wib sites

I've recently been trying to cut down on my expenditures.

The primary reason for this is that I'm in a mountain of debt and have been for a very long time.

There are a few rays of hope in this cloud of gloom. One of the main ones is the huge pile of "stuff" that I own. For example, if and when I pull my finger out and watch all my unwatched stuff, selling it all on e-bay will (in theory), release some big old chunks of cash that should alleviate at least part of the debt.

Also, my attempts at reigning in my spending have, on the whole, been working. I now buy far fewer DVDs than I used to. I also don't buy so much random crap and I even try to by non-branded and generic products where I can.

As part of this "don't spend money you having got, you fucking idiot" crusade, one of my attempts has been to get cable. I know I've talked about this before, but I dunno how far I explained.

Basically, it turned out that they wouldn't allow two lots of cable at the same address, and my landlord already has cable. So what we did was run a very long network cable through the roof from his router and down into my place.

My plan was to try this out for about a month and if it worked fine then I'd cancel my existing broadband, saving me over £30 a month. I'd also look at stopping my telephone landline, potentially saving another £11 a month. That's the best part of £500 saved a year.

Unfortunately, early signs are that this may not be as successful as I'd hoped.

There are two basic problems.

The first is that it turns out cable broadband is subject to the same issues of dropping out as regular broadband. Now it doesn't happen as frequently, and it's solved just as easily, by unplugging the router and then plugging it back in. But the problem of course is that the router isn't in my house, so if my landlord is out, there's nothing I can do.

The other problem is that the connection is massively capped.

Basically, they only allow you about 1.5gb of bandwidth before they throttle the connection speed back. 1.5gb is nothing - I can get through that browsing websites, let alone all the downloading I do.

This is one of the things I have gotten used to with my current service. There are no bandwidth limits at all and I regularly get through over 100gb a month.

The other thing that weighs in here is that the cable connection isn't dramatically faster than my landline broadband. From the cable I get just under 2megabits (this is actually puzzling to me, because it's meant to be a 10meg line - dunno if it's been handicapped because of the giant network cable, but it seems quite a bit off of what it should be), whereas with the landline I can get about 1.4megabits.

Yes, it's faster, but once they throttle it, which happens often, it drops to less than 1megabit. If I keep using it, it also seems to slow down even more.

The other saving plan I've been mulling over is getting rid of some of my websites.

For example, the scan-city.org site has basically never been used properly and, having gone almost completely off of doing scanning, it seems an incredible waste of money.

I've also gone off of walling, so it also seems daft keeping digital-bondage.net. On top of which nobody likes my walls anyway, so it's not like the world would be missing anything. To be fair, scan-city doesn't cost much, so it wouldn't be a huge saving to get rid of it.

That leaves trismugistus.com. I don't think I'd ever get rid of it, but I've been thinking I should turn it into a straight review site, especially if I get rid of digital-bondage.net. I could also probably change the hosting as I wouldn't have the need to store all my big walling files.

That'd give me an excuse to tweak the site design as well. Not that I dislike the current design (just the opposite in fact) but it might be nice to give it a facelift. I could also go through and tidy up things like typos and errors I made.