This weekend I'm going to try and do a bit of catching up.
As I've blogged before I've got quite a lot of TV stuff unwatched so I'm going to try and clear some of that. I was intending to watch quite a bit last weekend, but I didn't have as much free time as I'd initially envisaged, plus I ended up doing a lot of internet stuff.
This was good as I'd quite a bit of that backed up too, but it all took a surprisingly long time. A lot of it was actually reading newsletters and articles by various people I follow on the net and it struck me that I used to do all that stuff while I was at work.
You know what it's like - you take ten minutes to read an article or a newsletter e-mail. But just recently I've been so busy that I don't have that time spare any more. Sometimes I don't have time to do anything except work - and that's with me getting in at 08:00 and going home at 18:00.
I therefore now find myself having to do all that stuff at home in big chunks because it's all gotten stacked up.
I mean, in some ways it's good to be busy at work, but in others it's tedious to basically do nothing but work all the time.
It's no wonder I don't watch any anime and I end up with stacks of DVDs and Blu-Rays to watch - I barely had time to watch a few of them before, nowadays I barely have time to read the e-mails telling me the DVDs have been dispatched!
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Friday, 19 October 2012
Sunday, 25 March 2012
interwebs
A few weeks back I got BT infinity.
That makes it sound like I decided to get it, but actually it was more like they told me I was getting it. It was weird, actually, as the sales call was pretty aggressive but the trouble was it's a faster service and it's cheaper so it's hard to decline.
But why would I want to decline?
Well it wasn't so much that I wanted to decline it was more that I knew that getting it would be more than a little inconvenient and I couldn't really be sure if it would genuinely have any huge benefit. See the thing is they have to come and do stuff at your property.
What they mainly do is replace your prime phone socket with a different thing that has a splitter actually built in to it. It's a slightly different spec and function as well, I believe, because they also give you a modem.
The window they gave for putting this thing in was between 1 & 6, which is a huge chunk of time. And of course they can only do it Monday to Friday. Luckily with the flexi I was able to work bonkers hours and not have to take any time off. Well, I say lucky - I was absolutely shattered by the time Friday came.
Anyway, the other issue is that I rent, so I needed my landlord's permission to put it in. He was okay with it, but there was a side issue that the way the phone is installed it actually goes into my landlord's place and then he's put a huge extension round to my place.
I believe that extension he's put in is a big part of why I've always gotten a crappy speed here. Best I've ever had was about 1.5meg, I think, but normally it's more like 1mb on a good day.
So all those factors made it horribly complicated and meant I wasn't at all sure I'd get a huge boost. Especially when, as previously mentioned, I have access to my landlords cable, which is 10mb.
Anyway, the bloke installed it and did some line testing and said he was getting 25mb, which seemed quite poor to him. I explained about the line quality and he said that made sense then - apparently he normally expects about 50mb.
Still, 25mb seemed like it might have all been worthwhile. In reality it's actually been all over the shop. Part of the idea of super fast broadband like this is it lets you watch streamed HD stuff without caching. The only times I've tried that it's not gone 100% well. Generally it'll work for a bit, then flake out and I have to watch the rest in SD.
And we're only talking 1hr programs - not loads of films in a row or anything. However, torrenting works a dream. Indeed it works so well that generally on Monday morning when I used to set my machine going all day to dl my torrents and then some files would need to be carried over to the next day, with infinity all the files dl while I get ready for work (so across half an hour) and then the rest of the day I'm basically just seeding them.
We're talking dl'ing up to about 5gb of stuff in half an hour, so a staggering improvement. My guess is the difference with the torrenting is because it's designed to squeeze out as much bandwidth as possible and I'm doing it super early in the morning where the streaming TV is more at the whim of any "fair usage" policy and I'm tending to do it in the early evening.
Still, overall I think it's a success - at worst it seems to go down to about 2.5mb and while that's rubbish by most people's standards for my line it's a healthy improvement.
Still, one thing I would day is it would be nice not to have so many bits of kit. I'm not sure if I was doing something dumb but I don't seem to be able to plug in to the modem directly. You have to plug the BT hub thing in to it and then plug in to there.
I wouldn't mind so much if you could switch the modem off - you have to keep it on all the time so that it's able to talk to the exchange or otherwise after a couple of days the line speed starts to dwindle away and eventually it would basically cut you off.
This is particularly problematic for me as the modem has loads of really bright LEDs on it and of course bright lights are terrible for me to get to sleep. I have to tuck it away under my bed and even then if I don't angle it just right the light bounces around and bits of the room glow intensely.
In theory next week is my last week for the contracting. I've actually no real idea if I'll be there all week or not. I would anticipate a couple of days at the least. It kinda depends on if they like the report I've done or not - if they want lots of changes I'll be there a while, otherwise it may just be a couple of days.
That makes it sound like I decided to get it, but actually it was more like they told me I was getting it. It was weird, actually, as the sales call was pretty aggressive but the trouble was it's a faster service and it's cheaper so it's hard to decline.
But why would I want to decline?
Well it wasn't so much that I wanted to decline it was more that I knew that getting it would be more than a little inconvenient and I couldn't really be sure if it would genuinely have any huge benefit. See the thing is they have to come and do stuff at your property.
What they mainly do is replace your prime phone socket with a different thing that has a splitter actually built in to it. It's a slightly different spec and function as well, I believe, because they also give you a modem.
The window they gave for putting this thing in was between 1 & 6, which is a huge chunk of time. And of course they can only do it Monday to Friday. Luckily with the flexi I was able to work bonkers hours and not have to take any time off. Well, I say lucky - I was absolutely shattered by the time Friday came.
Anyway, the other issue is that I rent, so I needed my landlord's permission to put it in. He was okay with it, but there was a side issue that the way the phone is installed it actually goes into my landlord's place and then he's put a huge extension round to my place.
I believe that extension he's put in is a big part of why I've always gotten a crappy speed here. Best I've ever had was about 1.5meg, I think, but normally it's more like 1mb on a good day.
So all those factors made it horribly complicated and meant I wasn't at all sure I'd get a huge boost. Especially when, as previously mentioned, I have access to my landlords cable, which is 10mb.
Anyway, the bloke installed it and did some line testing and said he was getting 25mb, which seemed quite poor to him. I explained about the line quality and he said that made sense then - apparently he normally expects about 50mb.
Still, 25mb seemed like it might have all been worthwhile. In reality it's actually been all over the shop. Part of the idea of super fast broadband like this is it lets you watch streamed HD stuff without caching. The only times I've tried that it's not gone 100% well. Generally it'll work for a bit, then flake out and I have to watch the rest in SD.
And we're only talking 1hr programs - not loads of films in a row or anything. However, torrenting works a dream. Indeed it works so well that generally on Monday morning when I used to set my machine going all day to dl my torrents and then some files would need to be carried over to the next day, with infinity all the files dl while I get ready for work (so across half an hour) and then the rest of the day I'm basically just seeding them.
We're talking dl'ing up to about 5gb of stuff in half an hour, so a staggering improvement. My guess is the difference with the torrenting is because it's designed to squeeze out as much bandwidth as possible and I'm doing it super early in the morning where the streaming TV is more at the whim of any "fair usage" policy and I'm tending to do it in the early evening.
Still, overall I think it's a success - at worst it seems to go down to about 2.5mb and while that's rubbish by most people's standards for my line it's a healthy improvement.
Still, one thing I would day is it would be nice not to have so many bits of kit. I'm not sure if I was doing something dumb but I don't seem to be able to plug in to the modem directly. You have to plug the BT hub thing in to it and then plug in to there.
I wouldn't mind so much if you could switch the modem off - you have to keep it on all the time so that it's able to talk to the exchange or otherwise after a couple of days the line speed starts to dwindle away and eventually it would basically cut you off.
This is particularly problematic for me as the modem has loads of really bright LEDs on it and of course bright lights are terrible for me to get to sleep. I have to tuck it away under my bed and even then if I don't angle it just right the light bounces around and bits of the room glow intensely.
In theory next week is my last week for the contracting. I've actually no real idea if I'll be there all week or not. I would anticipate a couple of days at the least. It kinda depends on if they like the report I've done or not - if they want lots of changes I'll be there a while, otherwise it may just be a couple of days.
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
google+ and chrome
I gave google chrome a go the other week.
It has some nice touches. The integration with other google features is quite nice, the back-end interface is quite nice and it seems quite quick. I also got it because recent versions of Firefox seems to have some real memory leakage problems.
When I use Firefox to view crunchyroll or even do stuff on animepaper like download a bunch of scans, it doesn't seem to release the memory properly, so I keep having to restart it, which is crap.
chrome doesn't do that and also seems a little quicker than Firefox. Trouble is, it doesn't seem to have some of the things I like in Firefox - separate download window, more traditional "file" type menus - but also, it's not very customisable. So, for example, it has a bookmarks toolbar, which is basically fixed in its location, which is below the tabs and address bar, which I find annoying. But, more importantly, you can't move things around (that I can find).
Also, Ezy sent me an invite to google+, which is Google's social network thing.
I've given it a go and registered, but I have to say I really struggle with most of the social networking sites. I have facebook, myspace and twitter accounts and they're basically all totally neglected. I mean, I have enough trouble trying to blog every day, maintaining something like a social network page is just way too much like effort.
Part of the idea of google plus is that it's integrated with all the other google things you use. Now, while I like that for chrome, it actually has big disadvantages for me on something like google+.
See, a lot of the people I know have different relationships with me. So, the people I work with don't know about my interest in anime and manga. Certain circles of friend know I have an interest in it but don't know what it is or have any interest in it themselves. Other friends that's essentially how I know them - through that interest.
