A Change of ISP - III

Why is it that communications companies are always the most difficult to talk to? I remember, some years ago, spending several hours phoning various departments in BT trying to find out where to buy a cartridge for one of their fax machines. It was one of the most soul destroying, tedious, frustrating, annoying tasks I have ever undertaken. Well, I’m beginning to have similar feelings about switching ISPs.

Things have moved along since my last post; the D-Link USB network card was a joy, I just plugged it in, pointed the New Hardware wizard at the CD and away I went – brilliant. The ZyXEL router worked straight out of the box as well. We got this from our new BUSCit (the ISP we’re moving to) so I could ask them about configuration and they supplied pre-configured with our username and password. However the configuration was not what I ordered. It takes three phone calls and another week to sort out the configuration due to a combination of BUSCit giving me the wrong address block and me entering it incorrectly.

I’m now happy that everything works as it should with the new connection up. Now this is what I mean about communication companies; whilst sorting out the configuration problems I notice that my helpful sounding contact at BUSCit has stopped answering his mail. In fact, the support engineer that gave me the wrong IP addresses invited me to get back to him by e-mail but didn’t reply to me when I did. I finally got my contact on his mobile. Next stage is to ask Demon to unlock the domain (I wish he’d said this a few weeks ago) so e-mail and fax to them – with no reply.

Comment Spam

I've had my first spam comments! A site flogging contact lenses added a couple of comments to one of my posts on the subject with links to their site. I've deleted them and turned on word verification. At least some bots are reading this!

A change of ISP - II

So far so good.

Last week the BT engineer installed the new line. He go it done in one visit and only managed to disconnect our existing connection for an hour or so so I regard that as a huge triumph. I don't think I ever recall BT getting anything done in one visit Berea. Mind you, I don't know for sure that it actually works yet.

We couldn't connect up last week because the ISP hasn't got any of the routers they were supposed to send us in stock until I asked them why they hadn't sent it. Hmm.

This evening I was supposed to connect us up by sticking another network card into our communications server and configuring it all to work alongside our old connection. Unfortunately my certainty that we had a spare PCI slot in the server was completely wrong. We have some ISA slots but all the old ISA cards we have are so old that I couldn't get any working. Abandoned until I can get a USB network card.

It's sort of refreshing to have the opportunity to cock something up myself rather than leaving it to BT.

Whilst sorting out the HQ pictures I found this one taken of Tikka. My mother-in-law�s pet chicken. Yes, that�s pet as in house-pet. It lives in the house and will happily eat from your hand or grumpily peck you if you stop stroking it. It�s the only thing I know that can make my daughter sit still.

In the background is my darling wife Tracey. Just behind Tikka is Tracey�s grandmother Doris.
 

HQ. Looking ahead to the right. 

HQ. Looking ahead to the left. 

HQ

Most of the time I work at home from my "spare room" (soon to move to the garage - but that's another, long story) but every couple of weeks or so I have to come to Headquarters in North West London to do stuff I can't do remotely.

I'm at HQ now, I've done what I can this evening towards getting the new ISP up and running (more later) and I'm sitting here feeling fairly relaxed and listening to comedy on BBC Radio 7, which I can highly recommend.

I thought (probably because I'm getting a bit too relaxed) that you might like to see what it looks like form my desk in London. The two pictures that follow show what it looks like from my desk. Thrilling, eh?