I'm not dead

I just haven't thought of anything to post about that I've remembered when I have been home or in the mood to log on and write about. I'm sure I'll think of something as soon as I've posted this though... Typical.

No space

Lots of people have the group of friends that they forward funnies to that they get via SMS text or email. Well here's one that really (just today) happened to a customer calling one of the support guys at our office.

His keyboard broke two years ago, leaving him with no Space bar. He first created a login and signed on to our site three years ago. We have an automatic login (via cookies/whatever) so regular users don't need to re-enter their password every day from the same PC, as many sites do. So this user hasn't needed to retype his password ever since he first logged on. He had an issue today, so rung our support department; who told him to clear his cache and retry. It fixed the problem; but only after he'd failed to log on because he couldn't type a space into the login form.

For god's sake; a new keyboard is 5-10quid unless you want a flash one. I really can't believe he's got away using email, posting any content at all without his Space key for two whole years.

The temporary fix was to find a space elsewhere and copy and paste it in with his mouse or the Edit menu. I've had times in Windows 95/98 when the drivers have messed up or some program has got itself in a twist and I've had to copy and paste text to be able to do something before I could restart it; but for two years! Oh my god!

Tags: unbelievable support

30

I'm 30. What a great weekend it was too. Handily, it fell on the Saturday and I was out partying until at least chuck-out time at 2am. Got back home at 3, slept til 2.30pm and awoke with a bit of a hangover (was the spirits that did it, I'm sure! Nothing to do with the pints I sank! Honest!).

I was such a party animal I didn't open my presents or cards til Sunday at about 4pm. I hadn't been at my flat since Friday morning anyway so I wouldn't have been able to pick the cards up.

It's been a pretty awesome and very social month (and rather expensive - ouch), in fact I haven't watched anywhere near as many films as I would do normally (only 3-4ish so far I think). I need to recover next month (financially, for one thing).

Tags: birthday social

I'm all booked up.

Knowing my titles, you'd think I meant I'd been reading lots. But no, it's me being busy every weekend this month that's inspired this post.

Last weekend I was out every day: Friday with a mate after work (meal,pub in Camden); Saturday clubbing and made a new friend and had lots of fun - didn't return to my flat until Monday evening (don't worry, I didn't skip work). It was a bloody great weekend.

Next weekend I'm going to a party in Nottingham.

Weekend after that is Easter and I shall be helping a mate move into a flat and seeing the family.

After that is my 30th birthday, I expect to be out lots.

At the end of the month I'm partying again, out for the majority of the weekend I suspect.

Anyone got any tips on how to cope? :-)

Tags: social

Active ADSL

Hurrah! I'm ADSL'd up again at the new flat. 2MB line, may even go up to somewhere nearer 8Mb once the new BT IP-Max streams are migrated over. Those come online at the end of this month (March), although some people have had them to beta test for a while.

I've been slightly clever with the initials of the post title, as I went with Andrews and Arnold ISP (AA, get it?) and I chose them mainly because they're a techies ISP.

Yes, my email address will be changing. Some people already have it, if you know my gmail account that's the one I've been passing on for temporary use (although hopefully it's a permanent fixture). I will be writing to anyone in my address-book with the updated details sometime soon-ish, I'm not going to be silly and tempt spam already but you can have the new domain:

blog.breez.me.uk

That's for the blog. It's got it's own subdomain now. Nice. You may not recognise the last sections of the name: .me.uk is a new-ish type of domain intended for personal use. I always thought it was a bit wrong to be using .co.uk for people's personal domains and now they've finally seen sense and created .me.uk. Of course the millions of existing .co.uk's won't go away. I like breez.me.uk anyway - a real pity breezer.me.uk was already gone (and breeze.me.uk - that would have worked pretty well too, as well as jgarner or just garner or a shortening - any I liked had gone, oh well).

There's nothing on the site yet as I write, but the blog will be published there in the next week or two (maybe even to a "blog" subdomain?) and I'll start migrating over the rest of the site (or the bits I care about), so please get ready to upgrade your bookmarks. I'll leave the old Demon one on redirect for a while when it does disappear until the account is cancelled anyway, just warning you to expect a change.

Techy chat ahead: The user interface for managing the new AA account has a kind-of hacked together look about it, and as though it has been written for people who'd almost rather do it on the command-line, but it allows you to do so much should you wish: IP6 direct to your box, multiple IPs, setting up reverse DNS records, altering MX records, subdomains, and plenty more; all without calling them up and making a special request or paying extra (although you pay if you want any more domains). No proxying or NAT translation occurs through their end. Almost like paying for a separate domain hosting service.

It was a fight between them and Zen Internet at the end, who have user reviews, reliability and speed test results that seem too good to be true and customer support that does a decent job too. Anyone else not needing real techy services direct from their ISP and willing to pay a bit extra for the better quality service, they look like a great provider. You do get what you pay for with ISPs...

I had started to lose faith in Demon internet over the last few years and while not enough to make the effort to move away, they're not nearly as good as they used to be when I first signed up to them over 7 years ago when I finished university and needed a connection (job hunting would have been so much harder without it). That was around the time everyone and their dog were offering free internet accounts with web and email, I suspect not many of those are still around (freeserve being a notable exception, although they're called wanado now).

Demon are one of the few that (for consumer money without going to a business-type account) have 24hr support. I'm generally using my internet connection late at night, and in fact I wouldn't care if they made it cheaper by dropping office-hours support...
If there's a problem over the weekend or late night, and if I really need something, I don't want to have to be stuck. They were and still are more expensive (for the better products with static IPs etc. anyway) but I was happy to pay that for good service and good (UK-based) support who knew what they were on about. Unfortunately, in the last 3 years or so - since they were bought by Thus Plc I think - farmed the support abroad (I guess - full of non-native English speakers anyway), not kept up the service levels I was used to (the odd failure to connect 1st time every now and then started happening), and when I tried the 24hr support the other day (2am-ish) it was a dead line.

So we'll see how AA ISP do. I'll be able to have more fun setting up webpages and dynamic stuff on them anyway, Demon was a bit limiting - 1 counter script and that was it. I almost got round to hosting them on my firewall box that was connected nearly 24/7, in fact sometimes there was a box serving (err.. nothing apart from a graphic or two) but I didn't sort it out properly and wouldn't have wanted to spend too much time maintaining it or keeping it available 100%. Plus the rather poor upload bandwidth (288kbit/s, standard ADSL upload linkspeed unless you're on the newer 8Mb-capable lines) wasn't all that nice. Good enough for low-usage mainly-text pages, but not that great.

Anyway, look forward to more blog posts now I can get at blogger.com more easily from home.

Tags: adsl internet

Public Service Announcement: Be Safe & Secure Online

Came across this Get Safe Online website via a link at my bank's site, and any page providing good,sensible information and simple tips on securing your PC deserves a plug in my opinion. This post goes out mainly to the non-techies, hopefully all the computer geeks reading this will already know the stuff on there (fairly basic).

No matter who you are, if you spend any time on the 'net, it applies to you. Same as you don't drive a car (legally) without learning how not to crash and kill yourself/others, you shouldn't really (nowadays especially) be let loose on an open unprotected computer on the internet without any knowledge of the risks you're putting yourself at. Non-computer-literate people assign far too much trust to computers with their personal information until they're made more wary (hopefully not through a bad experience).

Tags: security computers internet