Red's Place

I believe we've hit a new year. Hope this software will cope with the date change. Oh, hi Lever! No idea why my last post didn't have a comment link, perhaps it was too short!

Anyway, work starts again tomorrow, (boo hiss), and I've got a hectic January lined up. Lots of things to do, including training some indians (yes, flying in from india) on how to support our systems remotely. Hmm, should be different. Plus, I've got to retain some sort of coherant technical oversight, I think, over the rest of the mayhem going on. Plus the normal problems/fixes etc.

Oh, watch out for the WMF Vulnerability (http://isc.sans.org/) this promises to be a major one.

Goodnight!

Could you pass eighth grade maths? Me? Doubt it, not even attempted it.

http://www.blogthings.com/couldyoupasseighthgrademathquiz/

Ok, so its time to renew the dreaded car tax. £165 for one new lane on the M25 in the last 10 years? What about the M3 guys? Or the M4? Or M40? Or any other road? - gets off soapbox -

So in the same post drop I get two of these reminders. One for the current car. One for the car that died 12 months ago. Buggeration. Guess the insurance company forgot to do something then. Guess I'd better write to DVLA .... something to do tomorrow.

And book an MOT.... yawn.

So I finally got the MOT test done today, it failed at first, I then forked over more cash for two new tyres (not unexpected really) and to get the horn fixed (WTF?), and it passed. Two hundred notes all in. Now I was able to use the interweb and order my new tax disc, another hundred and sixty notes. Yikes. At least thats it for the car for the tax man this year. Suspect a service will be due in August, hope its not as expensive as last year.

Also I'm changing ISP, since mine has been bought (boo hiss) by PlusNet who have some strange network management ideas and favour some protocols over others, I've decided to move. I cannot use an ISP that decides people surfing the net and using email are higher priority than any other port, and basically other protocols are for 'illegal uses'. Hmm, so that means my teleworking at home is not got the same priority as someone downloading a 500mb legal movie by HTTP? I believe it should have, and congestion should manage the usage.

So I'm transferring to Bulldog, the entire phone line and connection. Got my letter from BT today saying sorry to see you go, so its happening. If I'm offline for a while, you probably won't notice :) If it works, I'll have an 8mbps connection, with hopefully faster speeds later in the year.

Work is getting saner, starting to get organised to clear up some of the remaining havoc and unfinished stuff we did last year. Although I will need to spend time next week trying to get hold of our account manager at a telco/leased line business, its supposted to be next to impossible! Hmmmmm.

Have a good week!