Monthly Archive for September, 2008

BT to Be*

Published on 30 September, 2008. View Comments

Finally switched! After being locked into an 18 month slavery contract with BT, and being throttled virtually every night, I finally got dad to switch to Be*, so we’ve now gone from 6100kb/s or so in the mornings only, due to BT’s throttling, to 6900kb/s ALL the time, as you can see in the above screenshot. It’ll hopefully make a nice difference, as BT used to throttle the connection to a stupidly slow 200kb/s at night.

Anyway, good thing with Be is I have a static IP address, and, even better, you can request your own rDNS if you ask them, so instead of being *.zone3.bethere.co.uk, I could be anything.anydomain.com (as long as there’s an A record on said domain name pointing to my static IP).

Of course, the only thing I’m unhappy about is the fact that even though I’m under a thousand meters from the Stafford exchange, the downstream line attenuation is still a massive 46dB. Most likely, it’s because my specific telephone line goes some stupidly long distance because BT stuffed that up too. I wonder if it’s possible to get them to change it to another shorter line thingy? It’d be nice if they did, maybe then I could get more of the 24Mbit I should be able to get. :P

Is this bad?

Published on 25 September, 2008. View Comments

Right now, this is what I watch each week (currently airing):

  • 8 Out of 10 Cats
  • CSI: Miami
  • Fringe
  • Heroes
  • Friday Night with Jonathan Ross
  • Mock The Week
  • Prison Break
  • Rush
  • Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  • Without a Trace

Starting this week or in the next few weeks, I’m also going to start watching:

  • CSI
  • CSI: New York
  • Knight Rider
  • Survivor: Gabon

I’m also currently re-watching:

  • Las Vegas season 1
  • Lost season 2

And soon, I plan on re-watching / starting to watch:

  • 24 seasons 2 through to 7
  • Lost season 4
  • Supernatural seasons 1 through to 3

Now the question is…do I watch too much TV? Oh, and this isn’t including the 10 or so movies I have in my “to watch” queue. Nor does it include random TV shows that I decide to pick up, for example, someone suggested I watch “The Wrong Door”.

Argh

Published on 16 September, 2008. Closed

So, since my last post, I’ve since asked Jay, the sysadmin for TVF, to order a Chumby for me and post it to me in the UK. Actually, he got two, because JamieMc wanted one too. =P

Good news: it’s arrived in the UK.

Bad news: Parcel Force are holding them both hostage for £44 in fees. £14.12 in VAT and £8 for the “Parcelforce Clearance Fee”, which totals £22.12. As there are two of them, it’s £44.24.

This has ended up being annoyingly expensive. Chumby was roughly £98, plus I sent Jay about £15 extra to cover the postage. I still owe him $20 USD more, and now there’s this £22 fee, plus I need to pick up a £12-ish power adaptor from Maplins for the US voltage. So…that’s like £160. Perhaps it would have been cheaper to go for a weekend in Italy…