Something for Nothing

I was glancing through an email newsletter from Dabs.com late last night and for a change, something caught my eye: A BT I-Plate for £7.07. It turns out this simple little device connects to your BT master socket and boosts your broadband connection download speed in the region of 1.5Mbps. Since we live around two miles from the local exchange we're lucky to get anything much in excess of 1Mbps, so an improvement of this order would be very welcome.

The reviews seemed to confirm these claims were not excessive, with people falling over themselves to award maximum stars for the product, so I was naturally curious as to how it could achieve such results. A little bit of Googling later revealed how simple the process is: all the plate does is isolate the bell wire (pin 3) from your internal cabling. In the olden days, when we used phones with big metal bells in them, this wire was essential if you wanted the thing to actually ring, but much our appendix, it really serves no purpose these days. In fact its presence is detrimental, as it picks up loads of electical interference and reduces the quality of the signal on the other wires in the phone cable. This is why it is recommended to plug your broadband router directly into the master socket.

Unfortunately this isn't always possible - in our case the master socket is in the loft (lazy BT engineer years ago) so the router is at the end of about 10 metres of internal cable that weaves its way past ring main, lighting and heating systems - a recipe for poor signal to noise ratio. On the other hand, we're fortunate in that I installed a junction box immediately next to the master socket, connected by no more than six inches of cable, before fanning out to the extensions around the building.

So tonight I ran several speed tests at various sites (Moneysupermarket, for instance) and found that on average we were getting around .56Mbps download and .48Mbps upload. Very poor; much worse than I thought. I popped up into the loft, isolated the junction box from the master socket and removed the cover, then removed the bell wire at pin 3. With everything reconnected and a quick check to see that voice calls were still getting through, I rebooted the router. According to various comments, it takes two or three days for the router and exchange to settle on a new line speed, so I wasn't expecting anything too dramatic straightaway, but I couln't resist running the tests again. The result: 3.2Mbps down and .85Mbs up.

Astonishing. A simple, no-cost operation delivers nearly six-times the download speed, and in all likelihood it could get even better in the next 48 hours or so.

Emma will love it when she goes to cbeebies in the morning.

Rock 'n' Roll!

I'm in a band. The last time I could say that was sometime in the last century, so this is a definite novelty. A few of us at work have been discussing this for a while, and finally we managed to get together for the inaugural Tuesday Night Music Club this week.

So far we have two guitarists, a drummer, a bassist (at least he will be once he's managed to win a bass on ebay), a keyboardist (that's me), a sax player and a violinist (both absent). We didn't actually play anything this week; we just had a very democratic meeting to suggest what we'd each like to practice. As a result it looks like we're going to be a jazz/soul fusion, heavy metal skiffle band. So prog rock it is. Oh, and nobody wants to do vocals.

We reconvene in two weeks time, having all perfected "Wonderful Tonight" hopefully, to see if any of us can actually remember how to play. If that's OK, we'll have a bash at "The Boys of Summer" - a song I've always fancied covering.

We already have our first booking: The office Christmas party - so we'll need to get a passable version of "I Believe in Father Christmas" in the setlist if I have my way (which I won't).

All we need now is a name and a MySpace page.....

Picture Perfect Morning

I've downloaded a blogging app for the iPhone called Blogpress. I figured with more mobility I might be able to post more regularly, especially as I was going away on business for a few days last week and would have copious hours to fill.

This turned out to be a false hope, only surpassed in its naivety by the fact that myself and two colleagues packed our golf clubs - these remained locked in the cars for five days.

So we had a pretty scary rollout - but it was the biggest hardware and software release we'd ever attempted. In amongst the 60+ hours spent getting the platform stable I did manage to visit my hotel room for an occasional sleep and snapped this picture from my window of the Shropshire Union Canal and the mountains of North Wales beyond.



Shame. It looked like a lovely day for a round of golf.




