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.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT:


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Traffic Stacker – Viral Traffic Machine

Traffic Stacker is a relatively new site that claims to generate more converting web visitors and online advertising with very little cost or effort.

So, I decided to put it to the test.

The first thing I noticed was that the site looks very clean and professional, with an attractive look and feel, all of which helps make it easy to read and understand.

The sign-up process was very quick and painless, which was good.

I should warn you that although membership is currently free, they do offer two different upgrade options, although these are not necessary to gain the benefits.

Once you’ve activated your membership, which only takes a few seconds, then you’re straight into the Members Area.

As with the public pages, this is well laid out and intuitive, which means I was able to work out what to do after only a few minutes, and was able to get up and running in less than five minutes.

Once you’ve logged in, there are two main things you can do – create links and create ads.

To create a Traffic Stacker link, all you do is enter any URL (although I have found that, currently, it has problems with certain ones – I’ve raised a support ticket and they’re looking into it) and the system will transform it into a “Traffic Stacker” link for you.

You can also create a Traffic Stacker Ad, which you can use to promote anything you want, using the Generator tool.

And of course, you can create as many ads and as many links as you need.

The back office is organized nicely too – no hunting for stuff, as your five most recent links are displayed on the main page, for easy reference, while all of your links are shown in the order you created them.

Given that you’ll be using the Link Creator more than anything, that’s available right at the top of the page you get after you’ve logged in – another time-saver.

Once you’ve created your first ad and your first link, you can start to use Traffic Stacker to generate traffic.

How?

That’s easy too – as you may have expected by now.

Instead of promoting the original source link, all you need to do is promote the Traffic Stacker link that you generated.

Whenever somebody clicks on that Traffic Stacker link, the original page is loaded, and then, a second or two later, there’s a neat little ad that slides up at the bottom of the page.

This ad displays another member’s ad, as well as a link back to Traffic Stacker that contains your affiliate URL.

What this means is that, if anybody should click that Traffic Stacker link, they’ll be taken to the main website, and should they sign up, they become your referral.

This is a fantastic viral feature, because you can build a downline without even really trying, just by using the site to promote your own products or affiliate pages.

So, how do your own ads get displayed?

Well, whenever that little slide-up ad window appears on your pages, you earn credits that will in turn allow your own ads to be displayed on the ad windows that appear on other people’s sites.

The more clicks you get on your Traffic Stacker links, the more your ads will get displayed.

Don’t forget too that this is a viral tool – when you do grow your own downline, whether that’s by promoting Traffic Stacker or just by using it and having people click on your affiliate link, then you earn credits on their link clicks too, up to five levels deep.

That’s a ton of additional free ad views you can get, just by using the service.

I have to confess that I only recently signed up for this service, so I can’t, in all honesty, say how much extra traffic having a large downline actually generates for you.

But the rest of the service performs exactly as they claim – somebody clicks my links, credits are added to my account, and then my ads get displayed.

And BTW, Traffic Stacker keeps tracks of things like clicks and ad displays for you, which was not even advertised as a feature.

If all of that weren’t enough, there is one more feature that makes this a no-brainer – you can email your downline with your own offers, promotions, etc.

Now, you can use this system to send out millions of spam emails – it’s tightly controlled so that you don’t annoy your downline with too many messages, and the system does show you how long it will be before you can send out your next email.

Overall, Traffic Stacker seems like a very simple, robust and usable service – reminiscent maybe of some of the systems from a few years ago, but vastly improved and consequently much more valuable.

In conclusion, I highly recommend you take Traffic Stacker for a test drive!

BELIEVE IT OR NOT:


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