Now that's okay, but the problem is I keep some of those groups separate for very good reasons. While I do object to anime and manga all being classified as "cartoon porn", I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist or that I don't enjoy such things.
And of course a lot of stuff is borderline. I'll give you some specific examples - I used to make wallpapers, a fair few of which were ecchii to varying degrees. Recently, I closed my wallpaper website down (hopefully temporarily) and moved all the images to a blog site.
That blog site was a google one and I used Google's Picasa site to host the images.
All well and good, but of course with google+'s integration, it turns out it shows all those Picasa galleries in your "my pictures" bit. So, in other words, if I was to friend (they use circles and I didn't investigate it fully) someone at work, could look in my gallery and see all the anime stuff? A good chunk of it is nearly pornographic so that would not be a good thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could set it up so they couldn't, but as I say, far too much like effort.
So I set all the galleries to "view only if you have the link" - but what does that actually mean? Could they do a couple of clicks and get access to them or what?
Also, what about people I'd want to see the images? Are they now blocked unless they're coming in via the blog that has them on? But I'd actually be happy for them to just brows through them on google+.
And that's just a specific example for me. Many people have flagged the whole thing google does that you have to use your real name and can't use an alias.
All these whole social networking things all just seems to open up more cans of problematic worms to me than I've got the time, effort or interest to really deal with.
But there's also something I heard recently that makes them all a bit scarier. Basically, facebook are introducing a new version / tool that, in essence, operates on the assumption that everything you do you want to share with the world. It's also facebook's vision that they will essentially become people's "portal to the internet".
Man, that sounds risky - imagine installing it with good intentions, or not understanding what it was going o do and then it broadcasts to the world all the stuff you'd rather that big chunks of the world did not know. And imagine that teamed with them acting as the portal through which you do all your web stuff.
That would open up the possibility so many potentially bad things it makes the mind boggle.
It has some nice touches. The integration with other google features is quite nice, the back-end interface is quite nice and it seems quite quick. I also got it because recent versions of Firefox seems to have some real memory leakage problems.
When I use Firefox to view crunchyroll or even do stuff on animepaper like download a bunch of scans, it doesn't seem to release the memory properly, so I keep having to restart it, which is crap.
chrome doesn't do that and also seems a little quicker than Firefox. Trouble is, it doesn't seem to have some of the things I like in Firefox - separate download window, more traditional "file" type menus - but also, it's not very customisable. So, for example, it has a bookmarks toolbar, which is basically fixed in its location, which is below the tabs and address bar, which I find annoying. But, more importantly, you can't move things around (that I can find).
Also, Ezy sent me an invite to google+, which is Google's social network thing.
I've given it a go and registered, but I have to say I really struggle with most of the social networking sites. I have facebook, myspace and twitter accounts and they're basically all totally neglected. I mean, I have enough trouble trying to blog every day, maintaining something like a social network page is just way too much like effort.
Part of the idea of google plus is that it's integrated with all the other google things you use. Now, while I like that for chrome, it actually has big disadvantages for me on something like google+.
See, a lot of the people I know have different relationships with me. So, the people I work with don't know about my interest in anime and manga. Certain circles of friend know I have an interest in it but don't know what it is or have any interest in it themselves. Other friends that's essentially how I know them - through that interest.
Now that's okay, but the problem is I keep some of those groups separate for very good reasons. While I do object to anime and manga all being classified as "cartoon porn", I'm not going to pretend it doesn't exist or that I don't enjoy such things.
And of course a lot of stuff is borderline. I'll give you some specific examples - I used to make wallpapers, a fair few of which were ecchii to varying degrees. Recently, I closed my wallpaper website down (hopefully temporarily) and moved all the images to a blog site.
That blog site was a google one and I used Google's Picasa site to host the images.
All well and good, but of course with google+'s integration, it turns out it shows all those Picasa galleries in your "my pictures" bit. So, in other words, if I was to friend (they use circles and I didn't investigate it fully) someone at work, could look in my gallery and see all the anime stuff? A good chunk of it is nearly pornographic so that would not be a good thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if you could set it up so they couldn't, but as I say, far too much like effort.
So I set all the galleries to "view only if you have the link" - but what does that actually mean? Could they do a couple of clicks and get access to them or what?
Also, what about people I'd want to see the images? Are they now blocked unless they're coming in via the blog that has them on? But I'd actually be happy for them to just brows through them on google+.
And that's just a specific example for me. Many people have flagged the whole thing google does that you have to use your real name and can't use an alias.
All these whole social networking things all just seems to open up more cans of problematic worms to me than I've got the time, effort or interest to really deal with.
But there's also something I heard recently that makes them all a bit scarier. Basically, facebook are introducing a new version / tool that, in essence, operates on the assumption that everything you do you want to share with the world. It's also facebook's vision that they will essentially become people's "portal to the internet".
Man, that sounds risky - imagine installing it with good intentions, or not understanding what it was going o do and then it broadcasts to the world all the stuff you'd rather that big chunks of the world did not know. And imagine that teamed with them acting as the portal through which you do all your web stuff.
That would open up the possibility so many potentially bad things it makes the mind boggle.
Friday, 9 September 2011
internet & fansubs (BT)
I mentioned a while back that I’d gotten myself BT broadband.
Well, unfortunately I recently had to boost my package to the unlimited downloads one. This is quite a lot more expensive (the broadband bit of the package basically doubles), but there was no way I was going to be able to keep within the bandwidth limit, and they charge you a huge amount for each gb you go over.
There are two basic problems that have really brought this to the fore. well, actually there’s one problem, but it has a couple of facets.
That problem is the entire reason I got the BT broadband in the first place- fansubs.
As I’ve explained before, I got the Bt broadband because I was hammering my landlords connection so hard and so often that it seemed to be causing the line to fall over on a very regular basis. When this happened it meant I had no internet access at all, sometimes for quite long periods of time.
Also, my usage was clearly causing the line to hit its limit often, so when my landlord used it he’d get really slow speeds. Therefore, by transferring my fansub downloading to another line, I’d stop being an arse.
But then two problems cropped up. Firstly, the shower broke. As I explained at the time, that meant I couldn't download any fansubs because my computer is underneath the hatch to get access to the stopcocks. And because it was out for a week, I created a big backlog of stuff.
The other problem is that this year there seems to have been a real problem over shows that have been picked up for legal streaming. I try to be a good boy and only dl shows that haven’t been picked up by crunchyroll and AOD. However, this year a whole raft of stuff either wasn’t licensed at all or was licensed, but I was region locked out of.
A new service called Nico Nico started, which seemed to take several shows and I found the site basically unusable. But then quite a bit of stuff on crunchyroll was region locked and then there was this big announcement that most of it was going to be on AOD.
I’m not sure I buy into the conspiracy theories that it wasn’t picked up by crunchyroll for the UK because of AOD, but what was definitely true was that it was ages before AOD announced they had them and then literally months before they started appearing.
On top of that, AOD’s site has been crushingly slow, making it unusual and there’s still the problem that AOD's content can only be viewed full screen or in a tiny window, making it a much less practical site for me.
In other words, I seem to have reverted back to downloading just about everything.
And things seemed to be going so well :(
But it did mean that last month I was hammering the connection and I had to increase the bandwidth allowance.
What made this slightly more annoying was that when I tried to rest the payment direct debit thing, it wouldn’t let me set it to a sensible level. It had this weird thing of one page was recommending a sensible amount, but then when I went onto the page to change it, it insisted I couldn’t take it below a different “recommended” amount that was £10 more than the other recommended amount. I put the higher recommended amount in quotes, because if you it acts as a fixed minimum value, it’s not really a recommendation is it?
Still, I guess if a large credit build up because of this stupid flaw in the system, I’ll eventually be able to set it lower.
Well, unfortunately I recently had to boost my package to the unlimited downloads one. This is quite a lot more expensive (the broadband bit of the package basically doubles), but there was no way I was going to be able to keep within the bandwidth limit, and they charge you a huge amount for each gb you go over.
There are two basic problems that have really brought this to the fore. well, actually there’s one problem, but it has a couple of facets.
That problem is the entire reason I got the BT broadband in the first place- fansubs.
As I’ve explained before, I got the Bt broadband because I was hammering my landlords connection so hard and so often that it seemed to be causing the line to fall over on a very regular basis. When this happened it meant I had no internet access at all, sometimes for quite long periods of time.
Also, my usage was clearly causing the line to hit its limit often, so when my landlord used it he’d get really slow speeds. Therefore, by transferring my fansub downloading to another line, I’d stop being an arse.
But then two problems cropped up. Firstly, the shower broke. As I explained at the time, that meant I couldn't download any fansubs because my computer is underneath the hatch to get access to the stopcocks. And because it was out for a week, I created a big backlog of stuff.
The other problem is that this year there seems to have been a real problem over shows that have been picked up for legal streaming. I try to be a good boy and only dl shows that haven’t been picked up by crunchyroll and AOD. However, this year a whole raft of stuff either wasn’t licensed at all or was licensed, but I was region locked out of.
A new service called Nico Nico started, which seemed to take several shows and I found the site basically unusable. But then quite a bit of stuff on crunchyroll was region locked and then there was this big announcement that most of it was going to be on AOD.
I’m not sure I buy into the conspiracy theories that it wasn’t picked up by crunchyroll for the UK because of AOD, but what was definitely true was that it was ages before AOD announced they had them and then literally months before they started appearing.
On top of that, AOD’s site has been crushingly slow, making it unusual and there’s still the problem that AOD's content can only be viewed full screen or in a tiny window, making it a much less practical site for me.
In other words, I seem to have reverted back to downloading just about everything.
And things seemed to be going so well :(
But it did mean that last month I was hammering the connection and I had to increase the bandwidth allowance.
