“Fame” may be rather overstating it, but “The price of Not-Being-Absolutely-Entirely-Unknown” doesn’t scan so well.

I also realise if you’re reading this, you’re likely to read the latest first: that does seem reasonable. So because I’ve done two entries in quick succession, let me say:

Previously on this blog… so many people listen to my podcast UK DVD Review show that my website was shut down. Now, read on.

I’ve coughed up the cash and – hang on, let me check, Apple said it’d take a mo but yes, www.williamgallagher.com is back. They’re dashed clever, these Apple types: the cost of upgrading my .Mac account to 2Gb of storage and therefore some greater amount of data transfer ought to be £35pa but because it’s an annual subscription and my renewal date is in July, the nice shiny total at the bottom of the form was just the fee from now until renewal. Who could resist £8.32?

Come July I’ll be thinking about it again, but there you go.

And it’s funny, I don’t think I know many people who pay for their email account anymore. But there was one day, three years ago now, when I badly needed to get a large document off my PowerBook and onto a PC at Radio Times and there was nothing I could do. The BBC email system was croaking, I could hook my PowerBook onto the RT network but only for internet access, I couldn’t see any of the same servers the PC could. So I tried a trial version of .Mac which allowed me to send the document immediately.

I thought that would be it, get that document across, forget about .Mac entirely. But it proved so reliable-as-a-rock, so much quicker than the BBC’s webmail, that I paid up at the end of the trial. And in those three years or whatever it is, I’ve received fewer than 30 spam emails. I don’t mean my junk filter caught ’em, I mean I didn’t get any, they were stopped at Apple’s end. It’s a bit annoying that I’m getting any at all but then I use my .Mac address a lot, I bandy it about, whereas I have a Google Mail account that I exclusively use for archiving work (at the end of the day I email myself the document) and though I’ve never given that address to anyone else at all, still I get more spam through it than I do my .Mac address.

So I’m happy for about 360 days a year; I ponder the fee for about five days a year but so far always pay up.

Next time, even more exciting details from my finances,
William