ADSL All Change

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In our previous house, we had a cable modem, but despite there being a green Cable box right outside the wall of the new house, there’s no cable service in our street.  I checked with Virgin Cable but it wasn’t commercially viable to do the street any more.  So we signed up for ADSL.  At the time, I wanted a reliable service, and I’d heard good things about Nildram, so I signed up with them.

It wasn’t the cheapest option, by a long chalk, but it was reliable, in four years we had no noticeable outage.  Nildram was eventually purchased by Pipex but nothing really changed.  Then Pipex were bought up by Tiscali, and not much changed.  Then Tiscali were bought up by Opal. who may have been part of TalkTalk or were later renamed to TalkTalk business or something like that.  Once that happened, the service went downhill.

Overnight disconnects, variable performance, disconnects during the day, etc.  However, if you’ve met me you know that I am super resistant to change.  Not because I don’t think change can be good, but because I’m basically lazy.  I’ll tolerate ‘good enough’ vs ‘much better’ if good enough involves no effort.  Eventually though, there’s a tipping point and I’ll initiate change.

I’ve been looking at BT Infinity since it was first announced – cable-like speeds using VDSL.  It’s still variable speed, because your distance from the cabinet has an impact but it’s significantly better than most ADSL.  My ADSL connection is 6-7Mbps, BT Infinity suggested I might get 34Mbps.

So anyway – about 3 weeks ago we noticed the ‘net connection was being a bit odd.  Sending tweets wouldn’t work, web pages would half load, some stuff wouldn’t connect first time.  Throughput was okay once you got a connection, I could still get 5-600KB/s, but it would sometimes reqiure two or three page refreshes to load a full web page.

It came to a head when I worked at home one day, and my VPN connection to the office was atrocious.  I couldn’t send or receive any mail and got about 2KB/s transfer when trying to send and receive files.  Clearly, the underlying VPN connection suffered more from whatever was causing the connection issues in general.

Did I call TalkTalk?  No.  For two reasons.  Firstly, someone else at work mentioned exactly the same behaviour on their TalkTalk connection, and they knew of 1 other person with the same issue as well.  At the same point, I found someone living in a completely different part of the country on TalkTalk who had the same problem.  The second reason, and you can lambaste me if you like, is that I knew how the conversation would go.

Me: I’m having an issue – description of problem.
Customer Service Rep: Okay, I have a checklist of things you’ve already done, such as rebooting your ADSL router, taking all other devices out of the equation, etc., etc.
Me: But I know other people with the exact same issue around the country, and I’ve tried those things, and it feels to me like packet loss or traffic shaping gone bad, and my line quality values haven’t changed because I track them.
Customer Service Rep: Okay, but can you please work through this checklist of things.
Me: Sigh.

I spend my job fixing technical issues, and advising other people how to fix them, and I know very well how critical it is that you follow a logical investigative process and make no assumptions.  But when I ring a call centre I don’t want to hear that shit, I want to speak to someone technical so we can talk about it.  I know I can’t, I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it.

It’s like being a retired garage mechanic and taking your car to your local garage, and having to try and explain why you know what the problem is while they ask you what colour the paintwork is.

So no, I didn’t call TalkTalk, but I did decide to move to BT Infinity.  Ten minutes through the Infinity signup and I remembered I needed my MAC.  To give them their due, TalkTalk provided it well within the 5 working day estimate.  On Tuesday of this week I ordered BT Infinity and they gave me a delivery and installation date of next Wednesday!

So I’m excited but of course, because of who I am, I’m also planning!  I used to have a fixed IP address with Nildram but that’s going to go, so I’ll need to re-work the security on my VPS and web sites.  I’ll need to either run a long cat5 cable between the VDSL modem and the BT Home Hub, or get a new network switch, or maybe both.  Is there going to be room for both boxes near the phone?  Will the engineer be helpful and put the Home Hub in a different room?  Argh!

So, all change to something many people consider a luxury, but for many reasons, something we consider vital.  I’ll let you know how it goes, over 3G if it goes badly.

Quiet around here …

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Normally when I stop writing blog posts, it’s because I’m going through a low period emotionally.  It’s been quiet around here for a while and although some of that is absolutely related to my mood, a greater part of it is because I’m just busier than I have been for a while in the evenings.

Three trips to the gym a week might not sound like much, but we’re there for 2 to 2 and a half hours, so during the week that eats up virtually all of the evening.  When we get back we’ve got to eat, and then we’ve got to catch up on TV.  On the days we’re not at the gym we’ve either been playing Lord of the Rings Online more often again, or we’re recovering from the gym and catching up on TV!

On top of that, in the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of people visiting, family and friends, and that takes up time and emotional energy.  So it’s been a bit sparse around here other than gym updates.

