Happy New Year first of all. :)
Notes: - kill the guy across the street who shot rockets out of hand, nearly got hit by one and definately got deafened there for a second.
- If you plan on buying (postal) stamps for such a thing like real life mail, do so BEFORE the 31st. Lots of places usually closed that sell them then, also going to the post office far off in the city can be quite exhausting if the following point is the case:
- It snowed. Snow turned to mud. It froze again. Streets and Sidewalks = messy place of slide-around, and since it hasn't snowed in a couple of days, no one cares about the sidewalks anymore in regards of clearing/throwing salt on them. So they are really really really slippery. >.<
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Cable-Salad a.k.a. Back in Action (for now)
Last night the service guy from Telecom finally appeared, and in the end figured out that 2 cables have been jammed both in their box in the basement aswell as in the box in our room. Now for tech-savvy people it might sound reasonable, because jammed cables usually don't transmit data too well.
However, I fail to see how jammed cables are the reason, if - for weeks it works fine - but out of the blue it stops working properly, i.e. Sync-/DSL loss, with the connection coming back after a minute or two. I mean, if cables were really that jammed, it (technically) should not work at all. But since it worked sometimes, I still don't trust that matter. Or maybe cables unjammed on their own for no specific reason, just to go back to the jammed state hours/days/weeks later. The last person that had actually touched the cables before (and found them to be "ok") was this very same service technician. Maybe he went around our house and jammed the cables out of boredom just so he has to fix something. Or perhaps some neighbor (and the people that live here probably have even less a clue about telephone/internet stuff than myself and are all considerably older than I am) went around and jammed some cables for fun.
Who knows?
Could have been the rats too..oh wait, we don't have any. And not sure they'd particularly jam cables (rather than bite them through anyway).
However, I fail to see how jammed cables are the reason, if - for weeks it works fine - but out of the blue it stops working properly, i.e. Sync-/DSL loss, with the connection coming back after a minute or two. I mean, if cables were really that jammed, it (technically) should not work at all. But since it worked sometimes, I still don't trust that matter. Or maybe cables unjammed on their own for no specific reason, just to go back to the jammed state hours/days/weeks later. The last person that had actually touched the cables before (and found them to be "ok") was this very same service technician. Maybe he went around our house and jammed the cables out of boredom just so he has to fix something. Or perhaps some neighbor (and the people that live here probably have even less a clue about telephone/internet stuff than myself and are all considerably older than I am) went around and jammed some cables for fun.
Who knows?
Could have been the rats too..oh wait, we don't have any. And not sure they'd particularly jam cables (rather than bite them through anyway).
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Logic it makes none..
Today, 26th of December 2010 I ran into a couple of issues regarding Telecom, Blizzard, Microsoft and the BBC.
TELECOM: Now, why on earth - believe me, it makes no sense at all - is our internet connection (DSL 16000) cutting out again when doing a phone call - or accepting one. I mean come on, it is DSL...and cases of Internet simply just disappearing when using the phone haven't been around since ISDN. Then again, DSL kept disappearing like that a few months ago already, but it got fixed (how, I don't know) then started re-appearing again on the 6th/7th December for a few days straight. around the 20th or so the problems seem to have vanished, but they re-appeared last night. So now when you use the phone again - DSL will be cut off, router has to re-sync, etc.
BLIZZARD/MICROSOFT: Today after I rebooted (and no, I did not change a thing) World of Warcraft decided to not work anymore. Worked last night. Now it said I wasn't connected to the Internet. I was, actually had some sites open in Firefox, reloaded them, they worked. So I went a-check-ing for my WoW issue. Lots of sites suggested to either re-install or repair WoW - couldnt' be arsed since it did work last night and I made no changes at all, plus, I did try to run the repair option, which also told me that it could not connect to the Internet. I checked further, other sites were talking about router/firewall/port/proxy settings, which were also of no use, since there aswell, I did not change anything. I searched further. Apparently my issue was related to IE not working. Hm..I don't even use IE, but went checking, and indeed it did not seem to be able to connect to any sites. How come? I mean, Firefox and other applications work fine and are online. So wtf was it that IE is doing (or not doing). Fixed it, IE works now, and so does WoW. Weird. Should have an option to interact with my standard browser rather than IE because honestly - who in the world (other than Bill Gates maybe) cares about or uses IE? And who would actually find out that a program they don't even use at all is not working and thus causing other programs to not work aswell.
