Posts from April 2006

I have started a book club. I am the only member. I realise that this is a little unusual but I prefer to choose the books myself rather than someone else (or even worse, the Daily Mail).

I held my first meeting last night which was very well attended by all members. Norman gave a fascinating review of 'Into Thin Air' by Jon Krakauer. This book was written by a journalist and experienced climber who took part in a commercial, guided expedition to climb Mount Everest in May 1996. After reaching the summit, bad weather struck resulting in the death of eight climbers from three different expeditions.

Interestingly, although the author achieved his goal and succeeded in reaching the summit (shortly before the storm struck), there is hardly any euphoria or pleasure only the grim realisation that he is half way there, the descent is dangerous and his physical condition is deteriorating fast with the demands of the high altitude and the lack of oxygen.

Even though I am not a climber - in fact, I don't really like heights (I once had to be assisted from the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver by two ten year olds) - I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was well written and compulsive reading. The story of the expedition unfolding, the ascent, the mix of characters and the personal and honest account of the ultimate series of tragic events is very sad and truly mesmerising.

I am lazy. I buy my gas from British Gas and my electricity from Seeboard. It takes a lot for me to overcome my inertia and change provider to save money.

However, I am interested in Carphone Warehouse's offer of 8M/bit broadband, unlimited UK landline and international (28 countries including Australia) calls, all for 21 GBP per month.

This is much less than I am currently paying Telewest for an inferior package of telephone and broadband services.

The only downside I can see is that the contract is for 18 months. Obviously a lot depends on the quality of service Carphone Warehouse can provide to this influx of new subscribers but worth keeping an eye on.

PS. Well I was interested but I just entered my phone number and postcode to be told 'Your telephone number is not on a BT exchange so we can't offer you TalkTalk'.

So that is why Carphone Warehouse can only offer coverage to 70% of the UK.

Absolutely no-one has ever asked me: Norman - why dont you start a photo blog of all these interesting places you visit ?

So here we go. No. 1 in a very occasional series.

The Sage Gateshead in Newcastle (from the Tyne Bridge)

You start to feel small and insignificant. [ Via Populicious ]

I enjoyed these quotes from airline staff with a sense of humour (via Tom Kyte).

A couple of years ago, I was on a British Airways flight that was making its final approach to some anonymous airport in Scandinavia.

Quite suddenly and without any warning, the landing was aborted. The plane stopped descending, quickly started to climb, levelled out and then resumed a familiar, circular holding pattern.

I was a little perturbed but no-one else seemed bothered as though this was perfectly normal so I stopped screaming, apologised to my immediate neighbours, dabbed the sweat from my brow with a napkin and picked up my copy of 'High Life'.

The pilot announced:

'Ladies and Gentlemen. You have probably noticed that we have been unable to land and are in a now holding pattern. This is because the aircraft in front struck a bird during landing and the ground staff are currently clearing the runway of debris so it is safe for us to land. British Airways apologises for the delay to your onward journey and the inconvenience caused. However, please spare a thought for the poor bird.'

Of course, the last sentence was my input but what a glorious, wasted opportunity.

I go away to spend a few days sitting on the UKs gridlocked motorway network and I discover those chaps at WordPress have been making yet more changes.

The Regulus theme has been upgraded to 2.1.1 and now includes bug fixes, support for sidebar widgets, personalised header graphic and lots more besides.

In addition, every single post is now prefixed by 'Posted by Andy C'. This is completely superfluous in my case and I would dearly like to turn it off. This is my personal blog. Who else is going to be posting to it ?

Also, the categories and 'Add comment' now appear at the top of the article rather than the bottom which I also dislike intensely as it adds distracting clutter.

WordPress have also added feed statistics which is a welcome addition although the statistics are not as comprehensive as those provided by FeedBurner so I'll continue to keep the Feedburner feed alive for now.

Oh - and before you all jump to signup at once - WordPress had an outage over the Easter weekend.

Buoyed by my recent, successful firmware upgrade of my Linksys wireless router, and for the sake of completeness, I decided to upgrade the driver software of the Linksys Wireless USB adapters to the latest version (2.0.2).