-- Post From My iPhone

St. Mary's Prayer

"It's not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand."
(Brian Stimpson (John Cleese) from the film "Clockwise")

It's forty-three years since my Dad took me to my first game at The Dell (a one-nil win against Crystal Palace). At the time we were living no further than a decent goal-kick from the Milton Road turnstiles and I had spent much of the 1965/66 season watching legions of red & white-clad men strolling past the front of the house every other Saturday - usually looking very happy, as this was the season that Saints would win promotion to the top tier for the first time in their history.

Why it was several years before my father took me to another game is not something I recall now; certainly the fact that we moved six miles up the road to Chandler's Ford would have had something to do with it, but perhaps my apparent lack of enthusiasm at that first game might have been the real reason - I sat on the wall by the players' entrance for the whole game asking when the ice creams were coming round. I was only four years old. Nevertheless, some sort of spell had been cast on me: I was now a Southampton supporter. In hindsight, maybe it was a curse.

It's probably worth taking this opportunity to admit to a period of unfaithfulness. There's a loosely quoted rule that goes something like "You can change your girlfriend or your job, but you can never change your football club". The fact that female liaisons and any semblance of a professional career were not to trouble me for many years might just give me an excuse for not grasping the sentiment of such blind loyalty, for when Martin Chivers, my first football hero, left Saints for Spurs, I went with him.

How long my love of Saints lay suppressed and dormant I don't recall. Certainly for much of my time at junior school, peer pressure meant you had to support a "big" club to earn respect in the playground, or more importantly at the ritual team-picking at the start of games lessons. Support Saints and turn up in Woolworth's own-brand football boots guaranteed you'd be last to be picked and despatched to left-back for the whole game. On the other hand, a Liverpool strip and a pair of George Best endorsed Stylo Matchmakers ensured a coveted place in attack. I elevated myself up the pecking order by getting a pair of "Soccer Tabs" - an essential accessory of the Leeds United kit at the time - these were sock garters with a sizeable, frilly-edged numbered panel suspended from them. Mine were number sevens, and clearly in the minds of the usual team captains would transform me into a talent akin to their real owner, Peter Lorimer, renowned for his pin-point accurate, pile-driver free-kicks. After a few weeks, the realisation that I still couldn't hit a cow's back-side with a banjo, let alone trouble a four-foot goalkeeper from twenty yards, saw me slip back to right-half, but at least the kudos of those soccer tabs ensured I never played at left-back again.

Anyway, I digress. Just as my father had introduced me to Saints in the first place, he was also responsible for bringing me back into the fold. During an Easter trip in 1974 to my grandparents in Eltham, South-East London, he drove myself and my sister up to White Hart Lane to see Spurs play Saints. Standing on the terraces along one side of the ground we had a good view of the Saints fans to our right; they were in good spirits and voice, and I realised in amongst them were faces I recognised: a couple of blokes who worked at Eastleigh railway station; an older brother of a school friend, and others who I had seen out and about. The Spurs fans, on the other hand, were complete strangers and actually were quite intimidating. As the game progressed, and Spurs cruised to a comfortable 3-1 win, I felt no joy at all - I shared the emotions of the Saints fans, as hope and anticipation was washed away to reveal despair and frustration.

It was not so much a life-changing moment, rather a life-affirming one. The roller-coaster ride was just beginning, and within a few weeks "we" were relegated to the old Division Two, but for me the journey was just beginning. Over the next thirty years I went to most home games (as my vast programme collection will testify), with the exception of the early eighties when I was away at university. Ironically this was our most successful period in the top-flight.

Emma was born shortly before we were relegated again in 2005. By then Lin had given up her season ticket, and it gave me a good excuse not to renew mine, and I'm ashamed to admit that I have seen one game in the Championship since then (Barnsley 5-2 - not a bad choice). I always assumed that I'd start going again one day, maybe once Oliver is old enough to appreciate it (and not just pester me for an ice cream), but it seems there is now a very real chance the club will disappear before the end of the season. Despite successfully reducing the debt this season, Barclays pulled the plug on the club's life support machine, the PLC holding company, and it seems that there's every chance a 10-point deduction will be enforced. With that will come certain relegation and surely the end of the 130 year old institution - nobody in the current climate will be able to fund a recovery from there.