BBC: Last but not least I'd like to complain about the British Broadcasting Corporation. Sure, their stuff and interviews are good. I like to watch them. However, my PC is not really capable of streaming 200+MB of video to have it play without interruption. So I prefer to download the file and watch it from harddisk. Now that is a problem for 2 reasons. Firstly, I'm not in the UK. Proxy Servers don't support videos. So using something else. Can watch the video, as stream. Now streaming is bad for above reasons. So figured out a way to download it. Download itself worked ok. Trying to open it I get a wild mess of fancy colors, but not the video I would like to see. So I figured out after some searching that the video has DRM protection. But why? It is a video, an interview, that was broadcast on TV over there. So imagine I would have been there (England) at the time of the broadcast, I could have taped it or something. But I wasn't. So download was the only good way for me. And normally, I would be able to play it fine if I had the licence, which of course it won't give to me, because I am not in the UK. I mean, it is just a simple interview with Julian Assange, I wouldn't sell it to anyone or reproduce it or anything, simply because no one cares anyway. >.< But I would love to see it in full, which is not possible through streaming due to crappy PC and I can't watch the download due to DRM license restrictions that it only works for UK people. Now, if they don't want to get their news out to the world, then they may as well take their site off the Internet, or make it so only people in the UK can view their entire site at all. But putting something on their site for only UK people to see which also interests other people...is silly. (If anyone in the UK has seen/downloaded the DRM license for http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xnblc/BBC_News_Special_Wanted_for_Questioning_Julian_Assange/ I'd be grateful if they could give me their DRM key file, so I can actually watch the downloaded version of it (mobile or Media Player doesn't matter which. :)).
TELECOM: Now, why on earth - believe me, it makes no sense at all - is our internet connection (DSL 16000) cutting out again when doing a phone call - or accepting one. I mean come on, it is DSL...and cases of Internet simply just disappearing when using the phone haven't been around since ISDN. Then again, DSL kept disappearing like that a few months ago already, but it got fixed (how, I don't know) then started re-appearing again on the 6th/7th December for a few days straight. around the 20th or so the problems seem to have vanished, but they re-appeared last night. So now when you use the phone again - DSL will be cut off, router has to re-sync, etc.
BLIZZARD/MICROSOFT: Today after I rebooted (and no, I did not change a thing) World of Warcraft decided to not work anymore. Worked last night. Now it said I wasn't connected to the Internet. I was, actually had some sites open in Firefox, reloaded them, they worked. So I went a-check-ing for my WoW issue. Lots of sites suggested to either re-install or repair WoW - couldnt' be arsed since it did work last night and I made no changes at all, plus, I did try to run the repair option, which also told me that it could not connect to the Internet. I checked further, other sites were talking about router/firewall/port/proxy settings, which were also of no use, since there aswell, I did not change anything. I searched further. Apparently my issue was related to IE not working. Hm..I don't even use IE, but went checking, and indeed it did not seem to be able to connect to any sites. How come? I mean, Firefox and other applications work fine and are online. So wtf was it that IE is doing (or not doing). Fixed it, IE works now, and so does WoW. Weird. Should have an option to interact with my standard browser rather than IE because honestly - who in the world (other than Bill Gates maybe) cares about or uses IE? And who would actually find out that a program they don't even use at all is not working and thus causing other programs to not work aswell.
BBC: Last but not least I'd like to complain about the British Broadcasting Corporation. Sure, their stuff and interviews are good. I like to watch them. However, my PC is not really capable of streaming 200+MB of video to have it play without interruption. So I prefer to download the file and watch it from harddisk. Now that is a problem for 2 reasons. Firstly, I'm not in the UK. Proxy Servers don't support videos. So using something else. Can watch the video, as stream. Now streaming is bad for above reasons. So figured out a way to download it. Download itself worked ok. Trying to open it I get a wild mess of fancy colors, but not the video I would like to see. So I figured out after some searching that the video has DRM protection. But why? It is a video, an interview, that was broadcast on TV over there. So imagine I would have been there (England) at the time of the broadcast, I could have taped it or something. But I wasn't. So download was the only good way for me. And normally, I would be able to play it fine if I had the licence, which of course it won't give to me, because I am not in the UK. I mean, it is just a simple interview with Julian Assange, I wouldn't sell it to anyone or reproduce it or anything, simply because no one cares anyway. >.< But I would love to see it in full, which is not possible through streaming due to crappy PC and I can't watch the download due to DRM license restrictions that it only works for UK people. Now, if they don't want to get their news out to the world, then they may as well take their site off the Internet, or make it so only people in the UK can view their entire site at all. But putting something on their site for only UK people to see which also interests other people...is silly. (If anyone in the UK has seen/downloaded the DRM license for http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xnblc/BBC_News_Special_Wanted_for_Questioning_Julian_Assange/ I'd be grateful if they could give me their DRM key file, so I can actually watch the downloaded version of it (mobile or Media Player doesn't matter which. :)).
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