One thing that is certain about continuity (and normally proved right) : Things change and move on. They evolve. Continuity ceases or breaks eventually. Sometimes this brings change that is better, sometimes it's just different (=code for "maybe worse but we don't want to put it that way").

Its been a while but for a strange set of reasons I'm off travelling this week.  Some random and useless statistics have occurred to me:

• This will be the first time I've been on a plane for almost a year (a while back, 11 days was a long time)
• This will be the furthest I've been away since the girls were born in June 2008 (yes, further away than I was when they were born
• ... and the longest trip too (4 days / 5 nights)

Recently watching the BBC on Freeview I kept seeing "free Red for 6 Music". I pressed Red 'cos there was nothing else on and watched/listened to the La Roux / Heaven 17 session (http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/events/hub/artists/laroux-heaven17.shtml).

It seems that Parceforce is also affected by the Royal Mail post worker strike. Probably not really suprising but what is annoying is that Parcelforce are specifically telling customers that they are not affected. To quote directly from Parcelforce's website:

"It's business as usual for all Parcelforce Worldwide services during the current Royal Mail industrial action, so
you can continue to despatch your parcels with confidence."

I'm not sure what you can have confidence in!

I've been looking at the text of an NDA (for something completely unrelated to any work activity, I should add), which includes the clause that the recipients cannot even acknowledge that the NDA exists, despite the fact that the invitation to take part in the activity which will be covered by the NDA was advertised to a reasonably wide audience (and certainly to more people than will volunteer to sign the NDA) -- ie meaning the existance of the activity is known about by people under no obligation to keep it secret.

Some links to pages / items relating to Networking subjects

Thomson TG585 configuration
FreeSwitch - Quickstart download, build & configure on a new VM

Wireless
Wireshark article on capturing WLAN traffic

I've been trying to do some fancy stuff with my "BeBox" broadband router. The GUI makes the thing look quite restrictive in what it can do but really that's deceptive as it seems to be pretty powerfull little device. First up, reconfiguring the DHCP scope... strangely the GUI seems to allow you to add pools of addresses but not delete or edit existing ones. Maybe this is simply to ensure there is always at least 1 pool but there isn't even an obvious way to disable DHCP if you dont want it.

I've just found that Netstumbler wont work on Vista. For years I had it on my XP HP for occasional use. Now I need to use it more regularly (in part because the Vista UI for WLAN selection is so naff) and it wont work at all. Time to try Vistumbler

It's 3 years since I had a Vodafone phone ( well except for a £10/m SIM that I only had for 4 months for the quidco credit ). In the past I had reasonably good experience of it Vf for business use ... good coverage, reasonable customer service when needed. So it seemed a good choice for my new business phone.

Here's what their website says about their service : "Our aim is to help you as quickly and efficiently as possible."

Until now, a vista laptop was to me, similar to the attitude I had to kids till last year (when our twins were born):
- Something that seems OK for a few minutes, but thank the lord I can give it back to its owner

But now I've got a new laptop and it's got Vista on it. Aagh.

Vista, by default, asks before running anything that might use the network or reconfigure the system. So for me, that's pretty much every time I touch the damn thing (this 'feature' was turned off pretty quickly).

... so soon ....

Get far too much email? So do I... Hundreds on some day. How much do I actually need to read? Probably about 10-20% max. But the trouble is, you dont know if you need to know till you've read it. By when your time is already wasted.

I've been meaning to do this for some while now, but finally I got round to creating an Outlook Rule for this.

So now, any email where I'm on the Cc gets moved to a separate folder ("Cc-Junk") and marked as already read. I almost set it to just delete the email but I thought for the moment I'd just move it and see how it goes.

I was a Bulldog (/Pipex) customer till June 2008 when I bailed out instead of getting the "benefit" of being moved to Pipex Homecall. After leaving their custom, they still billed me a full months billing. Though they promised to pay me the money back, it took in excess of 11 calls to the Pipex "help" desk (contradiction) over a 5 month period before I actually got my money back. Either they are complely stupid, dumb and incapable of organising even finding a brewery (let along the preverbial knees-up) or this was a clear & deliberate corporate policy to provarocate in the hope that people would have enough and not bother claiming their money back. So £20 obtained for services-not-supplied isn't much as a 1-off, but do it to 10000 people and you've got a nice improvement to the bottom line...

My point - don't ever consider using Pipex/Tiscalli unless you want to be ripped off and have a quality of service that would try a saint.

After several years with my previous webhost, I decided a while ago to move to a different host.

It seemed like a simple thing to do, but it's a suprisingly complicated task to move just 2 domains and 1 webhosting service from one provider to another.

I wanted to move the website contact as well, and seeing as the whole excercise required builing the new hosting environment it was also a good opportunity to upgrade the hosting software to the latest version/

So quite a bit to do. Not to mention doing my day job and then there's the twins !