What made this slightly more annoying was that when I tried to rest the payment direct debit thing, it wouldn’t let me set it to a sensible level. It had this weird thing of one page was recommending a sensible amount, but then when I went onto the page to change it, it insisted I couldn’t take it below a different “recommended” amount that was £10 more than the other recommended amount. I put the higher recommended amount in quotes, because if you it acts as a fixed minimum value, it’s not really a recommendation is it?
Still, I guess if a large credit build up because of this stupid flaw in the system, I’ll eventually be able to set it lower.
Thursday, 19 May 2011
one tenth as good
Well, the phone line interwebnets stuff turned up on Tuesday, as planned. It was waiting on the doorstep when I got back, so I plugged it all in. I'm of sufficient nerd level that I was able to do all this without looking in any of the manuals that came with it.
Almost as soon as it was all plugged in and ready to rock, there was a call on the landline which turned out to be an SMS (a text message, basically - if you send them to regular phone lines it reads them out to you) telling me it was all activated. I therefore fired up my machine and windows 7 sorted its life out and set up a second network (I really am impressed with windows 7).
Obviously I immediately downloaded some porn. I figured this was appropriate, but mainly it was a way for me to check the real download speed. I mean I also used an online speed tester, but I figured a real-life download would be a good way to see how it did.
At the time I first connected it the download speed was around the 1meg area. To put that into perspective the cable line is a 10meg line, which was confirmed by the speed checker, which had an extra 0 on it.
However, when I tested it this morning the speed was double what it was last night, so around 2meg. It was mentioned that to start with the connection speed would be all over the place, presumably as it works out what settings give it a good balance between speed and quality.
With the cable broadband crapping out all the time due to torrents I've gotten way behind, so I figured I should start straight away. My usual practice is to do a trawl for new torrent twice a week and then set them going first thing in the morning. Unless the connection fails like it has recently, this usually means they're all downloaded by the time I get back.
What I was hoping to do was have two networks running at the same time. I've mentioned that I use my landlords cable, well that's done via a long Ethernet cable that runs across the loft from my place to his. That plugs into his router, which is connected to his broadband modem for the cable.
I actually connect this incoming cable to a (rather old) network switch that I then plug all my machines into, giving them all access to the cable. However, it does mean that I have to set the network as a public one, preventing me doing any file or printer sharing, so that my landlord doesn't have access.
But all of the machines I use are sufficiently new/capable that they actually have two network connections. What I was therefore hoping was that I could effectively run the landline broadband line "in parallel" - get a new switch (actually the BT hub thing appears to have multiple Ethernet ports, so I think it can act as a hub) and plug it up in the same way using the secondary LAN ports on all the machines. This then also gives me the opportunity to create my own network with sharings.
This didn't really work when I tried it in the small play about I had. I mean, I was able to have both networks there and running on a machine - the problem was that it defaulted to using the landline internet, instead of the cable internet. This was not ideal, because of course the landline is way slower than the cable, so I want the default to be the cable.
This may work. You can actually turn the BT hub thing off, so when I'm torrenting or if the cable has crapped out I can turn the hub on and it should use the landline cable as a preferential thing. Otherwise, if it's turned off (I'll have to test this bit out) it should use the cable internet. This would have the added advantage that (assuming I buy a new switch) my own network will still exist, just I'll use the fast internet via the cable.
What I'm trying to avoid is the need to swap physical cables about all the time. I've had that set-up before and it's a right royal pain in the arse.
-----
I've mentioned before how I pre-write many of my blog posts. Well I wrote the above yesterday, having set the torrents going in the morning and seen everything working okay. When I got back all the torrents had finished, so all seemed well.
But this morning when I came to repeat the process (as I said, I've gotten a really big backlog of torrents) I couldn't connect to the internet at all. So I've had it less than 48 hours and already it's broken (or, I suspect, I've been cut off). Marvellous.
Almost as soon as it was all plugged in and ready to rock, there was a call on the landline which turned out to be an SMS (a text message, basically - if you send them to regular phone lines it reads them out to you) telling me it was all activated. I therefore fired up my machine and windows 7 sorted its life out and set up a second network (I really am impressed with windows 7).
Obviously I immediately downloaded some porn. I figured this was appropriate, but mainly it was a way for me to check the real download speed. I mean I also used an online speed tester, but I figured a real-life download would be a good way to see how it did.
At the time I first connected it the download speed was around the 1meg area. To put that into perspective the cable line is a 10meg line, which was confirmed by the speed checker, which had an extra 0 on it.
However, when I tested it this morning the speed was double what it was last night, so around 2meg. It was mentioned that to start with the connection speed would be all over the place, presumably as it works out what settings give it a good balance between speed and quality.
With the cable broadband crapping out all the time due to torrents I've gotten way behind, so I figured I should start straight away. My usual practice is to do a trawl for new torrent twice a week and then set them going first thing in the morning. Unless the connection fails like it has recently, this usually means they're all downloaded by the time I get back.
What I was hoping to do was have two networks running at the same time. I've mentioned that I use my landlords cable, well that's done via a long Ethernet cable that runs across the loft from my place to his. That plugs into his router, which is connected to his broadband modem for the cable.
I actually connect this incoming cable to a (rather old) network switch that I then plug all my machines into, giving them all access to the cable. However, it does mean that I have to set the network as a public one, preventing me doing any file or printer sharing, so that my landlord doesn't have access.
But all of the machines I use are sufficiently new/capable that they actually have two network connections. What I was therefore hoping was that I could effectively run the landline broadband line "in parallel" - get a new switch (actually the BT hub thing appears to have multiple Ethernet ports, so I think it can act as a hub) and plug it up in the same way using the secondary LAN ports on all the machines. This then also gives me the opportunity to create my own network with sharings.
This didn't really work when I tried it in the small play about I had. I mean, I was able to have both networks there and running on a machine - the problem was that it defaulted to using the landline internet, instead of the cable internet. This was not ideal, because of course the landline is way slower than the cable, so I want the default to be the cable.
This may work. You can actually turn the BT hub thing off, so when I'm torrenting or if the cable has crapped out I can turn the hub on and it should use the landline cable as a preferential thing. Otherwise, if it's turned off (I'll have to test this bit out) it should use the cable internet. This would have the added advantage that (assuming I buy a new switch) my own network will still exist, just I'll use the fast internet via the cable.
What I'm trying to avoid is the need to swap physical cables about all the time. I've had that set-up before and it's a right royal pain in the arse.
-----
I've mentioned before how I pre-write many of my blog posts. Well I wrote the above yesterday, having set the torrents going in the morning and seen everything working okay. When I got back all the torrents had finished, so all seemed well.
But this morning when I came to repeat the process (as I said, I've gotten a really big backlog of torrents) I couldn't connect to the internet at all. So I've had it less than 48 hours and already it's broken (or, I suspect, I've been cut off). Marvellous.
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
all change
So late yesterday I finally got some messages through that my domains had all been transferred to the new registrar. I did some research on the interwebs and it seems to have taken a bit longer than is normal. I started the process last Monday and it's taken a full week to transfer, where most things seems to indicate it should only have taken three days.
I guess that's not a massively longer time, but it does add more behind one of the reasons I wanted to change - slow responsiveness. Also now that I can play with stuff properly on the control panel, I can see that the new host's user interface on the site is way easier to navigate and do stuff with.
I've also been investigating their hosting packages - like all hosts they offer different levels of stuff for different prices. They seems pretty good value, though obviously proof will be in the pudding - my last hosting was always cheap, but I wouldn't call them good value as it wasn't generally a pleasant and easy "relationship" (I'm struggling for a word to really cover it).
Today is also the day when, in theory, my landline broadband goes up. It was a bit of a pain to get it going, as I mentioned before. The basic problem is that although I knew the company I sued to have hosting with had been bought out by TalkTalk and they'd even changed their name to TalkTalk Business, it turns out they're still effectively run as a separate business and I had to contact them separately.
It took ages to work that out, but once I did getting the MAC was very quick. Though quite why they held on to it I'm not sure - I guess it costs money to get someone to properly release it.
I say it's the start day in theory, because I've not actually received the kit and they've sent me a couple of e-mails saying it could be midnight before it goes live. If I were without interwebs at all I think I'd be more anxious than I am.
Indeed, if I didn't have interwebs at all I think I'd be a bit annoyed and puzzled that it's taken about a week for it to all get sorted. I don't really know how complicated such things are, but this seems like a long time.
I should perhaps say I'm doing it with BT. Like any mega-huge corporation I'm sure there are the full range of good and bad experiences people have had with the, but this was just for convenience and ease. Obviously I've got a BT landline and it was just easy and fairly cheap to "flick the switch" on them giving me broadband too.
My plan is essentially to use it for torrents and as a back-up. It's guaranteed to be slower than the cable and it has a usage cap, but then the cable has a usage cap too. The real point is that for the past few weeks it's been obvious that it's my torrenting that's been killing the connection. In the last week I've deliberately not done any while I wait for the landline broadband and the cable internet hasn't been down once to my knowledge.
I guess that's not a massively longer time, but it does add more behind one of the reasons I wanted to change - slow responsiveness. Also now that I can play with stuff properly on the control panel, I can see that the new host's user interface on the site is way easier to navigate and do stuff with.
I've also been investigating their hosting packages - like all hosts they offer different levels of stuff for different prices. They seems pretty good value, though obviously proof will be in the pudding - my last hosting was always cheap, but I wouldn't call them good value as it wasn't generally a pleasant and easy "relationship" (I'm struggling for a word to really cover it).
Today is also the day when, in theory, my landline broadband goes up. It was a bit of a pain to get it going, as I mentioned before. The basic problem is that although I knew the company I sued to have hosting with had been bought out by TalkTalk and they'd even changed their name to TalkTalk Business, it turns out they're still effectively run as a separate business and I had to contact them separately.
