NZ Idol ends and Ihug Implodes

NZ Idol finished on Sunday evening- thankfully. The producers need to put this programme to rest now as we are definitely scraping the bottom of the talent barrel. Also the judges this year were abysmal. I've uploaded a piece on the series for Kiwi Herald called NZ Idol 2006 Ends On Sour Note which is a mild version of what I originally wrote. This old horse needs to be put down.

I've finished a couple of pieces of jewelry for the Creative Hastings Christmas sale only to realize they haven't sent me the entry form. As it's due to start in little over two weeks this is a bit of a worry. I am hoping they're just running late.

At the moment I'm having major problems with receiving and sending emails. Apparently there was an influx of viruses into Ihug over the weekend which resulted in a backlog of email. I was receiving them over twelve hours late. Yesterday I couldn't send any myself and when I rang the helpline I kept getting put on hold. I swear if I'd had to hear "Counting the Beat" one more time I was going to do something drastic. Finally I went to their homepage and they had posted an explanation of what was happening. Apparently not only had their servers gone down but the influx of phonecalls complaining about it had overloaded their system as well. They really need to get their act together as it's not the first time this year we've had outages and unlike Telecom which gives you a month's rent if you're without a phone for twenty four hours Ihug doesn't compensate its clients.