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.   

Somebody at Wordpress got upset with this blog awhile back and suspended the Wordpress version, as opposed to this the self hosted version, because it had photos from Flickr on it.

I did offer to remove the Flickr photos from the Wordpress version but they had noticed that the Wordpress version linked to this version which was a mirror image and therefore also had the same photos. The Wordpress administrator, I assumed that’s what he was, said that if I removed the photos from my own hosted version he might consider de-suspending the Wordpress version. Generous soul.

I think they have actually managed to contact some of the Flickr account holders to let them know I am using their photos as two have contacted me. Dunno if they were trying to upset the Flickr account holders or me. Of the two who contacted me both asked me to put a link back to the originals, which I have done. Don’t know what Wordpress’s problem is. Don’t they know that people put photos on Flickr so that people can see them?

Starwest

I was hoping to go to the Starwest conference in Orange County but I can’t see that happening right now as we have been spending money like water on our home and car and other things (Was the 42″ TV absolutely necessary? Ed). Darn shame as I was looking forward to it.

Easy Transfer

I’ve been running Windows easy Transfer to move a whole bunch of data from XP to the Vista machine and it is slow.

It’s also about as user friendly as a cornered rat. I used it for moving some video files, 44 gig, and it took at least an hour to send them via a Belkin cable and it looks like its going to take the best part of two hours to write them to the hard drive on the Vista machine. When Easy Transfer is first started there are default settings for copying all data across, but you have to be careful if you have already done some partial copying of data between machine before this, via a CD or DVD. As I sometimes have so little confidence in Microsoft (What do you mean sometimes? Ed) getting this kind of thing right I copied some essential data to the Vista machine via written CD’s and DVD’s.

The problem when you use Easy Transfer, is that with some of the default modes it is possible to overwrite files that you have already copied over to the Vista machine with out of date bashed up old versions of the same files. 

(The Easy Transfer section needs serious editing as it is not easy to understand, at all. Ed)

Quote of the day

‘Never judge a book by its movie’ J.W. Eagan