It took ages to work that out, but once I did getting the MAC was very quick. Though quite why they held on to it I'm not sure - I guess it costs money to get someone to properly release it.
I say it's the start day in theory, because I've not actually received the kit and they've sent me a couple of e-mails saying it could be midnight before it goes live. If I were without interwebs at all I think I'd be more anxious than I am.
Indeed, if I didn't have interwebs at all I think I'd be a bit annoyed and puzzled that it's taken about a week for it to all get sorted. I don't really know how complicated such things are, but this seems like a long time.
I should perhaps say I'm doing it with BT. Like any mega-huge corporation I'm sure there are the full range of good and bad experiences people have had with the, but this was just for convenience and ease. Obviously I've got a BT landline and it was just easy and fairly cheap to "flick the switch" on them giving me broadband too.
My plan is essentially to use it for torrents and as a back-up. It's guaranteed to be slower than the cable and it has a usage cap, but then the cable has a usage cap too. The real point is that for the past few weeks it's been obvious that it's my torrenting that's been killing the connection. In the last week I've deliberately not done any while I wait for the landline broadband and the cable internet hasn't been down once to my knowledge.
Thursday, 12 May 2011
fate of the websites
I've decided to cancel the current hosting for all of my websites.
There were a host (ho ho) of reasons for doing this.
Partly it was to save spending the money. None of the sites were hugely expensive, but given how little use I currently make of them it's like pissing money down the drain.
Another reason is that the company they were registered with and that provides the hosting was rubbish. I don't know that the new company I'm switching to will be any good, but it will be a clean break. Customer service was particularly poor at the old place.
Also, the hosting was of disparate types and accessed through different means and using different tools (despite all being the same company - another reason I'm not keen), which made things very confusing. This gives me a chance to consolidate it all into one place.
I'm going to kept all of the domain name registrations, which I've also transferred to this other registration place. I fully intend to revive trismugistus.com at the very least, but not for a while - certainly I won't even think about it until I've finished the magazine scanning, which I see as my main hobby priority for the immediate future.
I'll probably see if I can't get the sites to redirect to my blogs, but I'm sure there'll be lots of feet dragging over the transfers and cancellations. Making it easier for customers might encourage them to change things, and then they'd loose your money!
I've also decided to get my own broadband again.
Piggybacking on my landlords cable is something of a double-edged sword.
The upside is that when it's running smoothly, it's super quick. I can get download speeds somewhere in the ballpark of 10meg, which is super groovy.
Unfortunately, the download cap is pretty stingy - when you've downloaded about a gig it throttles the connection back something chronic. Of course, from my point of view it's still pretty quick - going from 10 down to 2 is a big drop, but 2 is as quick as I've ever had using telephone landlines. So the net effect of this doesn't bother me too much.
What does cause me problems is that the connection regularly flakes out. I'm used to this of course - loosing synchronisation is quite common on landline broadband too (I was more surprised that you get it on cable too) - but the problem is that the modem and router are obviously in my landlords house.
So if he goes out or it's late at night or early in the morning, I have no internet. Also part of the reason he suggested me using it was because he hardly uses the internet, so even when he's in he may not notice. And I also feel I'm being a bit of a nuisance constantly knocking on his door just to ask him to reset the modem/router.
I have actually noticed just recently that when I set a bunch of torrents going the connection dies very quickly. I've in the habit of setting them going before I go to work and leaving them going until I come back, by which time they've finished. I'm not sure if this is some deliberate move by Virgin to cap me in another way or just coincidence, but it is rather suspicious.
And it also means I feel a bit guilty that I'm now regularly killing his internet. As such, my new plan is to get a fairly basic phone line broadband. I can use it for torrents if that is what's causing the problem and it also means I've got a back up.
Not that it proved simple either of course. Turns out that when I cancelled my landline broadband back in September last year they never properly released the line. And to make things more complicated, the ISP was bought out by Talk Talk, so I spent ages trying to find out who to talk too, let alone getting it sorted :/.
There were a host (ho ho) of reasons for doing this.
Partly it was to save spending the money. None of the sites were hugely expensive, but given how little use I currently make of them it's like pissing money down the drain.
Another reason is that the company they were registered with and that provides the hosting was rubbish. I don't know that the new company I'm switching to will be any good, but it will be a clean break. Customer service was particularly poor at the old place.
Also, the hosting was of disparate types and accessed through different means and using different tools (despite all being the same company - another reason I'm not keen), which made things very confusing. This gives me a chance to consolidate it all into one place.
I'm going to kept all of the domain name registrations, which I've also transferred to this other registration place. I fully intend to revive trismugistus.com at the very least, but not for a while - certainly I won't even think about it until I've finished the magazine scanning, which I see as my main hobby priority for the immediate future.
I'll probably see if I can't get the sites to redirect to my blogs, but I'm sure there'll be lots of feet dragging over the transfers and cancellations. Making it easier for customers might encourage them to change things, and then they'd loose your money!
I've also decided to get my own broadband again.
Piggybacking on my landlords cable is something of a double-edged sword.
The upside is that when it's running smoothly, it's super quick. I can get download speeds somewhere in the ballpark of 10meg, which is super groovy.
Unfortunately, the download cap is pretty stingy - when you've downloaded about a gig it throttles the connection back something chronic. Of course, from my point of view it's still pretty quick - going from 10 down to 2 is a big drop, but 2 is as quick as I've ever had using telephone landlines. So the net effect of this doesn't bother me too much.
What does cause me problems is that the connection regularly flakes out. I'm used to this of course - loosing synchronisation is quite common on landline broadband too (I was more surprised that you get it on cable too) - but the problem is that the modem and router are obviously in my landlords house.
So if he goes out or it's late at night or early in the morning, I have no internet. Also part of the reason he suggested me using it was because he hardly uses the internet, so even when he's in he may not notice. And I also feel I'm being a bit of a nuisance constantly knocking on his door just to ask him to reset the modem/router.
I have actually noticed just recently that when I set a bunch of torrents going the connection dies very quickly. I've in the habit of setting them going before I go to work and leaving them going until I come back, by which time they've finished. I'm not sure if this is some deliberate move by Virgin to cap me in another way or just coincidence, but it is rather suspicious.
And it also means I feel a bit guilty that I'm now regularly killing his internet. As such, my new plan is to get a fairly basic phone line broadband. I can use it for torrents if that is what's causing the problem and it also means I've got a back up.
Not that it proved simple either of course. Turns out that when I cancelled my landline broadband back in September last year they never properly released the line. And to make things more complicated, the ISP was bought out by Talk Talk, so I spent ages trying to find out who to talk too, let alone getting it sorted :/.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
flake of the week
I've been really flaky just recently.
This is over and above my usual flakiness that is.
The best example is my windscreen. Before Christmas I visited my Dad down in Devon and on the journey down I got a stone chip in my windscreen.
Now it was impractical to do anything about it while I was down there and also it didn't spread. Sometimes cracks and chips can grow and spread, but this one hasn't changed at all - it didn't even react when I hit that huge pothole that bent my wheel.
Plus it'll cost me money to repair. It's not in my eyeline, which they often won't repair and would instead need to replace the screen, so it's only a small amount, but it's still money. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's one of those insurance jobs, so it really is a small amount, but still.
I think I've been blaming the weather for this one - it always seems to be either raining or snowing recently and I don't think they can repair them when it's like that. Or maybe they can - I dunno, that's where the flakiness really comes into it.
Another example is my internet.
A while back John put in the wire to let me access his cable broadband. Since then I've been using it quite a lot and of course the whole intention was that I was going to switch my own phone line broadband off and hence same myself a lot of money.
Trouble is that the cable broadband is rather flaky itself. When it's working I can get some really high speeds, but they only allow you 1gb of bandwidth before they start throttling the connection. 1gb is not a lot.
And even when that's not in effect the connection speed can be all over the place - sometimes really fast, sometimes really slow, and unpredictably so. Plus, it completely dies a hell of a lot.
Now I know how to fix these deaths - you reboot the router by switching it off and on and it re-synchs itself. Problem is of course that I can't get in to do that, because it's in John's house. And h doesn't use the net a lot so he sometimes doesn't notice for several days.
Which all means I can't get rid of my broadband. I therefore had a look for something cheaper and none of the other packages people offer are as good as my current one. So what about downgrading? Well, although there are cheaper options from the same company I'm worried that if I switch something will go wrong.
I've no idea how to change the IP of my router, for example, so I'm worried that if I change it'll go tits up. I could probably sort this out by phoning them, but as previously noted, I've been really flaky about this stuff and haven't bothered.
And there's loads of other stuff. For example, I've got loads of e-mails flagged as needing action covering everything from buying some more clothes to joining forums.
I'm just being totally rubbish.
I also keep wondering where the time goes. I remember not so long ago I had the time to watch anime and scan stuff and do all these little jobs as well, but just recently it seems like I don't have any spare time to do anything.
And then I remember - I must spend at least 8 hours every week playing Anno, absolute minimum. When you factor in work and sleep and shopping all the other crap I have to do that's a huge chunk of all my spare time.
This is over and above my usual flakiness that is.
The best example is my windscreen. Before Christmas I visited my Dad down in Devon and on the journey down I got a stone chip in my windscreen.
Now it was impractical to do anything about it while I was down there and also it didn't spread. Sometimes cracks and chips can grow and spread, but this one hasn't changed at all - it didn't even react when I hit that huge pothole that bent my wheel.
Plus it'll cost me money to repair. It's not in my eyeline, which they often won't repair and would instead need to replace the screen, so it's only a small amount, but it's still money. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's one of those insurance jobs, so it really is a small amount, but still.
