I wrote this post at 6pm and can't publish it.

Comcast rip into Verizon with their tortoise ads. The cable guys are bloody jokers and should be sued off the face of the planet for misrepresentation.

100MB/sec Comcast is on the blink yet again, and yet again the high speed Craptastic Crew are being paid a day's worth of many dollars per month for not providing anything but excuses. Where is the slow coach tortoise, Verizon, when you need them? They hardly ever went down in Philly and at a couple of megs per second were plenty fast enough for us.

They say the US is technologically advanced. Really?

A few weeks ago I was dealing with a carpet fitter and he was painstakingly unrolling his tape and measuring the room. It was painful to watch and I was amazed at his archaic ultra-slow technique.

At least 20 years ago back in the UK, I knew a carpet guy who used a wheel to pace out rooms. Easy. I also worked with a scaffolder who used a laser pointer to guage the dimension of rooms and buildings. Even back then, his gizmo was accurate to within a foot either way, and he was a right old poser on sites, making aand winning bets with the old boys who reckoned they could tell the size of things just by looking.

When I asked carpet boy why he didn't use a laser measurer to save his back and save him some time, his answer blew me away. "They haven't got the technology right yet and it isn't reliable." Jeez, how long do you need to perfect a light?

I went to the DMV today and had another insight into inefficient Government hares and tortoises.

To apply for a license you complete two forms, both requiring the exact same info.

You then take them to a desk guy, so he can check the duplicate info and verify 4 pieces of ID.

You then take the 2 forms and the IDs to a desk in the corner and a superviser checks the details. She cackles with "friends" sat next to her, before scribbling a couple of initials on the forms and telling you to stand in line at another desk.

You queue, and then a third official types the info you wrote twice by hand, into a computer. Amazingly, a drop of hi-tech wizardry speeds the process up and a photo license is magically produced 2 minutes later, no human intervention required.

If I were even half-qualified as a time-and-motion specialist, I think I would add some OCR scanner software, remove 80% of the staff and halve the time wasted in a process that was actually quite pleasant compared to visits to other government offices. You know the sort of governement place I am referring to. A humungous room full of screened-off desks staffed by complete tortoises who, I suspect, are probably Comcast customer service rejects.

Hopefully we will be online by tomorrow.