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.

Joy

Oh joy! That worked - how about with a photo I took of young Oliver
this morning?

Long Time Coming

Five weeks on from the iPhone debacle, I finally have one. So this
will be brief - I want to see if I can send an email straight to
Blogger.

Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?

Crumbs; it's July 31st and I'm in danger of only making one blog post this month - I'll try to get this one under the wire.



So, where have we been and what have we been up to? Well, as you can see from the picture we take life here on the Ranch very seriously, always ready to marshall the herd or defend ourselves from a marauding attack of Navajo braves - although they are quite a rare sight in north Tonbridge these days. OK, actually this was us before going to our friend Lee's 40th birthday Cowboy and Indian themed barn dance. The last time I went to a barn dance was in the lower refectory at QMC in 1985, but I'm pleased to report that my snake hips are still moving well. On a more cautionary note, somebody nicked one of my water pistols while we were there; another sad statistic in this country's growing gun crime problem.



Talking of birthdays, Mum was 137 earlier this month. She doesn't look it of course. I thought it was about time I retired her old Windows ME PC that has served her well for so long, but without an obvious hand-me-down from my collection to give her I went with a brand new cheap and cheerful box from ebuyer. I can't work out how they can make any profit when they sell an Acer Vista based PC for £135 (+ another £15 for extra memory) yet it's a perfectly suitable machine for internet, word processing and photo storage. Whether it survives as long as the last one is another matter.

A couple of Sundays ago we took Lin's parents to Hastings - the first time I'd been there in twenty-odd years I would think. I did sail past it during our dayskipper practical a few years back and it looked quite nice from a couple of miles out, but then after three days at sea sharing a 37ft yacht with four other people even Dungeness B Power Station looked welcoming. Actually, we parked up at the fishy end of Hastings, and I'd have to say it had a certain charm about it, but I don't think I'd like to go there when it gets really busy.

Well, I have eight minutes to make my deadline, so I have no time to report on my latest box of tricks; a High-Def media server. Until next time.....

Communication Breakdown

Like thousands of others I received a text message from O2 yesterday morning to let me know that the online upgrade shop was now open for those of us eager to upgrade to the Apple iPhone 3G. Since my Sony Ericsson K750i was starting to show its age, and I'd never got around to getting an iPod, I thought this was an ideal opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.

Needless to say the O2 website was a little slugish as I navigated through the screens; typing in my current mobile number, waiting for an upgrade code to arrive via text (which for some reason I didn't have to enter onto the web page), and finally providing my credit card details before pressing the "Send" button. Well at least I think I pressed it, as there was no immediate feedback, just the same screen staring back at me. After a couple of minutes it jumped into life with the message "There has been a problem, blah, blah, blah, please try again". So I did; several times.

After a few similar outcomes I decided to do something useful with my life for an hour or so, before returning to find a page saying the upgrade shop was currently unavailable. Mmmm, surely O2 knew there was going to be a huge demand for this launch and could have taken steps to prevent the meltdown.

I checked back a few times during the day to find the same message, before finally being presented with a page saying that the entire stock of iPhones had sold out. Well, obviously I was unlucky; I'm sure that we all had an even chance. At least that's what I thought until I asked around colleagues and friends this morning; I know it's not a major controlled survey, but of the five people I know who tried to order yesterday, two were successful and three were not. Those two are currently customers of other networks, while the three losers are already with O2.

Obviously a coincidence.

Chocolate Girl

There's a commonly used adage "Don't believe everything you read on the internet". whilst this is clearly the case when it comes to emails from Nigeria, medical miracle cures and tips on bringing up babies, it is important to remember that there are plenty of things you should believe.

One such example is that the most pointless piece of household gadgetry you can own is a chocolate fountain machine. I recall reading the results of a survey some months ago that came to this conclusion, so when Lin said that her Mum had always wanted one I felt obliged to veto any attempt to buy one for her birthday. Clearly, this had not discouraged Jan, as when Robert Dyas had one on clearance at under a tenner, she snapped it up without hesitation.

The machine was duly unveiled at Sunday lunch yesterday, and carefully assembled without the aid of instructions (hence the giveaway price). The first thing to be aware of is that you have to fill the machine with a special type of chocolate (purchased separately) that has the correct viscosity when the fountain is operating at its normal temperature. Alternatively, you can use any chocolate of your choice, melt it and add an appropriate amount of oil to achieve the same consistency, but in the absence of any instructions we were unsure as to what sort of oil to use and how much to add - I guess it wouldn't have been Castrol GTX.

Having filled the bottom bowl the machine was powered up. With a gentle whirring noise, the chocolate was sucked out of the bottom and with Archimedean mechanics pushed to the top of the fountain whereupon it cascaded over a couple of concentric domes to complete its round trip to the bottom bowl, ready to start the process again. And that's it. I guess it would have been more impressive if the chocolate had fallen evenly around the fountain, but despite lots of tweaking with the screw-in feet and careful examination of a spirit level (not supplied) we couldn't stop the thing listing to one side. As a result it tended to fall down this side like rain pouring off a shop awning in high winds. Whilst most of the chocolate made it back to the bottom bowl, some splattered off course and invariably found its way onto Jan's top where it joined previously spilt specimens of the Sunday lunch in a scene reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock canvas

By now Emma had shown great interest in the fountain and was offering strawberries into the flow of chocolate. Of course, like any three year old, her attention and control were not of the required standard and before long her fist was buried in the fountain and chocolate was running down her arm to her elbow and onto whatever was beneath her - the table cloth, carpet, the cat.... Within a few minutes Emma looked like she had been bog snorkelling all morning

the worst part is cleaning up afterwards - I'm not sure whether this refers to the fountain or the people who happened to be in the same room when it was turned on, but I can imagine the thought of that would discourage people from getting it back out of the cupboard. Of course, as Jan suggested it could always be used as a fondue centrepiece, except appropriately, that was the runner-up in the survey.