I think I've been blaming the weather for this one - it always seems to be either raining or snowing recently and I don't think they can repair them when it's like that. Or maybe they can - I dunno, that's where the flakiness really comes into it.
Another example is my internet.
A while back John put in the wire to let me access his cable broadband. Since then I've been using it quite a lot and of course the whole intention was that I was going to switch my own phone line broadband off and hence same myself a lot of money.
Trouble is that the cable broadband is rather flaky itself. When it's working I can get some really high speeds, but they only allow you 1gb of bandwidth before they start throttling the connection. 1gb is not a lot.
And even when that's not in effect the connection speed can be all over the place - sometimes really fast, sometimes really slow, and unpredictably so. Plus, it completely dies a hell of a lot.
Now I know how to fix these deaths - you reboot the router by switching it off and on and it re-synchs itself. Problem is of course that I can't get in to do that, because it's in John's house. And h doesn't use the net a lot so he sometimes doesn't notice for several days.
Which all means I can't get rid of my broadband. I therefore had a look for something cheaper and none of the other packages people offer are as good as my current one. So what about downgrading? Well, although there are cheaper options from the same company I'm worried that if I switch something will go wrong.
I've no idea how to change the IP of my router, for example, so I'm worried that if I change it'll go tits up. I could probably sort this out by phoning them, but as previously noted, I've been really flaky about this stuff and haven't bothered.
And there's loads of other stuff. For example, I've got loads of e-mails flagged as needing action covering everything from buying some more clothes to joining forums.
I'm just being totally rubbish.
I also keep wondering where the time goes. I remember not so long ago I had the time to watch anime and scan stuff and do all these little jobs as well, but just recently it seems like I don't have any spare time to do anything.
And then I remember - I must spend at least 8 hours every week playing Anno, absolute minimum. When you factor in work and sleep and shopping all the other crap I have to do that's a huge chunk of all my spare time.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
interweb problems
Last night my Dad phoned me.
Or, more accurately, rather late last night my Dad phoned me.
Or, more accurately still, rather late last night, midway through a really heavy week at work, my Dad phoned me.
The reason he phoned me was that it was his switch-on day for internet and he'd plugged everything in and it hadn't worked.
Now I mentioned recently that my Dad is not hugely computer literate and getting someone who knows very little about computers to work through menus and stuff is not much fun.
It also doesn't help that his computer has all the 'making it easier' crap that Microsoft introduced for XP enabled. The reason I left it on was because I was worried his experiences at his computer class may not match up with what he sees if I switch it all over to the settings I would have.
The problem he was experiencing, however, was a bit of a weird one that kinda stumped me.
Basically, with his internet they sent a CD that guides you through setting it up.
Well, one of the early stages is obviously setting the network card up and as part of that it detects the card.
And it couldn't detect the card.
This I had no real explanation for because the motherboard has LAN built-in. This morning I even checked the model number online and it definitely has built-in LAN.
I was kinda expecting maybe the driver hadn't been installed properly, but it's not even reporting it in the system config as an 'unknown device'.
Something I read online suggests that maybe it's de-activated in the BIOS, but that means the default BIOS setting is for it to be disabled, which seems highly weird.
It also means that I somehow have to get my Dad to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings. And his last excursion into the BIOS was the whole route of the problems he had that ended up with me wiping his hard-drive and re-installing :/.
This should be fun :/.
Or, more accurately, rather late last night my Dad phoned me.
Or, more accurately still, rather late last night, midway through a really heavy week at work, my Dad phoned me.
The reason he phoned me was that it was his switch-on day for internet and he'd plugged everything in and it hadn't worked.
Now I mentioned recently that my Dad is not hugely computer literate and getting someone who knows very little about computers to work through menus and stuff is not much fun.
It also doesn't help that his computer has all the 'making it easier' crap that Microsoft introduced for XP enabled. The reason I left it on was because I was worried his experiences at his computer class may not match up with what he sees if I switch it all over to the settings I would have.
The problem he was experiencing, however, was a bit of a weird one that kinda stumped me.
Basically, with his internet they sent a CD that guides you through setting it up.
Well, one of the early stages is obviously setting the network card up and as part of that it detects the card.
And it couldn't detect the card.
This I had no real explanation for because the motherboard has LAN built-in. This morning I even checked the model number online and it definitely has built-in LAN.
I was kinda expecting maybe the driver hadn't been installed properly, but it's not even reporting it in the system config as an 'unknown device'.
Something I read online suggests that maybe it's de-activated in the BIOS, but that means the default BIOS setting is for it to be disabled, which seems highly weird.
It also means that I somehow have to get my Dad to go into the BIOS and adjust the settings. And his last excursion into the BIOS was the whole route of the problems he had that ended up with me wiping his hard-drive and re-installing :/.
This should be fun :/.
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
intermawebnets
So this last weekend we did some investigations regarding the interwebs.
I plugged my laptop into his router and was able to access the internet no problems. The only issue might be that my laptop is running Vista. As such it'll have the latest network stuff and could have something that "works out" the connection for you.
My desktop machines are running older versions of windows and so could potentially be more problematic. It's unlikely, though.
So the plan is to run a network cable from John's router right through and across into my flat. I think the preferred route is to come into my place through the door to the attic space.
I should then be able to plug in and go from there. There may be some difficulty over the cable length - John measured it at 20m, which was an over-estimate, so that shouldn't be a problem, but such a long cable could be subject to signal loss and interference, so it may affect the speed.
Still, his cable package I believe is 10megabits, which is some 6 or 7 times faster than my phone-line broadband, so even with it slowing down it should still be quicker. Of course, that slow down may apply to the whole network would be the other possibility and I wouldn't want to affect John's connection.
Speaking of which I looked up Virgin's fair-use policy. I was rather afraid they'd have a bandwidth cap, which wouldn't be good at all, as I use a heck of a lot of bandwidth, as I've discussed before.
However, it seems they use throttling instead. The basic thing seems to be they have a peak period and if you download too much during that peak period, then they throttle back your connection speed.
It seems the amount you're allowed during this time is only 1.5gb, but the good (ish) thing is that it seems the peak period is in the afternoon and early evening. My heavy torrenting is mainly scheduled for the morning, so this may mean I'm okay. It could restrict what I get up to in the evening, though.
The plan, therefore, is to do it on a trial basis. If we hook it all up and see how it goes and if it badly affects John (or me, of course) then we can always not bother.
I plugged my laptop into his router and was able to access the internet no problems. The only issue might be that my laptop is running Vista. As such it'll have the latest network stuff and could have something that "works out" the connection for you.
My desktop machines are running older versions of windows and so could potentially be more problematic. It's unlikely, though.
So the plan is to run a network cable from John's router right through and across into my flat. I think the preferred route is to come into my place through the door to the attic space.
I should then be able to plug in and go from there. There may be some difficulty over the cable length - John measured it at 20m, which was an over-estimate, so that shouldn't be a problem, but such a long cable could be subject to signal loss and interference, so it may affect the speed.
Still, his cable package I believe is 10megabits, which is some 6 or 7 times faster than my phone-line broadband, so even with it slowing down it should still be quicker. Of course, that slow down may apply to the whole network would be the other possibility and I wouldn't want to affect John's connection.
Speaking of which I looked up Virgin's fair-use policy. I was rather afraid they'd have a bandwidth cap, which wouldn't be good at all, as I use a heck of a lot of bandwidth, as I've discussed before.
However, it seems they use throttling instead. The basic thing seems to be they have a peak period and if you download too much during that peak period, then they throttle back your connection speed.
It seems the amount you're allowed during this time is only 1.5gb, but the good (ish) thing is that it seems the peak period is in the afternoon and early evening. My heavy torrenting is mainly scheduled for the morning, so this may mean I'm okay. It could restrict what I get up to in the evening, though.
The plan, therefore, is to do it on a trial basis. If we hook it all up and see how it goes and if it badly affects John (or me, of course) then we can always not bother.
Friday, 28 August 2009
now that's quiet
Well I got my new power supply unit for my gaming PC and installed it.
I was a little afraid that perhaps it wasn't the PSU that was the problem, so I stood well back when I turned it on. But everything was okay, so the PSU was definitely the problem.
The only shock I had was the noise - this new PSU is virtually silent compared to the old PSU. I think it's a bit of double whammy - this new PSU is a quiet model, but also the old PSU was incredibly loud.
I'd always known my machine was loud - it sounded like a blooming Hoover! - but I'd never realised it was entirely because of the PSU. I've got one of those mega-powerful PCI-E graphics cards in it that's a got a big fan on it (it takes up two slots) and there's the CPU cooler and stuff so I'd assumed all of that was making a large contribution.
Turns out not at all - with the new PSU in and the covers on, it's almost silent :/.
Of course, having regained my PC, guess what I did? Yup, played Anno 1404.
I could have used this as an excellent opportunity to watch some DVDs or do some scanning, but unfortunately, I'm now realising, because I bought as you do (Richard Hammond's book I mentioned earlier in the week) I've been reading that pretty intensely instead.
Ah well - at least this weekend is a bank holiday so at this stage I can con myself into thinking that I'll be utilising the bonus time to do something I should do, like scanning or watching DVDs. I'm sure the reality will be a great big pile of Anno.
I don't think I discussed it on here, but my landlord inquire about me getting cable and basically, virgin said they won't allow two separate accounts at the same address. This seemed very bizarre to me - I mean, what difference does it make how many accounts you have at the same address? Surely it just means they're turning away perfectly good business?
So having go this bad news my landlord came up with the idea of running a cable from his router to my place. I dunno what's happened with this, though, as I've not seen him to ask. I don't like to be pushy with it, because he's basically offering to give it to me for free.
