My resume, which I had seriously rewritten recently and which needed to be displayed with the same look on my own domain’s web site, needed to be created in Dreamweaver and uploaded. I have my own domain but the company that provides me with that domain I don’t actually have any web space with but instead I use the web space provided by my ISP (Confusing or what. Ed).

How it works is that anyone that goes to my domain is forwarded to my ISP’s provided web space. For instance if anyone went to www.johnsmith.com they would be routed to and displayed page www.isp.com/johnsmith/index.htm. I checked my own domain’s URL to see what was displayed and it was my old resume that was on my web space hosted by my old ISP, which we stopped using a year ago.

I could try and phone them and get them to lose my old web space but I wasn’t sure how easy that would be bearing in mind that I was likely to get put through to a very confused call centre in another country. To stop the old resume being displayed I pointed my own domain’s URL at my web space with the current ISP, and finding that wasn’t easy. I set that up and then when I went to www.johnsmith.com I was displayed a default web page displayed by my current ISP. The default web page was displayed because I hadn’t yet uploaded a page to my web space.

I started Dreamweaver CS3, set up a site and told it about my current IPS’s web space, username and password. Created a ‘site under maintenance’ web site and attached a picture to it and uploaded it from within DW to the web space. On the 2nd attempt it worked. Dunno why it didn’t work the first time, just nothing happened. My other PC was showing the web space with the current default page. Hit F5 on that PC to refresh the page and, yippee, it showed my ‘site under maintenance’ web site with the picture.

Flushed with that success I thought I’d use Synctoy v2 to synchronise my iTunesmusic folder with another drive. My old iTunesmusic folder was on my XP PC and iTunes on that had been painful for several months as it kept showing missing music and podcasts, not that they were actually missing. I think this was probably an XP problem dealing with 40,000 files. Having moved iTunesmusic with its tracks, movies, podcasts and applications from the XP to the Vista PC, and it working for the last month, I’ve started uninstalling non-essential stuff on the XP PC. I had already uninstalled iTunes and the music folder was on its own 450gig USB drive so I formatted that and plugged that drive into the Vista PC with no problems. Now I had an empty drive to backup my iTunesmusic folder with Synctoy.

Downloaded Synctoy and let it install itself and the setup stalled. In fact the setup failed so badly I had to reboot Vista. Except it wouldn’t reboot, except in a restore mode. I ran the restore, which worked and retried installing Synctoy and this time it worked OK. Started it up and created a couple of folder pairs to sync. The first folder pair didn’t contain much data so ran that which sync’d ok. Started the 2nd folder pair, which was the iTunesmusic folder and that started OK and so far has sync’d 12,000 files. Couple more days to go.

I phoned the cable company again about their 20mb broadband service and got a slightly different story to the first call.

To ensure I understood exactly how it works I asked some pretty dumb and straightforward questions but managed to get some good answers. First off ‘Where do I plug the cable modem in?’. They give you some kind of splitter and you connect the cable modem to the cable for the TV, with the splitter. Well that made sense, except that the cable’s in the wrong room. Then ‘How do I connect a laptop to the cable modem?’. The answer was that they give you an ethernet cable. Oh. Then ‘It’s not wireless then?’. Nope (Well that’s 2 steps back. Ed). The guy did say that you can get a cable DSL router for wireless connectivity.

I had a look at a couple of sites and you can get a cable router for about $60 so that’s not so bad. I started looking at the specs of these routers and for about $120 you can get them with a greater range, I think one of them said it had a range of up to 100 meters which beats the whatsit out of our puny 50 foot range. I assume the cable router connects to the cable modem by a erm a …cable.

So what have we got? Cable access give me a 20mb fat pipe, no download limit (Oh yeah, use the BBC iPlayer 24 hours a day and we’ll see about that. Ed) and about 6 times the range I currently have. Hmmm…no brainer.

I phoned the cable company to sign on and asked for it to be installed by one of their guys, if for no other reason than I can pick his brain about this stuff. Being plumbed in tomorrow morning.

The good thing about it being a cable modem connection is that we can have that running in parallel with our existing BT ADSL connection so I can spend a few weeks testing the darn thing, before I pull the plug on BT, and making sure the Internet radio’s and iPhone work OK with it.

Now what can go wrong?

The news from the grapevine is that our client for the project software, that jumped ship last week, actually want to get hold of the source code and have a go at the software themselves.

This has got to be hugely embarrassing for our company as the developers are effectively being told leave the software alone as you’re no good at it and let us have a go. What the heck do the managers talk about when they have meetings about the feasibility of this. They can hardly say ‘no the client hasn’t enough expertise to do that software development’ when that is exactly what the client is saying about us. Both sides can’t be right but maybe one side is. Well that definitely isn’t our lot as we’ve already screwed up once. Jeez, those meetings must be squirmy.

Have moved the router back to its original position as moving it to two other phone sockets actually made the reception worse in that one of the internet radios dropped out even more and my WoW Vista PC also kept dropping the connection every 10 minutes. Dunno whether I need a fatter pipe or a signal booster. One thing I can try is to use a different router. A couple of months ago I did get a backup Linksys router which I have nominally setup i.e. there is no encryption, but it will connect. Maybe I should use that and see if I get the same problems.

I have started looking into possible other ISPs and it does appear that the most I’m going to be able to get on the phone line is 4mb, the speed at which it has now become stable. Therefore it is pointless for me to switch to another provider which uses the phone line for connectivity, unless it is solely for cost reasons. If I want to get quicker then it appears that I need to go for a cable modem and which I have read I can get a 20mb pipe. Unfortunately it’s with a cable company with a lousy reputation for support.

I started looking at some ISP comparison sites and drilled down to the bad reputation cable company’s customer feedback and lordy, lordy were some of the comments negative. A few, where there had been no problems, were excellent. Further reading made me realise that a lot of those comments that were good were where the user had been able to set up the system OK. In all instances all of the comments for reliability and speed were really good. Those comments that were bad were always for support.

Setting up these things is usually quite straightforward but if one step goes wrong then unless you understand this stuff, you are at the mercy of support people. Maybe those people that gave the good comments were tech savvy and were able to wire it up OK and had no need of support people and those that gave the bad comments just don’t know stuff, hence an almost immediate reliance on support people who probably made the poor users feel a bit inadequate.

To make the switching of ISPs justifiable I also need to get the cost down. If I get just the 20mb package then the monthly cost goes up marginally. If I add a landline then, due to the far better call allowance with a phone from the cable company, then the two items – ISP and phone – are in total cheaper than what we are currently paying with BT.

But can I trust the cable company to switch the phone number between the 2 networks or will they screw up and leave us connectionless for a couple of days?