bingo).

WoW has also proved a terrible temptation - I tried the Burning Crusade trial and got hocked by the much improved Draenai and Blood Elf content. I've now got a level 63 blood elf mage who is rather talented in the freezing-things-to-death department. Very different play style from my old paladin - a lot more fragile but much more interesting to play. The major downside is Blizzard haven't bothered with the mid-level content, so levels 20-60 are spent drifting through a ghost world as fast as possible. A shame, really.

I've also had utilities going silly - T-Mobile decided I owed them money I didn't and screwed up everything it was possible to screw up. Wankers. So, if you're in the UK: avoid T-Mobile. The others may be rubbish, but T-Mobile is more clueless, more useless and have a rubbish UTMS network. And the ROM on the MDA Vario II is buggy as hell, and no updates have been forthcoming (which is a shame, as the hardware is rather good).

I also decided to jump to Be and ADSL-2+. It's all good - when it works. Connection was buggered up between them and BT, leaving me with no ADSL for a weekend. Their help-desk is only slightly better than Demon's, but at least they had the good grace to refund me for the unused time. And now it's working it is running at a rather nice 16Mb (about 1Km from the exchange). The major downside is that my WAG200G (which is an excellent modem) won't go above 7Mb on Be's connection, so I'm stuck using the extremely rubbish Alcatel that Be supply.

But life is once again good (well, presumably) so hopefully I can stop neglecting this quite so much...