I must admit to also being slightly worried about the practicalities - I'm an extremely high bandwidth user and I wouldn't want to push him over any sort of fair use quota.
In the meantime I've been investigating different broad band deals and phone lines and stuff.
I pay a lot for my broadband, I've always known that. The thing is though, it seems to be you get what you pay for.
Where I am, distance from the exchange wise and line quality wise, I get about 1.5 meg tops. This is pretty much as I'm expecting and all I will ever get, so deals going on about 24 megs and even 8 megs are just no-goers. I will never achieve those sorts of speeds (cable not withstanding).
But also, the line I'm currently on is a business line. This means it has a low contention (25:1 or 30:1 I believe). My experience is that this makes a lot more difference to your speed than anything else.
All non-business broadband I've seen has had contention of 50:1 - so a heck of a lot worse, meaning the speed would be a lot lower during peak times. Peak times are during the day and evening, when I'm either using P2P or doing my general surfing.
Also, as mentioned, I'm a very high bandwidth user. I have a facility for checking how much I've used each month and I've never checked it and seen my monthly usage bellow 100gigs.
That's a lot of bandwidth and the vast majority of ISP's "fair use" policies would be triggered. Indeed, many have stated monthly caps that are way below 100gig.
Basically then, non-business accounts are out.
So what about other business accounts? Well, the ones I can find are essentially either identical to my other account, or, again, they don't offer quite as good a service.
The basic point then is that while I could get broadband a heck of a lot cheaper, I can't get broadband that meets my needs any cheaper.
Unless I get access to cable via John. I may see if I can get hold of him this weekend and see if he's still keen on the idea.
If I could do that I'd be very tempted to dump my landline entirely. I virtually only have it for broadband - certainly I could cope with all my calls being via my mobile phone.
And speaking of phones I may have mentioned my bill had suddenly shot up - it went from £11 a month to £19 a month: nearly double. So I was looking at non-BT deals, but while I was doing so I was also checking the BT site and everything on the site seemed to be saying that although line rental had gone up, it was only by about £1.
I therefore gave them a call and what it seems has happened is that my direct debit for £11 wasn't quite enough to cover the cost of the line. Therefore, some automatic system kicked in and decided that £19 was the value for it be.
This is utterly ridiculous - across 5 years of having the line (so 5 * 12 monthly payment), the entire total of the deficit was £20. And in the space of 4 months paying at £19 I've therefore built up about £16 of credit on the account.
So the woman re-ran the software and it came up with the much more reasonable £12 monthly charge and she also said I can claim back the over-payment, apparently.
Bizarre.
I was a little afraid that perhaps it wasn't the PSU that was the problem, so I stood well back when I turned it on. But everything was okay, so the PSU was definitely the problem.
The only shock I had was the noise - this new PSU is virtually silent compared to the old PSU. I think it's a bit of double whammy - this new PSU is a quiet model, but also the old PSU was incredibly loud.
I'd always known my machine was loud - it sounded like a blooming Hoover! - but I'd never realised it was entirely because of the PSU. I've got one of those mega-powerful PCI-E graphics cards in it that's a got a big fan on it (it takes up two slots) and there's the CPU cooler and stuff so I'd assumed all of that was making a large contribution.
Turns out not at all - with the new PSU in and the covers on, it's almost silent :/.
Of course, having regained my PC, guess what I did? Yup, played Anno 1404.
I could have used this as an excellent opportunity to watch some DVDs or do some scanning, but unfortunately, I'm now realising, because I bought as you do (Richard Hammond's book I mentioned earlier in the week) I've been reading that pretty intensely instead.
Ah well - at least this weekend is a bank holiday so at this stage I can con myself into thinking that I'll be utilising the bonus time to do something I should do, like scanning or watching DVDs. I'm sure the reality will be a great big pile of Anno.
I don't think I discussed it on here, but my landlord inquire about me getting cable and basically, virgin said they won't allow two separate accounts at the same address. This seemed very bizarre to me - I mean, what difference does it make how many accounts you have at the same address? Surely it just means they're turning away perfectly good business?
So having go this bad news my landlord came up with the idea of running a cable from his router to my place. I dunno what's happened with this, though, as I've not seen him to ask. I don't like to be pushy with it, because he's basically offering to give it to me for free.
I must admit to also being slightly worried about the practicalities - I'm an extremely high bandwidth user and I wouldn't want to push him over any sort of fair use quota.
In the meantime I've been investigating different broad band deals and phone lines and stuff.
I pay a lot for my broadband, I've always known that. The thing is though, it seems to be you get what you pay for.
Where I am, distance from the exchange wise and line quality wise, I get about 1.5 meg tops. This is pretty much as I'm expecting and all I will ever get, so deals going on about 24 megs and even 8 megs are just no-goers. I will never achieve those sorts of speeds (cable not withstanding).
But also, the line I'm currently on is a business line. This means it has a low contention (25:1 or 30:1 I believe). My experience is that this makes a lot more difference to your speed than anything else.
All non-business broadband I've seen has had contention of 50:1 - so a heck of a lot worse, meaning the speed would be a lot lower during peak times. Peak times are during the day and evening, when I'm either using P2P or doing my general surfing.
Also, as mentioned, I'm a very high bandwidth user. I have a facility for checking how much I've used each month and I've never checked it and seen my monthly usage bellow 100gigs.
That's a lot of bandwidth and the vast majority of ISP's "fair use" policies would be triggered. Indeed, many have stated monthly caps that are way below 100gig.
Basically then, non-business accounts are out.
So what about other business accounts? Well, the ones I can find are essentially either identical to my other account, or, again, they don't offer quite as good a service.
The basic point then is that while I could get broadband a heck of a lot cheaper, I can't get broadband that meets my needs any cheaper.
Unless I get access to cable via John. I may see if I can get hold of him this weekend and see if he's still keen on the idea.
If I could do that I'd be very tempted to dump my landline entirely. I virtually only have it for broadband - certainly I could cope with all my calls being via my mobile phone.
And speaking of phones I may have mentioned my bill had suddenly shot up - it went from £11 a month to £19 a month: nearly double. So I was looking at non-BT deals, but while I was doing so I was also checking the BT site and everything on the site seemed to be saying that although line rental had gone up, it was only by about £1.
I therefore gave them a call and what it seems has happened is that my direct debit for £11 wasn't quite enough to cover the cost of the line. Therefore, some automatic system kicked in and decided that £19 was the value for it be.
This is utterly ridiculous - across 5 years of having the line (so 5 * 12 monthly payment), the entire total of the deficit was £20. And in the space of 4 months paying at £19 I've therefore built up about £16 of credit on the account.
So the woman re-ran the software and it came up with the much more reasonable £12 monthly charge and she also said I can claim back the over-payment, apparently.
Bizarre.
Friday, 21 August 2009
cable confusion
Yesterday was a near-total right-off.
I was just so tired from the intensity of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I could hardly even see straight, let alone do anything useful. I'm also pretty shattered today, but then I didn't help myself by playing Anno quite late into the night - dunno why I did that as I knew what the consequences would be.
I do feel a bit better, though, so hopefully I can get something done.
Tomorrow looks like it's going to be a bit manic, though.
Recently, they've been digging up the roads in the town (well, village is more accurate) where I normally do my shopping. This has caused traffic chaos so where I normally slip my shopping in during my lunch break, it's meant that I've been having to do it very early on a Saturday.
I mean, there are advantages to shopping very early on a Saturday, but generally I find the advantages offered by shopping during the week tend to outweigh these.
But anyway, the point is that I've got the shopping to do, but I've slowly been adding more and more other stuff too. First off, I'll need to fill up with petrol, which isn't a huge hassle, but it's easier if I do it before the shopping, which means getting up super early.
Then I need to go to the post office, but the slight problem is it's a bit of a triple-whammy. First off I need to get some photos done for my passport (this means I'll have to shave either tonight or tomorrow morning) and then I need to post a parcel for an e-bay auction thing and finally I need to collect a parcel because there's a customs charge to pay.
What makes it annoying is that the first two are best done in Alton, but the last has to be done in Farnham. I'm very tempted to pay the customs charge online and then basically go from there - they'll try to deliver it and if I'm lucky my landlord Jon will be in to collect it. If not, it at least puts the problem off for a week and I can collect it next week when thins will hopefully be a bit less busy.
And they get even busier when I get home after the post office, because I'm supposed to be experimenting with my landlord's broadband. I mentioned before that I was looking at trying to get cable, well it turned out that this was impossible.
Basically, Virgin said they don't allow two separate accounts at the same address (my place is a self-contained annex and so has the exact same address as the main residence). Why the won't is a bit of a mystery to me. BT will let you have multiple accounts at the same address - that's what I've got now.
So that seemed to put a serious kibosh on things until John offered that we run a cable from hi box right the way through to my place and that should let me plug into his broadband. If it all works it means I should be able to cancel my broadband at least.
I've actually been giving serious consideration to stopping my phone line as well. Ideally what I'd like to do is just have a mobile (indeed, I'd actually like to switch to a pay as you go mobile as well, rather than be on contract).
I dunno - I need to think about that a bit before I go ahead.
But anyway, the first step is the broadband, so I'm going to test my laptop on John's router and see how we go. If it works, then he's going to see if he can run a long cable into my place and if so then I may well be sorted.
I was just so tired from the intensity of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I could hardly even see straight, let alone do anything useful. I'm also pretty shattered today, but then I didn't help myself by playing Anno quite late into the night - dunno why I did that as I knew what the consequences would be.
I do feel a bit better, though, so hopefully I can get something done.
Tomorrow looks like it's going to be a bit manic, though.
Recently, they've been digging up the roads in the town (well, village is more accurate) where I normally do my shopping. This has caused traffic chaos so where I normally slip my shopping in during my lunch break, it's meant that I've been having to do it very early on a Saturday.