I’m not sure if that will change any time soon, we’ve got visitors this weekend, we’ve had a lot of stress about cars and the house, and I’m in a pretty low place mood wise, but let’s see what happens.

Random Update – The Gym

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My first gym session was the 27th of July 2011.  Until then, I’d basically never done any exercise for the sake of it.  The status summary after lots of sessions is – still fat, but the devil is in the detail.  It’s entirely obvious now that I recover better after the aerobic equipment, and for me, that was most of the aim of going in the first place.  I was sick of not only being out of breath after exerting myself, but having to spend too long recovering my breath.

The aerobic stuff in the gym still gets me out of breath, still makes me feel knackered but I’m recovered in a much, much shorter period of time.  I’m pleased.

So I’m not visibly losing weight and I’m not about to start running any distance, but I’m definitely feeling the benefit.  It’s also true that I’m still not enjoying the actual exercise.  It’s not a chore as such, but it’s not something I do with any relish.  Having said that, I was looking forward to the overall session yesterday in the hope that it would work out some of the anger and frustration that had built up that day at work, and it did.

All in all, it’s been a good life change so far.

Gym Log, Star Date somethingfunny

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This is mostly just a record for myself, so I can look back in a year or so and see if / how much my gym sessions have changed (I’m going to record the distances next time I’m at the gym and update this, because I can’t remember them all).  This is what my current gym session consists of (not in this order, I mix them up to keep thing interesting).

  • Recumbent Bike – Warm up – 9 minutes, ~70rpm
  • Treadmill – 8 minutes, 5.5km/h, 2-9% incline
  • Upright Bike – 8 minutes, 80-100 rpm
  • Wave Form – 4 minutes, level 8
  • Cross Trainer – 2 minutes, level 1
  • Rowing – 10 minutes, medium intensity (1800-1900m)
  • Arm Bike – 5 minutes, level 4, 5, 6, 7, 4
  • Lats – 3 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Shoulder Press – 2 sets, 15 reps, 10kg
  • Chest Press – 3 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Low Row – 3 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Leg Press – 2 sets, 12 reps, 30kg
  • Abdominal Crunch – 3 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Pectoral – 2 sets, 15 reps, 15kg
  • Adductor – 2 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Abductor – 2 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Leg Curl – 2 sets, 15 reps, 20kg
  • Leg Extension – 2 sets, 15 reps, 15kg (These make me want to die!)
  • Recumbent Bike – Cool Down – 10 minutes, ~80rpm

13/10/2011 – update: Leg extensions are only 15kg and Abdominal crunches only 20kg.

14/10/2011 – update: corrected a few other entries.

The Hobbit – What I’m looking forward to most

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Dwarves who aren’t comic relief.

I get why The Lord of the Rings movie was the way it was.  There is, for all intents and purposes, only a single Dwarf in that story, and in nearly every scene he’s in, he’s adding some comic relief.  Whether it’s being tossed by the beard, afraid of trees, counting how many goblins he’s killed, being stuck under a warg or claiming Dwarves were built for sprinting, most of his lines are designed to make us chuckle.

But I’ve been reading fantasy books for a long time, and roleplaying for about the same duration and Dwarves are mighty warriors, dour, taciturn, honourable, noble and solid like the mountains they inhabit.  They aren’t the butt of anyone’s humour, or if they are, that person finds them self missing a limb pretty quickly.

With a bakers dozen Dwarves in The Hobbit though, I’m hoping at least a few of them live up to the fantasy literature design that I love, and the way I enjoy playing them in games.

Don’t let me down Mr Jackson.

An Open Letter to Game Developers – Content, not Hair Styles

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Ground rules for this rant about computer (roleplaying) games,

  1. I know some players absolutely love being able to customise how their character looks to the nth degree
  2. I know that with the ability to customise appearance, and to change appearance based on the gear you’re wearing in the game, is rumoured to capture a larger audience
  3. I know that funding for Feature X does not necessarily impact on funding for Feature Y (so less of X does not mean more of Y, or more of Y does not mean X suffers).

Given those basic ground rules, here we go.

Dear games developers, mostly roleplaying games developers

To a reasonably large extent, I don’t care how my character looks, but I do care if all the locations are just the same rehashed map over and over again (I’m looking at you Dragon Age 2).

Mostly, I don’t really mind if I only have say, 2 hair styles and 1 nose to pick from at character creation.  But I do care if all the quests are similar and there’s no epic storyline to follow other than ‘buy your way out of debt’ (hey, DA2, looking at you again!)

Yes, I absolutely want to be able to invest in my character, because being invested makes the gaming experience that much better, and part of that is being able to change how my character looks.  But let’s be honest, I’m not going to make him look like me (fat, fourty, hairy) so a small sample of heroic male and heroic female appearances will do.  Also, armour is armour, I don’t mind if you use the same shape and just change the colour, really.

