Friday, 27. November, 2009

All Done! (Blessed Eid Al-Adha and Happy Thanksgiving to All)

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Finally I’ve – hopefully – finished setting everything up, all posts should have valid permalinks, read more tag at the longer ones, proper categories assigned, and links out working – though it gave me a bit to remember them all. For my luck I’m not much a graphoman so it took only about 80 articles to edit (I decided to make most of the Islamic stuff private, for now) manually.
Frustrating experience. Those movings will kill me one day. I just hope it’s all right now and I can stick with WP for long time. Drupal was a great thing but for blog only it’s quite heavy CMS, taking 70+ tables in MySQL, while WP is ok with 10. And I have the blog only; so no reason to use Drupal for now, unless I want a complex website – which I don’t.
I’ve lost few recent articles and comments though when the blog got wiped out yesterday (the backup I had unfortunately didn’t have them, it was about a week old), but I hope noone will hold the lost comments against me – I certainly didn’t delete them intentionally.
So happy late Thanksgiving to anyone who celebrates; and blessed Eid Al-Adha to the ones who celebrate it as well.

By Um Abbas | Posted in Thoughts | Comments (2)

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Tuesday, 10. November, 2009

Morning Walk and Recent Days

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Yeah. I won the fight with my laziness (and migraines) and actually took my butt outta the pit of our house, to take Dori on a walk, and we decided to go to the sea. No big traveling, just 20 minutes by metro to the seaside.
Due to early hours of the day (at least for Britain) and the fact it was Monday, most of the places were empty – best time of day for me, personally.
We had some fun on the beach, Dori exploring something quite new for her (and she started to like the waves too much, for the weather it was, I say), me just having fun with camera after a while I didn’t take any pictures at all. Wasn’t in the right mood for that, I guess.

Dori at the Beach Keep on reading »

By Um Abbas | Posted in From Britain, Photo | Comments (2)

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Thursday, 5. November, 2009

Virgin Media: Powerful Incompetence

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The internet service provider for a big part of Britain has a widely spread advertisement: Powerful Stuff.
It promises broadband of nice download limits (we personally pay for XL package, supposedly 20Mb which we never got, but, oh well), nice upload, TV and phone line; package of powerful stuff.
We bought it – and started to use XL package, 20Mb download, not so bad fair user policy.
Virgin was serving ok for nearly two years. Occasional problems with lag usually solved in few hours.
But…
When a problem occurred, Virgin has shown it’s real face.
Crap support, crap service, crap excuses.
Our internet connection is literally worse than dial-up for about a month already. It randomly even disconnects, just for sure. Pings to close servers end up in time outs mostly. When they manage to go through, the show catastrophic numbers of 1000+ ping within the island, package loss in most of the cases over 10%.
First call, maintenance.
When the imaginative maintenance of some incompetent support member passed by and our internet still sucked, we gave them a second call.
Second call, too much students in the area.
Yeah, right. And last year Newcastle didn’t have a student in town. Bull-poo. If you can’t have a server which can support enough people on 20Mb per household, don’t  offer it! That is suable false advertisement and cancellation is for free. Because you fail to deliver something you agreed to provide in the contract. We pay money, you give us service. Not like now – we pay money and you messed up, but you won’t admit it.
Third call was already clear – just another bull-poo about another imaginative maintenance to shut us up, the usual round of making excuses about our end of line (trace route show else, you stupid *bleep*).
Fourth call will be only for one purpose.
We are changing ISP. Keep on reading »

By Um Abbas | Posted in From Britain | Comments (1)

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