I mean, there are advantages to shopping very early on a Saturday, but generally I find the advantages offered by shopping during the week tend to outweigh these.
But anyway, the point is that I've got the shopping to do, but I've slowly been adding more and more other stuff too. First off, I'll need to fill up with petrol, which isn't a huge hassle, but it's easier if I do it before the shopping, which means getting up super early.
Then I need to go to the post office, but the slight problem is it's a bit of a triple-whammy. First off I need to get some photos done for my passport (this means I'll have to shave either tonight or tomorrow morning) and then I need to post a parcel for an e-bay auction thing and finally I need to collect a parcel because there's a customs charge to pay.
What makes it annoying is that the first two are best done in Alton, but the last has to be done in Farnham. I'm very tempted to pay the customs charge online and then basically go from there - they'll try to deliver it and if I'm lucky my landlord Jon will be in to collect it. If not, it at least puts the problem off for a week and I can collect it next week when thins will hopefully be a bit less busy.
And they get even busier when I get home after the post office, because I'm supposed to be experimenting with my landlord's broadband. I mentioned before that I was looking at trying to get cable, well it turned out that this was impossible.
Basically, Virgin said they don't allow two separate accounts at the same address (my place is a self-contained annex and so has the exact same address as the main residence). Why the won't is a bit of a mystery to me. BT will let you have multiple accounts at the same address - that's what I've got now.
So that seemed to put a serious kibosh on things until John offered that we run a cable from hi box right the way through to my place and that should let me plug into his broadband. If it all works it means I should be able to cancel my broadband at least.
I've actually been giving serious consideration to stopping my phone line as well. Ideally what I'd like to do is just have a mobile (indeed, I'd actually like to switch to a pay as you go mobile as well, rather than be on contract).
I dunno - I need to think about that a bit before I go ahead.
But anyway, the first step is the broadband, so I'm going to test my laptop on John's router and see how we go. If it works, then he's going to see if he can run a long cable into my place and if so then I may well be sorted.
Monday, 1 June 2009
return to work
Well, I'm back to work.
Truth be told I'm a bit broken after the holiday.
The skin on my arms is still peeling, I'm still bloody tired and I appear to have picked up some sort of cold. It's a bit of a half-arsed cold, though - I don't really feel bad as such, but I've got a soar throat and a mild case of the sniffles. I'm guessing it's a reflection of being a bit run down more than anything.
It was an excellent holiday. I'll be blogging about it in detail later in the week I think - today is just about getting used to being back at work, I think.
I've still loads to catch up on post holiday.
One of the things I always forget is just how much internetting I do. You go away for not even a couple of weeks and you've 70 e-mails to deal with - and these aren't just spam, they need me to do stuff. And then there's all the forums and news sites a surf on a regular basis that I've been trying to catch up on.
There's a good week of catching up there alone and on top of that there's all the real-world stuff too of course.
Truth be told I'm a bit broken after the holiday.
The skin on my arms is still peeling, I'm still bloody tired and I appear to have picked up some sort of cold. It's a bit of a half-arsed cold, though - I don't really feel bad as such, but I've got a soar throat and a mild case of the sniffles. I'm guessing it's a reflection of being a bit run down more than anything.
It was an excellent holiday. I'll be blogging about it in detail later in the week I think - today is just about getting used to being back at work, I think.
I've still loads to catch up on post holiday.
One of the things I always forget is just how much internetting I do. You go away for not even a couple of weeks and you've 70 e-mails to deal with - and these aren't just spam, they need me to do stuff. And then there's all the forums and news sites a surf on a regular basis that I've been trying to catch up on.
There's a good week of catching up there alone and on top of that there's all the real-world stuff too of course.
return to work
Well, I'm back to work.
Truth be told I'm a bit broken after the holiday.
The skin on my arms is still peeling, I'm still bloody tired and I appear to have picked up some sort of cold. It's a bit of a half-arsed cold, though - I don't really feel bad as such, but I've got a soar throat and a mild case of the sniffles. I'm guessing it's a reflection of being a bit run down more than anything.
It was an excellent holiday. I'll be blogging about it in detail later in the week I think - today is just about getting used to being back at work, I think.
I've still loads to catch up on post holiday.
One of the things I always forget is just how much internetting I do. You go away for not even a couple of weeks and you've 70 e-mails to deal with - and these aren't just spam, they need me to do stuff. And then there's all the forums and news sites a surf on a regular basis that I've been trying to catch up on.
There's a good week of catching up there alone and on top of that there's all the real-world stuff too of course.
Truth be told I'm a bit broken after the holiday.
The skin on my arms is still peeling, I'm still bloody tired and I appear to have picked up some sort of cold. It's a bit of a half-arsed cold, though - I don't really feel bad as such, but I've got a soar throat and a mild case of the sniffles. I'm guessing it's a reflection of being a bit run down more than anything.
It was an excellent holiday. I'll be blogging about it in detail later in the week I think - today is just about getting used to being back at work, I think.
I've still loads to catch up on post holiday.
One of the things I always forget is just how much internetting I do. You go away for not even a couple of weeks and you've 70 e-mails to deal with - and these aren't just spam, they need me to do stuff. And then there's all the forums and news sites a surf on a regular basis that I've been trying to catch up on.
There's a good week of catching up there alone and on top of that there's all the real-world stuff too of course.
return to work
Well, I'm back to work.
Truth be told I'm a bit broken after the holiday.
The skin on my arms is still peeling, I'm still bloody tired and I appear to have picked up some sort of cold. It's a bit of a half-arsed cold, though - I don't really feel bad as such, but I've got a soar throat and a mild case of the sniffles. I'm guessing it's a reflection of being a bit run down more than anything.
It was an excellent holiday. I'll be blogging about it in detail later in the week I think - today is just about getting used to being back at work, I think.
I've still loads to catch up on post holiday.
One of the things I always forget is just how much internetting I do. You go away for not even a couple of weeks and you've 70 e-mails to deal with - and these aren't just spam, they need me to do stuff. And then there's all the forums and news sites a surf on a regular basis that I've been trying to catch up on.
There's a good week of catching up there alone and on top of that there's all the real-world stuff too of course.
Truth be told I'm a bit broken after the holiday.
The skin on my arms is still peeling, I'm still bloody tired and I appear to have picked up some sort of cold. It's a bit of a half-arsed cold, though - I don't really feel bad as such, but I've got a soar throat and a mild case of the sniffles. I'm guessing it's a reflection of being a bit run down more than anything.
It was an excellent holiday. I'll be blogging about it in detail later in the week I think - today is just about getting used to being back at work, I think.
I've still loads to catch up on post holiday.
One of the things I always forget is just how much internetting I do. You go away for not even a couple of weeks and you've 70 e-mails to deal with - and these aren't just spam, they need me to do stuff. And then there's all the forums and news sites a surf on a regular basis that I've been trying to catch up on.
There's a good week of catching up there alone and on top of that there's all the real-world stuff too of course.
Monday, 2 March 2009
erm
Bit of a non-weekend to be honest.
Saturday I got swamped with stuff I had to do - shopping, cleaning, fill the car up with petrol, loads of ironing, etc.
I'm also trying to close down my aol account. I kept the dial-up "just in case" but never used it. Unfortunately I've had a dickens of a time changing e-mails on a lot of sites. They're often ones I only visit occasionally, if rarely, but are important.
The trouble is you forget your passwords or usernames or whatever and you need to get them sent to your old e-mail. That means you can't get rid of it just yet otherwise you'll never get the e-mail changed or access to it again :/.
The other problem was I was knackered, so most of these jobs took longer than they should as I just couldn't be arsed.
I was knackered for a very specific reason - last week I was working on a movie script. What I was trying to do was see how far I could get, see how much I could do. The answer was the best part of half of it.
The problem was it totally drained me. By the end of the week I was basically a dribbling moron with no thoughts left in my head. This wasn't good for work, let alone keeping going with the script. I may deliberately avoid working on it this week to try to get the juices refreshed.
Which feeds into my other plan. The amount of unwatched anime I've got stacking up is silly - my shelves are literally overflowing. I've therefore decided I'm going to force myself to sit down and watch loads of anime DVDs.
This probably means at the cost of watching normal telly. As I mentioned on Friday there's quite a bit I'm watching at the moment, so really I'm creating some problems for myself down the line. But really the key point is that I can't flog stuff on telly on e-bay, whereas I need to do that with the anime DVDs.
Sunday was then a non-event. I was still knackered and just watched some recorded telly and finished off the Wintersmith.
I'm really loving my new monitor, btw. Sometimes I catch myself just looking at the desktop - a good wall on a big widescreen monitor is a thing of wonder.
Saturday I got swamped with stuff I had to do - shopping, cleaning, fill the car up with petrol, loads of ironing, etc.
I'm also trying to close down my aol account. I kept the dial-up "just in case" but never used it. Unfortunately I've had a dickens of a time changing e-mails on a lot of sites. They're often ones I only visit occasionally, if rarely, but are important.
The trouble is you forget your passwords or usernames or whatever and you need to get them sent to your old e-mail. That means you can't get rid of it just yet otherwise you'll never get the e-mail changed or access to it again :/.
The other problem was I was knackered, so most of these jobs took longer than they should as I just couldn't be arsed.
I was knackered for a very specific reason - last week I was working on a movie script. What I was trying to do was see how far I could get, see how much I could do. The answer was the best part of half of it.
The problem was it totally drained me. By the end of the week I was basically a dribbling moron with no thoughts left in my head. This wasn't good for work, let alone keeping going with the script. I may deliberately avoid working on it this week to try to get the juices refreshed.
