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.   

The Led Zeppelin at Knebworth DVD was delivered the other day and again its taken from the video screens and does it rock?

You bet it rocks. The color is a bit saturated in places but then that’s due to the lightshow, I assume. I was watching it on a normal sized TV but it was so good I have just put it on the 42″ widescreen with sound through the stereo and it’s really awesome stuff. Over The Hills And Far Away sounds good with the great Bonham bass drum thump that was on the How The West Was One CD. Still watching this. Update later.

Makes you wonder what other concerts of their’s had video screens. I don’t think video screens were used before about 1975 so if anything prior to then is to be sold by Amazon then it would have to have been filmed. I wonder if there’s anything from the 1980 Europen tour? 

I’ve just seen that this DVD is also for sale at play.com and has got 8 ot of 9 lousy reviews for sound and picture quality. Same with Amazon, most people thinks it’s a rip off and rubbish quality and give it 1 or 2 stars. They maybe right but I’m just glad to see the darn thing and at $12 for 1 hour 41 minutes of great music, jeez, what are they complaining about.

I went to this show.

I just had a call from an agent about a position with a testing company who only take on the creme-de-la-creme, well that’s what the agent liked to think. The agent sent me the job spec and said he’d phone later and ask me what percentage fit I thought I would be with the company.

The job spec came through and appeared OK. The agent phoned later and asked me what I thought so I told him it appeared to fit with what I do. The agent didn’t like that answer and responded that I’d failed him and he was disappointed. The agent then said ‘do you remember the question I asked you on our previous phone conversation?’. He actually wanted a percentage figure for the me and company fit. ‘OK 80%’. 

The agent then went on to mention a team leader position, which wasn’t mentioned on the job spec, and which position did I think I would prefer. I responded ‘either’. The agent pushed and I said the team leader position as I was likely to gravitate to that position. He then said that ‘the job spec is specifically for a technical tester why do you want to do the team leader position?. Because he had widened the scope of the positions available and wanted an answer to that question.  Talk about bloody minded and arguementative. The agent then said ‘you are obviously leaning towards a management position and aren’t really a hands-on tester’. Give me strength. Hands-on testing is virtually all that is on my resume, and 18 years of it. But no he was having none of it I was a manager and that was that. He also said he didn’t like the way the conversation was going (HE didn’t? Ed).

Last week I was accused of being a developer and this week a manager. Earlier I had mentioned to the agent that some people get a bit intimidated by my experience and to bear that in mind. I was trying to be helpful but he didn’t like how that sounded and it was obvious that the whole application was going to fail and looking back I think that was the agent’s aim.

The agent received my resume and I suppose had to consider it as I had all the right experience. Just too much of it, and he was trying to get me out of the picture because that very experience was just too much for the creme-de-la-creme company. So he got rid of me by saying that I was a manager. Tiresome little man. I think I remember I had a conversation about that same company a year or two ago with a similar result.

I removed a few other bits and pieces from this blog and have got the load time down to just under 2 seconds and that’s probably as fast as I’m going to get the page to load.

Got to level 60 in WoW.