Posted by The Random Blogger on Jan 17, 2012 in
Techy Stuff You’re probably wondering what the hell modems have to do with the John Wyndham book, “The Day Of The Triffids”, right?
Hopefully, all will become clear soon, but first, a brief summary of this classic science fiction book, for those who’ve not read it (or seen a movie or TV adaptation of it).
The book is basically about two things – triffids, which are plants that can move about, are intelligent, and can kill people with poisonous stings, and a meteor shower that renders all those who watch it blind.
Both of these elements are, of course, bad, but what makes the situation so horrible is that they both happen at once – the vast majority of the population go blind, and therefore can’t see where they’re going or what they’re doing, and the triffids go on the rampage, attacking these blind and defenceless humans everywhere.
The point, to me at least, which was borne out from my many years working in IT, is that while you can plan for independent scenarios, it’s really difficult to plan for combinations of events, such as those depicted in this novel.
And that sort of brings me to our modem issues.
We had been struggling for years with a so-called broadband/DSL service that barely offered 1Mbps downloads, in spite of frequently asking for the 3Mbps service that we’d been offered.
And then, one weekend in December 2011, we had an Internet outage that lasted longer than usual, so we raised a support ticket.
Needless to say, by the time the service engineer came, we’d already got our Internet access back.
Nonetheless, he checked the line into our house and reported that all was OK, and he gave us a new modem to install, saying it was all pre-configured, so all we had to do was plug it in.
A chance comment by me about our Internet speed led him to ringing his office and finally upgrading us to a 3 meg service.
Hurray, or so we thought!
However, from the moment we installed the new modem, we had no end of technical issues, including loss of Internet connectivity, an inability to access our local home network, and sometimes we couldn’t even connect to the modem’s own control panel.
These problems were occurring multiple times a day, every single day, which meant getting any work done was difficult, to say the least.
The only good news was that, when we could get access to the Internet, our download speed was vastly improved, at last!
After trying everything we could think of, we called our service provider again and waited for the engineer to come.
Once again, he checked the line into the house and found no problems, but we did find a phone terminal in our mud room where the wires were a bit loose, so he tightened those up.
Did that do the trick?
No, of course not – that would have been far too easy!
So, I mapped out our phone and Internet wiring set-up for him, as we wouldn’t come in the house for some reason, and we decided to try making a small change to the configuration, as he’d discovered, based on our modem stats, that there was way too much noise on our line, and that the incoming signal was therefore being compromised.
Back indoors, I swapped a few cables around and installed a new junction box, and lo and behold, the noise on the line disappeared.
We thought we’d cracked it, so the engineer left again.
It should come as no surprise that the problems were still with us – not as severe as before, but things weren’t right.
More out of desperation than anything else, I thought I’d try shutting down my software firewall – mainly because I’d run out of options. I didn’t like the idea – after all, we’d installed the firewall for a reason – but we were losing hours and hours every day to these intermittent outages.
And much to my delight, that solved the problem! No more dropped connections to the Internet or to our home network, no random glitches – just a working network and Internet connection!
Finally, we have a reasonable service, although I use the word “reasonable” loosely – we’re still struggling with a 3Mpbs service when I know people who are getting 60Mpbs! But that’s what you get when you live in a remote, rural area, I suppose, and at least we don’t have to rely on a patchy satellite service.
So, now do you see the connection to the Triffids story?
Just like in that book, our problems were not caused by one single factor, nor even two, but by three different issues, all of which were causing us excessive downtime. Fixing any one or two of those problems was still insufficient, and that’s why it’s really hard to test and plan for such combinations of occurrences.
Tags:
support ticket,
tv ad,
science fiction,
single day,
Internet access
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Posted by The Random Blogger on Jan 8, 2012 in
Internet Marketing While browsing the ClickBank Marketplace for something, I came across the product CB Surge, which is a Firefox plug-in that annotates ClickBank results with various information, including some colour-coding that indicates whether it’s worth promoting or not.
Sounds like a good idea, in theory, but then you have to wonder how accurate it is…
…because CB Surge does not recommend promoting CB Surge!
You gotta love it!
Tags:
clickbank marketplace,
CB Surge
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Posted by The Random Blogger on Dec 25, 2011 in
Entertainment We occasionally watch re-runs of Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, and as with most shows, especially comedy, there are good parts and bad parts.
