Home » Discussion Forums » Blog Post Discussion » Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology
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| Re: Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology [message #49055 is a reply to message #49053 ] |
Sun, 08 April 2012 21:29   |
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Your comment about the phone lines always being bad connections rang alarm bells, not sure if anyone has mentioned this before but unless you have had fibre installed (which Im fairly sure you havent) then your broadband is sent over your copper phone lines
So if your standard phone line is crappy due to interference, then that has a direct affect on your broadband performance, it will likely manifest as random disconnects all over the place and sometimes trouble getting connected.
Sound familiar?
I had the same problem but here in NZ when they lay cable to the house they do it in two pairs of cable, so they switched to the other pair (and cut about 3 m of damaged cable off) and my performance was much better. Not sure if that is an option for you in the UK?
Also I recommend (if you havent already) getting a Powerboard with a powerfilter in it *and* ports for your phone lines to plug into. If its that bad, then it may spike badly enough over time to damage your router or anything else electrical plugged into it
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| Re: Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology [message #49056 is a reply to message #49053 ] |
Sun, 08 April 2012 22:27 |
EMoon
Messages: 669
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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If having us feel tortured with your Mystery Fun was the goal, then yes, I feel tortured. Silent but intense screams of agony are even now wafting across the land between here and the Atlantic and will soon be wafting across the ways, you-ward, to give you the satisfaction of knowing your torture plan was successful.
Aside from that...due to my few but intense years in the USMC, when I was in charge of a small programming group doing Vital Work for the Nation (we were trying to get age-old accounting records out of green steel file cabinets guarded by Miss M, who was ancient and territorial, into a form that would mean the bills actually got paid...while using computers so primitive, compared to today's netbooks, that any software using a 100K (K, not M or G) partition was banned) I have Secret Words of Power to land on bright young things who dare consider me a Silver Surfer. (No, dear child, I have said, I was not taught to use my PC to file recipes by someone your age. I programmed 1401s in Assembler, infant, and you would lick my toes and beg mercy if YOU had to locate the single misplaced comma in a core dump covering the entire floor, when the only tool we had was eyes on the code and you had to follow your chunk of input data to find out what happened to it. I gave up programming to write science fiction, so take your condescending dear-little-granny attitude and stuff it up a rocket and fire it off to some other galaxy.)
In reality, I had two geniuses in my unit, much better coders than I was (both would now be my age, if still alive, and I relish the thought of someone telling the former SSgt J-P- that he was a Silver Surfer. More than heads would roll. I was good at the logic end, but the finicky side of coding (including using a keypunch) was not my strong point. But all those black/brown/blond headed surfers who think they invented all this are going to be silverheaded or bald someday, and then...HA!
(We silver-heads get excited so easily about these things...)
Technology that doesn't work like it's supposed to...and people who are sure it would if you only did what they tell you, which you have done, and redone, and redone again...annoy. it's so frustrating. People tell you, Oh, this is EASY--anyone can do it--and then your tech, snickering evilly in its plastic case, refuses to let you do it, and you get the blame. Though I strongly suspect your phone line. Sympathy.
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| Re: Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology [message #49067 is a reply to message #49053 ] |
Mon, 09 April 2012 10:55 |
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 serenityruler
Messages: 16
Registered: March 2012
Location: United States |
Junior Member |
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My understanding of Silver Surfer is a villain in the Fantastic Four, and personally, any chance to be connected to comics can be fun. My friends and I had a whole superhero/supervillain Halloween once right when we were getting to that age where it was kinda inappropriate to trick-or-treat anymore.
As for the surprise, I'm intensely interested. Because the reader forum is detached from the blog itself, I'm not sure if the blog exists to create conversation or just to hear from Robin. It has to be her style and humour in the writing seeing as it isn't excerpts from the books or exclusively book related subjects. Hmmmm....
As for Skype, it totally does hide the chat function. It is the only way for me to keep in touch with my Dad back in the US while I'm in the UK. He, too, is permanently logged in and he rarely checks his email, so I never know what to do if he doesn't answer the call at the agreed time. He never sees the IMs I send... Rawr, Skype. (I had to teach him how to use a USB drive to save his recipes though. Hilarious whoever mentioned that)
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| Re: Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology [message #49072 is a reply to message #49067 ] |
Mon, 09 April 2012 16:39 |
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Corellia
Messages: 111
Registered: June 2010
Location: Norway |
Senior Member |
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I love skype! I've got relatives in other countries, and a boyfriend on Svalbard (Ny-Ålesund to be exact, a place which even bans cell phone use...), and skype is a life saver. With skype, we can sit chatting, or just doing stuff in companionable silence, for hours every night. Without skype, I would be broke because of high phone bills 
Skype mostly works for me (most techonolgy mostly works for me (knocks on wood) but sometimes it benefits from a good scolding....)
By the way, I picked up my new dog yesterday, after a rather hellish journey, and I might possibly get a guest post out of it. How often do you look through ads for dogs to find the son of your late and very beloved dog?
[Updated on: Mon, 09 April 2012 16:43]
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| Re: Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology [message #49074 is a reply to message #49053 ] |
Mon, 09 April 2012 20:52 |
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Ah, Skype. I use it with some people, and it usually works . . . okayish. I don't love it, but for some friends (and family), it's the best option, even though the program is fiddly and the quality of audio and visual isn't the best.
Definitely curious about your New Idea!!!
Smooshes!
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| Re: Jolly jolly jolly jolly Easter technology [message #49080 is a reply to message #49061 ] |
Mon, 09 April 2012 23:59 |
EMoon
Messages: 669
Registered: March 2009 |
Senior Member |
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Diane: Assembler, COBOL, and a couple of really nifty early database management software names that were ditched by the Corps because they took up a whole 100K partition on what was then an impressively huge 360. Remember JPL? (Not Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but Job Programming Language...) I hated Assembler with a purple passion, because I'm a lousy keypuncher and thus mistyped things. COBOL wasn't much better but at least when you compiled it, it would tell you more or less where you went wrong, instead of having the floor of my room in the BOQ covered with a core dump printout. As I said, I was really good with the flowcharts and the logic, and not so with the actual coding.
What we did was create a relational database management system out of a paper system for two different accounting messes, one that had to manage some hundreds of thousands of records and one that handled somewhere around a million. And could generate reports for Congresscritters who asked things like "How many E-3s and under shipped overweight household goods in the last 12 months?" or "On what dates did John Doe utilize military air transport and who were the providers?" or "Did the President's son-in-law (then a Marine officer) ship overweight household goods to his next assignment after he married the President's daughter and charge it all to the Corps?" (On the last: No, he paid the overage charges promptly.)
With records limited, of course, to 80 letters-or-numbers. We did it first in one of the newer chunks of software, then were told--no, you can't use that, it takes the 100K partition--do it in COBOL which takes only 56K. You used COBOL--you can imagine that that conversion was like. Not written as a database management software at all. I pretended I'd never heard of COBOL during the whole Y2K panic when people were trying to find COBOL programmers and bring them back into service. No. Not entering that madness again.
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Despite the presence of multiple towers in our area, our cell phones are mostly non-functional at the house because we don't get a signal. I assume we are in a hollow or something. And the landline doesn't need charging and works if the power goes out, and it can't be hacked. (And, like Robin, I give my cell number to VERY FEW people.)
Do you have any guidelines for guest posts?