David’s Blog

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Well, more spammed-by-proxy.

I had an email today which purported to come from a lady called ‘Nicole’ at a company called ‘M80‘. A quick looksee at their website shows that they are actually into ‘Social media marketing and online publicity’. In my case, their person sent me an email using my contact form, telling me all about an upcoming webinar Cisco are hosting this Thursday about Unified Communications, something I mentioned in some other posts.

The email then goes on to give me links to blip.tv to preview the webinar (apparently I have to keep that off the record), plus some excerpted clips from the webinar which are on YouTube. Finally, there’s a link to the actual webinar.

And, here’s the cheek of it:

I hope you'll consider posting the video and link to your site; there's some
great UC info here and it's rare that we have in-depth video on the subject!

Well, make your mind up, dear!

Thing is… this is an unsolicited email. I didn’t ask to be told about Unified Communications, or presence or WebEx. I already know what they do. The email address it goes to is registered with Cisco for some CCNA stuff I did some time ago, but this actually came via my contact form. So this company are obviously paying people to Google for terms, then email or post comments on people’s websites. Truth be told, ‘Nicole’ is probably somebody working in India or China for a pittance, just filling in contact forms all day.

I think the thing that galls me the most about this is that Cisco are doing it - a company who recently invested in Ironport, an ANTI-spam company! They’re also working for companies like Dr Pepper, Ford, and 20th Century Fox. All big, reasonably respectable companies, or at least, as respectable as mega-corporations like those can be.

So looks like we have a new kind of spam to concern ourselves with.

Look! I changed some things.

I decided to change the theme. The old design was a bit narrow, and restricted some of the things I could link. Also, I got fed up with staring at myself (I know, amazing to think it’s possible), so that had to go.

I also dropped the Flickr integration plugin I was using. It worked, but it was a bit messy, and didn’t work well with this theme. I couldn’t be bothered to make it work, so away it went.

So a friend of mine has a new blog. He’s blogging about ASP.Net stuff (C# mainly).

Go here: read it!

I don’t know why I find Lolcats funny. But I do. I can waste hours browsing.

I’ve had my ‘Are you David Rickard?’ page up for a while, and I get a fairly constant trickle of emails from others with the same name.

I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, but now, you can see them all on a map too.

I can tell you’re excited.

I had been using Zen for quite some time - since August 2004 apparently. They’ve been pretty good to me over the years, and I’ve had stellar service from them. BT, less so. My line speed had been steadily degrading, and for no good reason. I’d gone from getting around 4Mbs down to around 2Mbs, and lower on a bad day. No matter what I did, I couldn’t produce any sort of improvements, and Zen were unable to help as there was no ‘fault’ as such. The line was stable, and it worked, even if it was a bit slow.

I decided to move elsewhere to see if I could resolve this issue. I decided to use a company called Be. Be are what is known as an ‘unbundled’ supplier. Basically, they install their own kit into BT’s exchanges, and plug your phone line into that. All your calls still go via BT as normal, but your Internet access takes a different route at the exchange end. They also use a newer technology, ADSL2+. Zen’s product uses BT’s ADSL product, with the more recent ‘ADSL MAX’ add-ons, which allow the line to negotiate the fastest speeds it can. ADSL2+ works in pretty much the same way, only it uses all sorts of new methods to achieve the same thing, and not surprisingly, does it better.

My migration to Be took place last Tuesday. I came home from work, configured the router, and found I was now getting 3.8Mbs. A fairly good improvement. Not only that, but my upload speed has more than doubled, so sending files and emails is now much quicker too.

It proves to me there was some sort of issue on my line though. Various BT engineers have told me that sometimes at the exchange end, if equipment is overloaded, a situation can occur where line noise bleeds into neighbouring connections, i.e. mine. This then degrades the connection. BT can sometimes perform what is known as a ‘lift-and-shift’, whereby they simply unplug your connection, and physically move it to a different point. Unfortunately, getting BT to do it is very difficult, so it didn’t happen.

The only option left was to move the connection myself, by changing supplier. So far, I’m glad I did. I’m getting a better speed in downloads, and overall, the connection is far snappier at doing things, like web surfing and the like.

So, to Zen, so long, and thanks for all the fish.

Awesome!

I’ve been using Microsoft Money for a while now. Previously I’d been using Quicken, but since it was discontinued, I decided to change. All the upgrades between versions I’d done had made the data a bit ‘odd’, so Money would complain. Also, my categories for transactions were all over the place. So I decided at the beginning of 2008 I would start afresh, and start with new data.

Somewhere along the line I decided to start using the statement download features my banks offer me. WHY wasn’t I using them earlier? I was always worried I’d end up with duplicates, and other data oddities. I was also concerned I’d spend so much time fixing the data to fit what I had it would take just as much time as it would to type it in anyway, which is why I was doing so.

Well I was wrong. Very wrong. It works perfectly. I download a statement, I check the data is correct, and if there’s a duplicate, it tells me. It’s all very simple stuff. I can now pull down my data in a matter of minutes.

It’s a shame there’s not a more direct route, so from within Money I can’t just click a button and have it sync. I have a feeling some of the US banks offer that, but none of the UK banks seem to, which is a shame. Then again, I don’t think people in the UK care as much about putting their statements onto computer as people in the US do. I don’t know many people who do bother doing it anyway.

I just like to know where I’m wasting all my money, and I can do that easily in Money.