Instead of spending time and money developing the game engine so it can handle all that customisation and doing all the hard work necessary to pull it off – why not invest that time and energy into content.

Quests, dialog, locations.  That’s what I want from a game.

Not to decide if my character has a hook nose, or a ever so slightly smaller hook nose.

Thanks.

David Gemmell’s Legend

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You can read my full post about re-reading David Gemmell’s Legend over at BookThing.  I just wanted to write a short piece here to say that it’s as good as it ever was.  I decided to re-read it (and all of his books) while we were going through our books, adding them to Good Reads.

I have half a mind to re-write some of my reviews on BookThing because they tend to be very short in the early days, but we’ll see how that pans out.

Untidy Blog

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Meh, transferred (or half transferred) various blog posts, forum posts and stuff from various sources to here, before I shut down some other websites I host, but as usual, got bored half way through so now I have a bunch of old, badly tagged, wrongly formatted stuff hanging around.  To make it worse, I’m not sure how far through the process I got, so there may be only half the posts I want to transfer but no easy way to find them amongst the 1386 (soon to be 1397 when I hit post) items on the blog.

Oh well, must devote some of my impending holiday to sorting this place out (in lieu of sorting anything in the meatverse out).

Exercise for the sake of it

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I have never been interested in taking part in sport.  I’ve just never found it an enjoyable activity, sure I played football as a kid, and tennis in the street for two weeks of the year, but it wasn’t something I found engaging.  I don’t think PE at school helped, but I wouldn’t say it stopped me either, I just never enjoyed it.

And I never liked the idea of exercise for the sake of it.  Running is great if you enjoy running, but running purely because you feel it is good for you never sat well with me.  That probably explains most of the motivation for things I do – but anyway that’s a different story.

I’ve had a pretty sedate lifestyle (I know, with my physique you would never have guessed right?), although never being able to drive meant I spent my teens, 20’s and early 30’s doing a lot of walking, but these days it’s slowed even more.  We’ve not done any LRP events for 5 years or so, and my job is even more desk bound than it used to be.

There have been a couple of events over the last 12 months which left me feeling embarrassed or frustrated at how out of breath I was.  So I’ve been wanting to make a change.

But the real inspiration for what I’ve done (more in a bit) is Grete (@randomwittering on twitter, and owner of Bookthing, on twitter as @bookthing_uk), my amazing wife.  Grete has been going to the gym (and aqua aerobics) for nearly 2 years now.  I’ve been talking about maybe going for about 12 months, and I finally took the plunge a few weeks ago.  I had two inductions at the local council run gym, the first was good, the second less so.

But I eventually went for a full session with Grete, and have been a couple of times a week now for the past month and a bit with a short break.  I won’t say I enjoy it, it is after all, exercise for the sake of it in its most pure form.  I mean let’s be honest, walking at 5.5km/hour for 10 minutes with varying inclines is great except you never actually go anywhere.  So no, I don’t enjoy it, but it does make me feel good.

It makes me feel like I’ve made a positive change in my life which will hopefully result in things being better.  I’m never really going to change my eating habits a great deal these days – I made that change when I found I was diabetic and I’m just about living on the edge of what I can tolerate food-wise (although the last 12 months have slipped a little).  So I needed to make another change.  I’m not fit enough to ‘do sport’ even if I wanted to (which I don’t, maybe American Football, but not much else), and the advantage the gym has is that at least what you do varies during the 90 minutes or so you’re there.

So, thank you Grete for inspiring me to go to the gym, and for inspiring me to make a positive change in my life.

I can’t stop having the bacon cobs for breakfast, but at least I can burn off some of the calories walking nowhere for 10 minutes.

I hate cars

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So it’s my semi regular I hate cars post.  Our Megane gave up the ghost suddenly out of nowhere.  One day it was fine, one day the head gasket is gone and it’s on its last legs.

Thanks to some super quick action from Grete’s Awesome Father (Or, the GAF), and most of our savings (which is the first time we’ve had any for ages, and now they’re gone), we’ve got a new old car.  A Ford Focus.

Some random points,

  1. Air con – don’t need it until you have it, then can’t live without it.
  2. Some company paid us for the Megane and then they scrapped it, and it was easy and painless and we made enough cash to cover insuring the Focus.  This is a big change from when we scrapped the Escort and we had to beg someone to take it away and we paid them for the privilege.
  3. Slow punctures suck.
  4. Kwik Fit’s policy of charging different prices for the same service depending on whether you book online or just turn up in the store is shocking.  Luckily the store sorted out us.
  5. Cars in general, suck.

That is all.