good to be back (?)

kinda...

Just saw an ad on TV for iinet where the bearded geek guy says that Japan has had high speed broad band since the nineties, but iinet are building out their broadband network in Austraiia so it's better unless you're thinking about moving to Japan... what a kick in the teeth!

When I moved to Japan in 2001 we were paying the equivalent of about $AU30/month for *uncapped* bandwidth. I just moved back to Australia at the end of last year. It's now 2007. If you check iinet's broadband plans you'll see that you couldn't even get 2Gb a month for that today. Yeah, iinet, I am actually thinking about moving back to Japan, everytime I pop up my bandwidth usage dashboard widget to make sure I'm not going to have my speed throttled I think about moving back to Japan. It's safer, cleaner, and cheaper to live in than Australia anyway.

The worst thing is that iinet are actually the best in Australia. I'm on Optus, and they suck ass!


video rental... as if you would

We made our first trip into a local video store. We're used to Tsutaya where you can rent vids for a few bucks. Hell, it's even cool to rent an armfull of audio cd's, and buy a spindle of blank cd's at the same time, what do they care? Well, I guess Blockbuster are really scared of being put out of business by kids with internet connections. Can't imagine why when no-one in Australia can get any real bandwidth down here, but try finding a price on their website - give up? I'll tell you: they want $AU15 to rent 3 videos on the weekend. About ¥1,500? No wonder they're ashamed to post prices like that on their website.

The thing I don't get is the stupidity. For an extra $15 a month I could up my broadband bandwidth by a good few gigbytes, and instead of being expected to return the ARccOS protected discs the next day, I could download and watch them os often as I liked. I could even legitimately purchase them from itunes for little more. Why do Blockbuster still exist?