For those who don’t know this show, the format is that the host, Byron Allen, introduces four comedians and they talk about various issues – a sort of chat shows for comedians.
So, for what it’s worth, here is my take on what’s good about this show, and what’s not so good.
The Good:
- You occasionally get some really funny people on the show (e.g. John Roy, Katt Williams, Ralphie May, Sheryl Underwood, to name just a few), some of whom (e.g. John Roy) surprisingly never seem to have had their own Comedy Central special.
- With certain groups of comics, you get a real chemistry going, and instead of the comics just regurgitating parts of their regular stand-up act, they interact with each other and ad lib. (Note that this happens most frequently with the shows Byron Allen refers to as “Hot Chocolate”, which are those where all four comedians are black.)
The Bad:
- Byron Allen almost always introduces the show by saying something like “we have some very funny people for you tonight”. Isn’t that the whole point of the show – I mean, who the hell would watch a show full of unfunny comedians?
- There are (too) many occasions when he very obviously feeds his guests lines that serve no other purpose than to get them to present a small segment of their regular show.
- Amazingly, there are some shows where one or more of his guests hardly get to say a thing. In one show, in fact, one of the comedians never even opened his mouth, which is just plain rude on the part of the host.
- There are way too many adverts, even by US TV standards – maybe every seven minutes!
The Ugly:
- Byron Allen’s “jokes” that he inflicts on the audience before introducing the four comedians are really, really bad (and dated too).
Well, there you have it, and given that I appear to have listed more bad points than good, you’re probably wondering why I still watch it.
The truth is, there are some shows that are so weak that we end up watching another immediately afterwards (we have tons Tivo’ed) to see if we can “end on a high note”.
But in the end, it’s all a matter of balance – does the good material outweigh the bad material, not only in terms of quantity but quality too?
And for us, it does, which isn’t to say we don’t “speed-vision” through some of the more boring segments.
Tags: Comics Unleashed, John Roy, Sheryl Underwood, regular show
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Posted by The Random Blogger on Oct 26, 2011 in
Photographs,
Wildlife I meant to post this a while ago, but never got around to it (as usual).
Anyway, this is a photo of a moth that I took around midnight on 24 July 2011 on our back porch.
The wingspan of this giant, even with its wings folded, is about four inches.
If anybody knows what type of moth it is, please leave a comment, below.
Tags:
anyway,
giant moth,
back porch,
four inches
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Posted by The Random Blogger on Oct 22, 2011 in
Techy Stuff … the fact that the Gmail spam filter frequently classifies its own Google alerts as spam!
Doesn’t it know that you have to sign up to receive Google alerts, and that they are therefore unlikely to be unsolicited spammy emails?
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Posted by The Random Blogger on Oct 14, 2011 in
Entertainment While having a rare random browse around the web yesterday, I came across a site called Offensive Halloween Costumes, and while I didn’t really find the costumes offensive, it did get me to thinking about who the hell would choose to wear such stuff.
But let me back up a bit.
You see, I’m the sort of person who doesn’t even like wearing a party hat at a Christmas lunch, for example. (And I came in for a lot of stick from my former work colleagues for being the only person in the room not wearing their stupid paper hat!)
And if I think back to my childhood (which is getting harder and harder, the more distant that gets), I don’t think I enjoyed wearing them then either.
So, here’s my point: I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing any of the more traditional Halloween costumes (e.g. Batman, Dracula, Darth Vader), and I really can’t get my head around why anybody would willingly wander the streets at Halloween dressed in some weird costume.
But I accept I’m probably not normal in that respect (in many respects, actually).
Having said that, however, if you take a look at the site I found (the URL is http://OffensiveHalloweenCostumes.org/), you’ll find costumes that defy explanation.
For example who would want to be seen in public (or even in private by friends of family) wearing a costume that resembles a penis, a vagina, a tampon, a turd, or a condom?
The only costume I saw that I thought was both clever and funny, without being too ridiculous, was called Double Occupancy, but other than that, I think I’d have to be so drunk before I wore one of those costumes that I’d be too drunk to put it on in the first place.
Anyway, if you’re not easily offended and fancy a quick laugh, check it out – but don’t say I didn’t warn you!
Tags:
batman dracula,
paper hat,
party hat,
darth vader,
stupid paper hat,
double occupancy,
offensive halloween costumes
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