In addition, prompted by my wife's perceptive question of 'Is it not working because someone has hacked into it ?', I also decided to increase the security on my embryonic wireless network by disabling SSID broadcasts and enabling MAC address filtering so only specified PC's can connect.

Apologies to all my neighbours. This is probably undue paranoia on my part but if only you could have provided demerara sugar instead of fobbing me off with caster sugar all those years ago, none of this would have been necessary.

These simple configuration changes and software upgrades went surprisingly smoothly. Until, of course, I came to complete the very final task of upgrading the driver of USB adapter #2. This USB adapter is identical to the (upgraded) USB adapter #1, was purchased around the same time and was working perfectly on the old 1.x driver.

Inevitably, when I upgraded this driver, it stubbornly refused to connect to the wireless network. I uninstalled, reinstalled, rebooted, reinstated the original driver to confirm the adapter was still working in the new wireless configuration but, still no joy. So this irritating minor issue will now continue to nag away like a dripping tap until I can be bothered to revisit it.

I have been experiencing more wireless weirdness recently. What once was stable and reliable has become increasingly sporadic, unreliable and damned irritating for no obvious reason.

I am not a networking sort of guy. I am not particularly interested in wireless networking. I use WEP in an effort to secure my network and stop my neighbours piggy backing off it but that's about it.

I am ashamed to admit that, on one occasion, when my wireless network was broken, I briefly piggy backed on an unsecured network just to temporarily solve the problem.

I am even more ashamed to admit that, on another occasion, I simply unplugged the USB wireless adapter and just plugged it into an alternative USB port. Coincidentally, this just happened to work and I thought I had somehow miraculously addressed the problem (but deep down inside, I knew I hadn't).

Anyway, my kids have been moaning about this intermittent access to the internet for a while (can't play World of Warcraft, can't access email, can't use MSN, can't do homework etc etc) but today there was an important new development with very severe and wide reaching implications.

I was affected. I was trying to work from home and couldn't because my VPN connection kept dropping as I got kicked off the network.

Time for action. Could this action be completed in five minutes ? Probably not but let's have a go anyway.

I connected my laptop in directly to the Blueyonder cable modem with an Ethernet cable and the internet connection is fine. No need to waste anyone's time by calling Telewest technical support.

Then I connected the laptop directly in to a wired port on the Linksys wireless router and, again, the connection is rock solid.

So I head over to www.linksys.com and register for an account as a precursor to searching the FAQ and support forums. Then I register the wireless router so I can check the latest available firmware version for this model - WRT54G (V2.0).

The latest firmware version is 4.20.7 (dated 25 August 2005). I check the current firmware version and am surprised to discover that I am running version 2.02.7 which dates from the 2004 Jurassic period.

Ooh - how exciting. A difference of two in the 'major' version number for the firmware. Why this is akin to upgrading from Oracle 8i (RULE) to Oracle 10g (ALL_ROWS) ! I immediately download the software and briefly pause for a moment to read the dire warnings on the Admin screens about 'Only upgrade the router firmware if you are experiencing problems'.

I fleetingly worry that this is an American company and I stupidly reside in England so the firmware may be incompatible and could break absolutely everything. Then I take a sharp intake of breath and I press the inviting 'Upgrade the firmware now' button.

The firmware upgrade is successful ! There are some new menu options visible on the Administration screens. The firmware version is now listed as version 4.20.7.

I reconfigure to Channel 7 as Channel 11 is so 'last year' and also limit connections to 802.11G only.

Everyone is reconnected, connectivity is much improved and very stable with no drop outs thus far. Service to the InterWeb is restored !

Last night, I flew to Stockholm airport. I stayed overnight in a hotel at the airport.

Today I went to a meeting in a conference centre at Stockholm airport. I talked, listened, answered a few questions and asked a few questions.

Then I flew home from Stockholm airport.

18 hours in Stockholm and I never left the airport complex. Weird.

This may be contrary to corporate blogging guidelines but still...

Just had the formal feedback from my annual review and it is excellent news.

Seeboard - monthly bill down to £38 (down from £60) per month.