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.

The Spirit of Radio

It was my birthday a few weeks ago. That's alright, I probably forgot yours too. Anyway, the family all chipped in and bought me a Roberts Internet Radio; the WM201 for those who are interested. I'd never really explored the world of internet radio before but having a dedicated device that does not require the PC to be on appealed to me, and this particular model is fully stereo and supports both wired and wireless networks.

It takes a lot for a high-tech gadget to impress me these days, but I have to say this little box is the business. You register the device at the Reciva website and set up a profile of favourite radio stations while you're there. The next time you go to the radio, it updates itself with these settings to give you shortcuts to each of those stations. You can of course still use the radio to search for new stations by name, genre or geographical location, but using the web site is a lot easier.

I started by searching the rock genre, with particular emphasis on progressive rock. Amongst a generous selection of channels, one stands out over the others: the curiously named Delicious Agony. The first three tracks I heard were by Peter Gabriel, Yes and Kansas - all of which I own and could easily play myself if I wanted, but somehow hearing a radio station playing my kind of music was more satisfying.

There are some very wierd spoken-word stations out there too, dealing with all sorts of topics ranging from the paranormal to abnormal. Yesterday eveing, whilst trying to calm Oliver after a feed, I flicked through the kids genre looking for baby friendly music. I found a station called 101 RU Lullaby, which sounded promising, but in fact seemed to be broadcasting some Russian bloke singing about his cabbage harvest accompanied by a detuned harmonium. Since this had very little calming influence on Oliver I jumped to my favourites list and chose Beach House Radio, a Spanish station I stumbled upon that plays a mix of chillout, dance and electronica - not the sort of thing I'd normally listen to, but it's very relaxing and always seems to send Oliver into a blissful sleep.