The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

On Thursday night last week, I picked up an Xbox 360, and Gears of War, got home, installed the whole thing after packing my trusty original Xbox and the rest of the night playing Gears of War. I finally went to bed at around 2:30am Friday morning. That was the Good. Actually that was Great!

Now for the Bad. That Friday (which was last Frdiay) I got up 4 hours later, and tried to connect to Xbox Live again. No connections. no DNS, nadda, none. When I got back from work later that day, I still had no connection. Actually the DSL connection was down, and had been down the whole day I was informed by the wife. Well that was certainly wasn't good, that was real Bad. So I called up Sympatico Tech Support to get that fixed. After a few minutes with Level 1, I got pushed over to Level 2, where I was informed they would run some test on my line and then I would be called back.

The Ugly. Saturday morning still no broadband access, no access at all actually, the DSL modem isn't able to synchronize at all. No Eve Online, more like Eve Offline, and I'm not talking about the site! That afternoon, I get a call back for a tech, we go through a few more tests, and he comes to the conclusion that it's most likely the modem. Just to be sure, they're going to do some more tests and then call back to let me know. Sunday evening, I get a call back from Tech Support, they're sending a technician on site the next day to either check my set-up or (most likely) replace the darn modem.

I've survived another week-end without online access. It's more frustrating then you'd think, and I'm not talking about gaming, or blogging or even picking-up your email. I'm talking about all these little things that you'd need to check something online, a site you've just seen an ad on TV, the name of that actor, a little utility you need to convert .AVIs to .WMVs.

Anyway, things should be back to normal tonight. I'm just glad I had the new 360 to keep me busy. More on that later.

Speed surfing with the Google Web Accelerator

Another cool utility from the Google beta labs: Google Web Accelerator Download. Came across it this morning and I must say there is a noticeable difference in the speed at which some of the sites load.

I'll see if this perception last over the next few days. The download and installation were very quick and simple - very Google-like. It works both for IE and Firefox. Once installed, it loads in your systray, so you can have it running or not. When it is though, on the top right corner of Firefox it will let you know how much time you've saved by using it.

It the few sites I've loaded to give it a run and see a difference, according to it, I've saved 14.6 seconds as I write this. This doesn't seem much, but you do notice a change; especially on sites with a lot of graphic content. The EVE Online home page loaded a lot faster than usual. A great lot.

So I'll blink Google Web Accelerator as a 'coolutility' (my BlinkList tag) and it'll appear in my Cool Utilities links section of this blog (lower on the right column).

Happy speed surfing!!

Back online! I'm whole again...

It's kind of stupid to say that since I had access from work. But the internet has been part of my daily life for over 10 years now, and it's something that I take for granted. So when I simply can't get to it, it's painful. Add to that the fact that I couldn't play the MMORPG Eve-Online, and you start to understand the extent of my devastation. I'm kind of pushing it am I? But you get my point!

Having said that, I took the better of this evening uploading our pictures from our trip to Italy this past June on my new flickr pro account. It's an amazing site/web application and once you've started using it, it's addictive. A prime example of the web 2.0 and what's in store over the next few years. So far I have about 550 pics up and I still have a few days left to add. You can see the latest pics added on the right in the "my flickr pics" applet.

I also spent the morning adding all my bookmarks to my BlinkList. I had started doing so last week with del.icio.us but found BlinkList had better features and a more practicle interface. It's still in beta but works fairly well. I strongly suggest you give it a try!

Off to bed now, have a good night!

P.S.: Oh, in case you were wondering, it was my mobo! The Prescott P4 I had installed fried my P4C800 Deluxe and it had to be replaced. A bummer, but a cheaper fix then replacing the processor. Oh, well!


[EVE Online] [flickr] [BlinkList]