Which feeds into my other plan. The amount of unwatched anime I've got stacking up is silly - my shelves are literally overflowing. I've therefore decided I'm going to force myself to sit down and watch loads of anime DVDs.
This probably means at the cost of watching normal telly. As I mentioned on Friday there's quite a bit I'm watching at the moment, so really I'm creating some problems for myself down the line. But really the key point is that I can't flog stuff on telly on e-bay, whereas I need to do that with the anime DVDs.
Sunday was then a non-event. I was still knackered and just watched some recorded telly and finished off the Wintersmith.
I'm really loving my new monitor, btw. Sometimes I catch myself just looking at the desktop - a good wall on a big widescreen monitor is a thing of wonder.
Monday, 8 September 2008
interweb? doesn't-ever-fucking-work-right-web more like
The internet here at work is shit.
It's impossible to go a week without the connection either grinding to halt, or just totally not working. And when it does work it's as slow as a geriatric snail.
I wouldn't mind (it's not like it's my connection) except I know the company pays a fortune for it and it rankles a bit knowing we pay so much for so very little.
Anyway, a fairly random w/end, if I'm honest. I'll do some more specific blog entries about some of the stuff later in the week, but I guess the main one following on from my last post is that I completed Company of Heroes.
My opinion is basically unchanged--pretty good game, but I felt a little disconnected. Interestingly I also started the sequel/expansion "Opposing Fronts" and this was much more personalised. You actually play one of the commanders and the briefings refer to you as that character, so I guess it must have been a common criticism.
Installing O.F. was a bit of a nightmare--there were something like six patches that it needed to download and install and all bar one of them was huge. Most were like 130-odd meg. Luckily my connection at home is a hell of a lot better than a t work so dl'ing files that size isn't hugely problematic.
But still, it was hugely frustrating. Mainly because why hadn't they rolled all the updates up into one patch? Maybe because it would have been nearly a gig, but I bet some of them overlapped.
It's impossible to go a week without the connection either grinding to halt, or just totally not working. And when it does work it's as slow as a geriatric snail.
I wouldn't mind (it's not like it's my connection) except I know the company pays a fortune for it and it rankles a bit knowing we pay so much for so very little.
Anyway, a fairly random w/end, if I'm honest. I'll do some more specific blog entries about some of the stuff later in the week, but I guess the main one following on from my last post is that I completed Company of Heroes.
My opinion is basically unchanged--pretty good game, but I felt a little disconnected. Interestingly I also started the sequel/expansion "Opposing Fronts" and this was much more personalised. You actually play one of the commanders and the briefings refer to you as that character, so I guess it must have been a common criticism.
Installing O.F. was a bit of a nightmare--there were something like six patches that it needed to download and install and all bar one of them was huge. Most were like 130-odd meg. Luckily my connection at home is a hell of a lot better than a t work so dl'ing files that size isn't hugely problematic.
But still, it was hugely frustrating. Mainly because why hadn't they rolled all the updates up into one patch? Maybe because it would have been nearly a gig, but I bet some of them overlapped.
Friday, 29 August 2008
it's me, only not me
Have you ever searched for yourself on google?
There are two ways of doing this--you can search for your actual name or you can search for your username. Some people use a lot of different usernames (I've never quite seen why myself) so the second one is only really interesting if you keep the same username, like me.
I first did this when I got my first PC way back when. It was something of an eye opener. There's someone called Mark Sunderland who is a photographer (in the states, I think) and you can buy prints from him.
When I first discovered this I considered buying some of his stuff--it's not all that bad. I decided against it in the end, but it would have been kinda cool.
The search I tend to do is on my standard username, trismugistus. My website trismugistus.com always used to be the top result, but when I checked recently it had actually slipped to the second page. This seemed a little bizarre to me and makes me wonder quite how google does its rankings.
I mean, there's plenty of stuff on trismugistus.com and of course when I post in forums, etc, my website is in my sig, so it should all be interrelated. However, it occurs to me that as I've added more sites to my 'family' I've had to shrink the link. That is, it often says "trigs.com" or similar nowadays, so maybe that affects how google sees it all?
Anyway, one of the great things about google of course is you can also do image searches and that really does bring up a bizarre set of results. One of the things that's most interesting about my search results is all the scans that have been stolen from me. People don't change the filenames and since they got them from AP, that's why it finds them.
AP used to have actual stats visible--number of page views, number of dls, that sort of thing, but a while back they removed them. Now there's just the "popularity" ranking available via the gallery.
They've always had that too, and some of my stuff was up in the first ten pages, but I was always left wondering if people actually like my stuff. The google image results thing tends to suggest they kinda did :).
There are two ways of doing this--you can search for your actual name or you can search for your username. Some people use a lot of different usernames (I've never quite seen why myself) so the second one is only really interesting if you keep the same username, like me.
I first did this when I got my first PC way back when. It was something of an eye opener. There's someone called Mark Sunderland who is a photographer (in the states, I think) and you can buy prints from him.
When I first discovered this I considered buying some of his stuff--it's not all that bad. I decided against it in the end, but it would have been kinda cool.
The search I tend to do is on my standard username, trismugistus. My website trismugistus.com always used to be the top result, but when I checked recently it had actually slipped to the second page. This seemed a little bizarre to me and makes me wonder quite how google does its rankings.
I mean, there's plenty of stuff on trismugistus.com and of course when I post in forums, etc, my website is in my sig, so it should all be interrelated. However, it occurs to me that as I've added more sites to my 'family' I've had to shrink the link. That is, it often says "trigs.com" or similar nowadays, so maybe that affects how google sees it all?
Anyway, one of the great things about google of course is you can also do image searches and that really does bring up a bizarre set of results. One of the things that's most interesting about my search results is all the scans that have been stolen from me. People don't change the filenames and since they got them from AP, that's why it finds them.
AP used to have actual stats visible--number of page views, number of dls, that sort of thing, but a while back they removed them. Now there's just the "popularity" ranking available via the gallery.
They've always had that too, and some of my stuff was up in the first ten pages, but I was always left wondering if people actually like my stuff. The google image results thing tends to suggest they kinda did :).
Thursday, 28 August 2008
ripportage
There's a siterip of AP going about on 4han. I won't link to it--you can go there and find it if such things are of interest to you.
I've discussed before how horribly ungrateful people are about the efforts scanners go to, so I won't really focus on that, but as someone who used to "work" for AP I thought I'd discuss a couple of the weirder things.
It's strange sometimes the things people get in their heads. I mean, if you look at some of the things being posted, a lot of it is just plain wrong. As in factually wrong--I don't mean regarding people's opinions, I guess people are entitled to those, but some of the things people think just aren't correct.
What puzzles me is how people get these inaccurate opinions. It's like, when I was a mod there, I wrote the FAQ. Now, I don't mean it was all entirely my original work, a lot of it was cobbled together from other sources or the existing rules, but the point is I compiled it together.
So I know what it said. It hasn't really been updated in ages and so is inaccurate in a few places, but a lot of the stuff is still valid.
Therefore, simply reading the FAQ would give people the proper information. And yet they don't--and I'm not just talking about the 4chan thing any more, I mean in general.
One of the most frustrating and annoying things about the job was all the people that would basically try to say "no, I haven't broken the rules!" when clearly they had, it's just they hadn't even bothered to read the damn rules.
It's like, in terms of the AP rip, there's a lot of rage towards bantam as the demon that owns AP. I've not spoken to him about it, but I am fairly sure he doesn't really give a rat's arse about the rip. AP has never laid claim to owning anything on its site--it just needs some mechanisms for slowing down its bandwidth usage so that he doesn't get bankrupted.
And the fundamental point is that surely it's his site--he can do what he wants with it. I know I had my emo thing a while back and said some unfortunate things at the end, but in the end I backed down because, when I'd calmed down, I remembered that fact.
But one of the weirdest things is what the rip represents. All it really shows is how successful AP has become. It's the king of the heap and so everyone's focus is on it.
So the reality is it's actually a massive compliment :/.
I've discussed before how horribly ungrateful people are about the efforts scanners go to, so I won't really focus on that, but as someone who used to "work" for AP I thought I'd discuss a couple of the weirder things.
It's strange sometimes the things people get in their heads. I mean, if you look at some of the things being posted, a lot of it is just plain wrong. As in factually wrong--I don't mean regarding people's opinions, I guess people are entitled to those, but some of the things people think just aren't correct.
What puzzles me is how people get these inaccurate opinions. It's like, when I was a mod there, I wrote the FAQ. Now, I don't mean it was all entirely my original work, a lot of it was cobbled together from other sources or the existing rules, but the point is I compiled it together.
So I know what it said. It hasn't really been updated in ages and so is inaccurate in a few places, but a lot of the stuff is still valid.
Therefore, simply reading the FAQ would give people the proper information. And yet they don't--and I'm not just talking about the 4chan thing any more, I mean in general.
One of the most frustrating and annoying things about the job was all the people that would basically try to say "no, I haven't broken the rules!" when clearly they had, it's just they hadn't even bothered to read the damn rules.
It's like, in terms of the AP rip, there's a lot of rage towards bantam as the demon that owns AP. I've not spoken to him about it, but I am fairly sure he doesn't really give a rat's arse about the rip. AP has never laid claim to owning anything on its site--it just needs some mechanisms for slowing down its bandwidth usage so that he doesn't get bankrupted.
And the fundamental point is that surely it's his site--he can do what he wants with it. I know I had my emo thing a while back and said some unfortunate things at the end, but in the end I backed down because, when I'd calmed down, I remembered that fact.
But one of the weirdest things is what the rip represents. All it really shows is how successful AP has become. It's the king of the heap and so everyone's focus is on it.
So the reality is it's actually a massive compliment :/.
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