Modems And The Day Of The Triffids

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.

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Email Spam

It never ceases to amaze me how many spam emails I receive – every single day.

But what I don’t understand is why I receive some of them.

Let me explain…

When I sign up at a new website, I always create a specific email address that I only use for that site. For example, if the site were called “Make Millions In Seconds” (I just made that up), then I might sign up using an email address called makemillionsinseconds@mydomain.com

I do this to help me filter incoming emails, and generally keep track of them all.

So, here’s the question: how come I receive a ton of emails to address such as the sample one above, as they are only meant to be used for one site (or, in some cases, a number of sites run by one person)?

Are the spammers simply guessing these email addresses? Maybe they’re combining the names of popular websites and marketers with another list of harvested email addresses / domain names? Having said that, it would seem like they guess correctly an awful lot!

Are the site owners selling, renting their customers’ and subscribers’ email addresses? If this were the case, then an awful lot of people are doing this, based on how many spam emails I receive.

Are the companies who run the email and autoresponder services doing the same? I have to say that this seems unlikely, as many of these websites use big names such as Aweber to manage their email lists, and I can’t believe that these companies would risk their business for this sort of unethical practice.

Or is it that too many people and companies are not protecting their data, and it’s just being hacked by spammers with some clever data mining tools?

Of the various options I can think of, this last one seems the most likely, but if you have any better ideas, please leave a comment below.

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Paul Myers & TalkBiz News – A Man You Should Listen To!

I’ve been involved in various aspects of Internet marketing since 2004, at a guess, and I’ve seen many so-called “gurus” come and go.

I’ve subscribed, at one time or another, to most of their lists, and for reasons I’ll explain here, I’ve also unsubscribed from most of them.

You see, to me, it seems that most of these people might originally come out with something useful and/or good (although many don’t), but after that, and they’ve nothing else to offer, they all bombard you with the same emails promoting the latest “big thing”, just to try to make some affiliate commissions and get to the top of the league tables.

To me, if you’ve one thing to say, and you’ve said it, then that’s it. I really don’t want to receive dozens of emails all promoting the same product launch.

This is even more true when you realise that the stuff that has always worked will always work – without the need for loopholes and fads and fancy scripts, etc.

So after all this time, and after wading through (and mainly deleting) what must be thousands of emails, who do I still listen to?

Sadly, not very many of them.

But there is one person who is genuinely different (well, there are a few, but I may have to write about them some other time) …

… and his name is Paul Myers.

What makes Paul different?

Well:

1. He doesn’t send you a load of junk mail (aka spam) promoting stuff that he clearly hasn’t tested for himself.
2. He doesn’t send you one or more emails every single day, clogging up your inbox.
3. When he does email you, what he says is well-written, unique content that’s useful, educational, often humorous, and that offers a perspective that nobody else seems to offer.
4. When he does promote his own products, of which he has quite a few, then you can guarantee that they will be reasonably-priced (I think the most I’ve paid for anything is probably $27), and yet they offer much more value than most everything else I’ve bought (including the really expensive stuff too).

In fact, I positively look forward to receiving Paul’s emails – to the point that I wish he would write more frequently (although I accept that if he did that, the quality may not be sustainable, not that I feel that this would be a real problem for him).

So, do yourself a favour, head on over to TalkBiz News, and sign up for his newsletter.

Not only will you be glad you did, but you’ll also receive a free copy of his highly-acclaimed book, “Need To Know“.

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What I Learned Today

I’m starting a new category today, called “What I Learned Today”.

I’ve always believed that if I don’t learn something new, every single day, then that day has been wasted.

So, this new category is an attempt at documenting what it is I learned each day.

Now, remember, this blog is random thoughts and random posts, so there’s a good chance I won’t actually post something every single day.

This does not mean that I didn’t learn anything (and even if I do post, it doesn’t mean I only learned one thing) – it probably means I’ve not found time to write a post about it, as time is the one commodity I have very little of, given my other commitments and projects.

Anyway, maybe you’ll learn something from what I’ve learned, so enjoy!

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Earn Money Fast And Easy

There are thousands of people looking to break free from the humdrum 9 – 5 job every single day, and yet when they start looking online for ways to do this, there is so much information available that it’s overwhelming.

I’ve been in the Internet Marketing business for about five years now, in various guises, and I know that it’s getting harder, not easier, to find good information that you can trust and that actually works.

Let me just list a few of the many ways you can earn money online:

• Run an ecommerce site
• Affiliate marketing
• AdSense
• Create and sell your own information products
• MLM (aka Network Marketing)

Now, the problem with almost all of these is that you need a fair amount of technical knowledge (e.g. to build websites in the correct way) and marketing knowledge, and with the way that things are going online (e.g. more competition every day, Google changing its search algorithms on a frequent basis, the high cost of pay-per-click advertising – if you get it wrong), it really isn’t for beginners unless you have a sound plan and are willing to follow it, without distraction.

You see, that’s another problem with Internet Marketing – you’ll soon be inundated with the next best thing since sliced bread, and all this does is make you take your eye off the ball, and instead of moving forwards with what might turn out to be a good money-making project, you put it on hold (maybe indefinitely), while you try out that new thing you just bought.

And while you’re trying that out, something else comes along, and so the vicious circle continues, ad infinitum.

We actually had plans, when I left my well-paid regular job, and they fell apart almost instantly for reasons that are not relevant here, and we ended up running an ecommerce business.

Now, it’s much more rewarding than anything I ever did in my corporate life – saving dogs from horrendous deaths makes a genuine difference to the families we help – but I actually work longer hours now than I ever did.

Part of that is because it’s our own business, and that’s what tends to happen, and part of it is because the only real way to differentiate ourselves from our competitors is to offer 24 x 7 support to our customers – it’s greatly appreciated by those that make use of it, but it does mean our work and sleep patterns get all out of whack constantly.

So, bearing all of that in mind, what can the absolute beginner (or newbie, as they are unflatteringly called) do to earn an honest buck online?

Well, there is one way that most people could get started with almost instantly, and I’ve managed to obtain a FREE video for you that details (more or less) everything that you need to know.

The first thing you need to do is to download the following file to your computer, by right-clicking on the link and selecting the Save As… option.

• HowToMakeMoneyOnlineFastForDummies.wmv

Now, this file is 52MB, so it may take a while to download!

Once you’ve downloaded it, you’ll need to play the video, which is in Windows Media Player format, and most Windows computers will already have a version of this software loaded and ready to go.

So, grab yourself a drink, sit back and watch this video today – it could well be the catalyst you need to get yourself out of the rat race.

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Folder Guide – A Free Tool That Works!

Being a bit of a geek (or is that nerd?), I’ve installed no end of supposedly useful tools and applications on my various PCs over the years.

Most of them turn out to be nothing more than a novelty that gets tired very quickly, and so they get unceremoniously dumped soon afterwards.

But there is one free tool that I’ve had installed on my PC for a few years now, I use it every single day, and it really does save me loads of time, not to mention mouse-clicks!

It’s called Read more…

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