Rather than a crappy MC name, Megaline is the name of the company that now has the responsibility of providing our internet connection. Anyway, 20-something hours after being told that our new connection was live, and the new connection details, we eventually had an IP address once more. Changing from an internet network arrangement that utilized some servers before getting to the real ISP in use, to a simpler PPPoE connection had given me some hope in that there would be less packet loss, as less hardware in the chain generally means less to go wrong. Sadly, this has not been the case, with complete loss of data throughput occurring a couple of times today already. Although this only occurred when opening around 30 pages in FireFox at the same time as a torrent downloading, to see a decrease in network stability was not what I hoped for. I will be monitoring the connection over the next few days, to see if problems only occur under such ‘heavy’ usage, or if this is a regular occurrence. If this does happen often, there is probably not much I can do about it – even less that back in Britain in fact, as I can’t see much action being taken once any fault is reported.
Anyway, I now get an extra 3Gb per month before being throttled, the price is around four times cheaper, so I can’t really complain. But watch this space for further efforts of me trying my best anyway 😉
Dec 05 2007
Megaline Is In The House…
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Nov 19 2007
Burping For Real This Time
If you were sincerely upset by the misleading title of the Oz Equals Land Of Toxic Emissions? post, go and check out this site on burps and farts.
OK, so it is not the most mature of content for web sites to focus on, for sure, but if someone, somewhere wants to find information on something, you can almost guarantee a webmaster has already compiled just such a site, LMAO.
Sadly, I could not get the videos (such as Britney Spears belching) to work at all in either Internet Explorer of Firefox, but the audio files make up for that. If you find this all immature and not to your taste, just skip on to the next post.
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Oct 29 2007
Opening Links In A New Tab
For some reason, FireFox will no longer open links in a new tab, when I middle click on them. BUT only on this website, and only when looking at the public face of this site – within the admin area, all works as it should.
Has anyone else come across this problem? I am trying to think of any plugins I have recently installed that could cause this change. It is not exactly the end of the world, but it does interest me what could cause this behaviour…
Sep 20 2007
A Prime Example Of My Stubbornness…
The previous post took around 30 minutes to write, mainly because I was also doing a few other things at the same time. Having written the post, I hit the Publish button, and moved onto to clear down the work required on a few dozen other FireFox tabs, intending to return to the WordPress tab a little later.
For some reason I checked back on it before that. Lucky really – the post was lost, with a 406 error, I believe. Some issue with a suitable request not being issued or found… Anyway, simply returning back to the previous page just presented me with an EMPTY post page, with all my work missing. OK, so I’ve had similar problems before, clicked forward, and then F5ed, and the data has been re-posted correctly. So I tried this approach, unfortunately the same error returned. Before looking into this much further, I opened up Internet Explorer, and checked I could publish a test post there. (Didn’t want to do this within FireFox in case I cleared some sort of internal cache, and therefore lose all hope of recovering the work.) This new test post appeared fine.
I now had a choice, spend perhaps 10 minutes re-writing a post, as I still had the basic outline in my head, or… decide the PC was trying to annoy me on purpose, and rise to the challenge & beat the issue into submission.
Friends will not be greatly surprised to hear that I took the second route – and some twenty minutes later, recovered a version of the text, by sniffing the outgoing packets that were sent whenever I hit F5. Unfortunately the software I had installed to do this was rather rudimentary, with no filtering options, and as I had a lot of other pages loading and data being sent, it took a while to track down the right packets to analyse. Once I had searched for, and replaced, the silly codes (ASCII escape codes??), I had the post back again. OK, so it would have been simpler to just retype the thing, rather than start sniffing network packets, but it had been a while, and you can never tell when it might be useful 🙂
Then before this post was finished, we had a power cut. Luckily we have already replaced the last UPS we had, so I had enough time to hibernate the PC. The power came back 5 minutes later, the PC booted up, then decided it wanted to hibernate before it had finished booting. It hung for 5 minutes, before I hit restart. T.F. for FireFox’s ability to restore sessions when it senses your PC has become fubarred 🙂 Even our washing machine didn’t lose its programming, which was lucky, as I am doing some last minute washing, drying and ironing to get ready for Amsterdam and Britain. I’d already been delayed on that front by a few hours when our hot water went all orange again! Then Kara decided it was time to rid the shirt I am wearing of those evil adornments – buttons.
However, none of the above is going to bug me, I’m on my way to get severely relaxed, meet friends and family after a break of some 9 months, so I shall take it all in without getting too stressed. Oh, and Steve, a good friend from my Uni days back at Bournemouth has just got in contact through Facebook, my beautiful wife has just kissed me before going to bed, and I may even be in bed myself before dawns breaks, so the world could be in such a worse state for me right now 🙂
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Sep 07 2007
Language Differences
We went out tonight with Walton, as a belated birthday celebration for him. (I will post up some pictures when I get round to emptying the memory card again, hopefully tomorrow). One topic of conversation was the difference between UK English spelling, and how the Americans can not spell properly. OK, to be fair, I am pretty sure he defended his nation well, explaining that they know how to spell, it is just that UK English has too many un-necessary letters.
