I created some blogs recently on the kind of stuff I’d like to read on sci-fi books and music reviews.

It was quite easy and having created some entries I hurled the blogs URL at Google and Bing and waited to see if any poor schmucks wanted to read them, and they did. Seemed that quite a few people read the entries via RSS feeds. There wasn’t much original content as the blogs were full of reviews I’d copied and pasted from other sites so they weren’t very SEO friendly. Think the search engines actually do some comparison of entries against other similar subject blogs entries and if my stuff isn’t original then you stay way down in the search engine results pages. Fair enough.

My net connection was crawling this morning so I rebooted the router and then both PC’s but it didn’t make any difference. Thought I’d check the service providers status page to see if it was their problem but my connection was so lousy I was getting timed out before the page had loaded. I then phoned them to listen to their sytem status messages but my area was supposed to be OK. I then resorted to the dreaded logon to the router to see if anything was up there. I hadn’t connected to the router for ages and couldn’t remember the correct settings anyway but I convinced myself that it looked OK. What I should do is take a screen dump of each of the routers setting pages and print the darn things off. Shoulda, coulda, woulda. That’ll never happen.

What else could I reboot? Aha..what about the cable modem. I’ve never powered that off in the last two years and gave that a go. Did that make a difference? You betcha. The net connection suddenly flew like it hadn’t for ages. It’s obviously been getting a bit slower for the last couple of months.

And the moral of the story? Once a month use one of the broadband speed testing sites to make sure you’re getting the connection you’re paying for and if not reboot stuff.

My cable modem/wireless internet connection on both my XP and Vista PC’s kept disconnecting so I’ve ended up using the ethernet cable. Hardly wireless ferchrissakes.

With the ethernet cable connection I usually get a 15-19mbps connection and with the flaky XP and Vista wireless connections I was getting between 3-5mbps. That is such a huge difference in speed I thought I’d better see if there were any upgrades for the Belkin wireless adapter drivers, for both machines. First I upgraded the XP PC and when I tested that connection speed I got at least 7mbps.

Then when I went to upgrade the Vista’s Belkin drivers I realised that the driver disk I used was a couple of years old and almost certainly not Vista compatible. It was a miracle it connected to the internet at all. I installed a Vista driver for the adapter and re ran the speed test and now I’m getting, an occasional connection speed of 15mbps, and usually at least 7mbps. Result.

I got an email from an agent the other day about a position not very far from where I live and spoke to him about it immediately. Apparently I was the first person to phone him about the position. I asked him how many people he’d emailed about the position and the answer was 1,500. I asked him about that and what kind of responses he got and he said he gets a lot of emails from a lot of annoyed people as job specs don’t match the clients. I bet they use some software where you punch in a couple of IT acronyms, hit the send control and everyone that contains a couple of the acronyms on their resume gets an email.

Fancied doing some geek reading and have just bought Secrets of RSS by Steve Holzner, Head Rush Ajax by Brett Mclaughlin and a Dummies book on Wordpress.