But for now, I live in hope. On the eve of a massive, must-win game at Sheffield Wednesday, I still have the belief that a miracle will happen; we will win, there will be no points penalty, and a white knight will appear to carry the club forward. By this time tomorrow, such dreams will be shattered, no doubt.

Starting All Over Again

.....will be:

1. This blog
2. Southampton Football Club

Back soon

Oh To Be In Love

I've got to say I'm very impressed with O2 now (see what I did there?). After the initial iPhone debacle, I've had no problems with them since, so I've taken the plunge and changed my ISP from Demon to them aswell.

Having been with Demon for yonks (probably 15 years or so), it was surprisingly unemotional leaving them - after all I was paying £23 a month for download speeds under 1Mb, suffering customer support from Bangalore (seldom needed thank goodness), and to cap it all they've just been bought by Cable & Wireless, our principle competitor for the product I've helped develop during the past seven years.

Having taken the plunge, migrating to O2 was very easy; Demon issued the MAC code without any fuss, and from then on I was kept updated on the progress of my order by text and email on a regular basis. The wireless router was delivered a few days in advance and connected to my existing network without any problems, then last Monday, as promised, the connection was transferred to O2 - a simple case of moving the phone line from my wired router to the new wireless one. A few tweaks on the PCs and everything was back up and running - including browsing the net on the iPhone while I'm sat on the loo.

Despite the fact that Demon ask for a month's notice, and invoiced accordingly, they cancelled my account that evening, so I've been unable to check the old rhayader mail, and it is now bouncing. I think the only mail that went there was spam and a few mailing lists that I don't care about, but pretty poor of Demon nevertheless.

During the course of last week, the connection to O2 "trained" itself to establish the best bandwidth available. By this weekend it had settled on up and download speeds over twice as fast as on Demon - given that we live two miles from the exchange I guess that's pretty good. Best of all, as an O2 mobile customer, I get a £5 per month discount, bringing the fee down to £7.50. And customer support is a freephone number to UK based staff.

Now that I've finally adopted wireless networking I've reconfigured the Roberts Internet Radio to connect that way too. I've shied away from wireless until the security improved, something that the WPA2 protocol seems to address well, but unfortunately I discovered that the Roberts only supported the rather weak WEP standard. Happily, selecting the update firmware option on the radio downloaded the latest updates that includes WPA2 support.

Family Snapshot

I've grown up believing I was part of a very small family; both my parents were only children, so there's never been aunts, uncles or cousins on the scene. I did have two great aunts but between them they only managed to provide me with a single 2nd cousin.

A few years ago I started researching my family-tree, but as this was before the online tools and services were really established I didn't have a great deal of luck. In fact I encountered so many cold trails I began to imagine my ancestors only came down from the trees in the late 19th century.

Of course, things are very different now, and sites like ancestry.co.uk and thegenealogist.co.uk have brought together all manner of census, birth, marriage and death, and parish records for easy access in one place - albeit at fairly hefty subscription prices. I've been using the latter, but will probably change to Ancestry in due course, as it seems to have better global coverage. Nevertheless, I have been able to go back a couple of generations on the families of three of my four grandparents - my Mother's father remains a complete enigma, having disembarked from a ship in New York in 1931 and disappeared from the radar for ever. Curiously there is no record of him being born in the UK either, so I guess he was just passing through during the 1920's.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to join GenesReunited.com to see if it could throw up some new leads. The results have been impressive; immediately I found somebody who had researched a tree that included my father's grandfather and great uncle, the two brothers that according to family legend fell out in a big way, resulting in one of them adding an 's' to their surname Sandy to disassociate themselves completely.

Yesterday I made contact with another researcher who turns out to be living in Queensland, Australia and is married to a 4th cousin on my maternal grandmother's side. He has managed to trace the line back ten generations to a chap called John Bidlecomb who was born around 1660 in Fawley, Hampshire. Pretty impressive stuff when you think about it; that's before the Plague and the Great Fire of London, and only just after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II. Even Kronenbourg beer was yet to be tasted.

So in 350 years and nine generations, my Mum's family line has migrated about six miles as the crow flies.