Seriously, I discovered tonight that I did not know the UK English spelling of some words, and that in fact he occasionally spells some words in UK English. For example, he would write arguement, where as the American spelling is in fact argument. It looks as though all these years of not bothering to change the default language of my spell checker has effected me, as I did not realise I had been spelling it in American English myself. In fact FireFox’s spell checker is set to UK English, and even it does not like arguement! Sometimes though, different words entirely are used, for example, in Britain, estate agents ‘help’ (sometimes) with the process of buying and selling houses, whereas in America the same job is performed by a person called a realtor. (Assuming they belong to the official realtor association).
OK, well I need to help organize my neighbor’s aluminum gray colored jewelry in the center of his apartment.
Or if you prefer to spell that as an English person…
I need to help organise my neighbour’s aluminium grey coloured jewellery in the centre of his flat.
Aug 24 2007
CNN Report On Nuclear Hangover In Kazakhstan
I watched an interesting short news item on the problems facing the area in Kazakhstan that was used by the USSR to test nuclear weapons. I was actually quite surprised at the tone used by people in the area, as I would have thought that they would feel more cautious talking to a foreign reporter about things like this. Anyway, catch it over at Yahoo News.
I just rechecked the video, and for some reason it is now playing at 50% of the intended height. This was in FireFox, I checked the same link in Internet Explorer 7, and didn’t have the same problem… If you have issues with the video, try switching browsers.
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Aug 17 2007
Help Requested
I have a blogger.com account, for when I come across blogs that don’t allow comments unless you have such an account. Since re-installing Windows, following a failed hard drive, blogger.com, and any blogs based there, including my own, have all the links and text in Russian. I think I have checked the usual suspects; Regional & Language settings in the control panel make no reference to Russia or Kazakhstan, FireFox itself has no Russian/Kazakh entries under the Advanced tab, under the general section, within the languages button. Ahh, that reminded me to check it under IE7, the same Russian links and text are there too, so it must be a global setting, rather than browser dependant.
I can’t think where else to look on this PC, nor can I think which settings I have changed compared to my pre-hard drive crash setup.
Anyone able to offer a suggestion?
Jul 17 2007
Spitoons
It is strange what concepts or ideas can sometimes inspire a post on my blog. A couple of meandering witterings ago, I mentioned I needed a spitoon having uttered two dirty words, as far as I am concerned at least. Anyway, as I was not sure how to spell it (in case you care, both spitoon or spittoon are apparently OK) , and I do not always trust FireFox’s built in spell checker, I popped over to Wikipedia, and bought up the page on spitoons.
Now, should the need ever arise, I can talk for, oh at least 30 seconds, on the subject of receptacles to spit into §. So why exactly did it fire my poor synapses momentarily? I think Kazakhstan needs a lot more public spitoons (or just plain rubbish bins) to prevent spit from just collecting on the pavements, and making otherwise respectable men look like British chavs in just a few seconds.
OK, what I really wish for is spitting to be frowned on a lot more over here, but as that has a snow flakes chance in hell of occurring, I would truly be happy if people just spat into something, rather than where I walk. It is like being back in the Lower High Street in Cheltenham. ahem, sorry, make that the ‘West End‘ LMFAO 🙂
OK, random suggestion over, just one more thing I especially liked – a quote from the Wiki
If you expect to rate as a gentleman
Do not expectorate on the floor
Now how do I say that in Kazakh, and where do I find taxi quickly enough afterwards to prevent a beating for being a smug self righteous bar steward 😉 ?
§ (Because we all know that anything found on the internet has to be true, don’t we 😉 )
Jun 04 2007
Virtual Dress Up Dolls
If you have a daughter, or young niece, you may want to check out the service offered at webkinz. The main concept is taken from dressing up dolls that many girls play with. One of the problems with this conventional manner of playing with dolls is the prohibitive cost of buying new dresses, tops and accessories for the dolls.
So, Cartoon Doll Emporium have digitized the whole process – your child simply chooses the base doll they want to work and play with, and the page then loads up all the options available.
Although the site is aimed at the ‘tweenie’ sector of the market, they have included some dolls that older girls may be interested in, for example see the doll I created below.
For the most part, the site is well constructed, though small children may well find it easier to move the clothing and accessories when viewing the site via Internet Explorer, rather than FireFox. If the item is further down the page than the doll, you need to drop the item, scroll up, pick it up and then drop it again, though this is probably unavoidable – the only way to make it all fit on one page would be to user smaller images, which wouldn’t be as interesting.
The final result can be saved, linked to and as you can see from above, referred to as an online image. If your daughter/niece has had enough of dressing dolls for one day, the site features other activities to keep themselves interested.
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May 29 2007
Homepages EXACTLY How You Want Them
Personally, I have about:blank as my homepage for both Internet Explorer and FireFox. Why? Two reasons, primarily because I only have a measly allowance of 700 Mb per month, and also because the application loads a little quicker when it only need to display a blank page at start up. (Has anyone else noticed IE7 still takes a silly amount of time to achieve this?)
However, if I was not data limited, I would have setup a personalized homepage over at NetVibes.com a while ago – you can either create an account there, and have your choices saved permanently, or if you prefer to experiment with it a little first, you can just rely on a cookie saving your preferences for a certain amount of time. (If you do settle on one design, do reg an account, else you risk losing your choices eventually)
Thanks to a postie over at the PPP forums for the heads up on this site, I’ve forgotten who you are, but if you leave a comment, I’ll gladly link to you 🙂
This post is NOT sponsored, I’ve just been meaning to write about it for a while, apologies for the delay…
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