Thursday 6 October 2005

Pic of the day: I did it! And with a somewhat more dignified expression than Ayase from Midori no Hibi, I am happy to say. (The anime is now available in American shops! You may get it and laugh at Ayase, who is also the main role model for my NaNoWriMo novel this year.)

New ISP

A little past midnight the Internet access disappeared. This time however it wasn't a surprise. This was the day when I was supposed to change to a new ISP, for the first time in my life. Exciting!

No, seriously. While my ISP has changed names once before during my career as homepage owner, possibly even diarist, it was still the same one. But I got fed up with paying well above market price and still getting abysmal service. The drop that made the cup flow over was when they used almost two weeks on finding and fixing a small error they had made themselves while upgrading my line to a higher speed. All the while feeding me various lies about what was being done to fix it. When I finally met a guy who knew anything, he fixed it while I waited on the phone. The others had been just making up things. Every one of them, for almost two weeks. I even took a day off from work to wait for a technician who didn't come, because it was all lies, the level of lying that a desperate guy in a bar will do with drunk girls to get some. No basis in fact whatsoever, but it sounds plausible if you have no other source of information. What kind of ISP has a majority of their phone support people doing this??? Telenor of Norway, it seems. Know this and be warned.

In the morning, there was still no connection to the new ISP. I had got a new DSL modem, user name and password. But we can't expect people to be up at night attaching my DSL line. In fact, it was kinda amazing that Telenor was up after midnight to shut down the one I had there...

Anyway, in the afternoon when I came home from work, I could log on with my living room machine. However when I tried setting up PPOE on my router, it did not work. I tried various things, including restarting the equipment, erasing the password and writing it again, things like that. The last thing I did was run a simplified setup and remove the service name. It still did not work after that, and I left it to itself for a while, perhaps 15 minutes? Then suddenly it worked.

The e-mail is a story in itself. The old e-mail account doesn't work, of course. That's too bad since I think it is still in some databases and probably some friends of mine have it, not to mention it is on all those old journal entries. But that's water under the bridge, I guess. My new mail address is at chaosnode.net (otherwise it is the same) and Operamail downloads this perfectly. I have now set it to check the mail every 5 minutes. In the past I didn't since almost all the mail was spam, so it would disturb me all the time if I did.

However, I cannot send or reply to chaosnode.net. The old account would tell me "we don't relay" which I guess is typical of their attitude. But the new one at losmail.no doesn't say anything. Actually it says "1 mail sent" but it is not moved from outbox to sent and it does not arrive at the person I write to. So I have to go on the web and send it by squirrelmail. I am not amused, well except by their slogan "webmail for nuts". Indeed if I wasn't nuts I would probably not go to such great lengths, but just use the default losmail account with Outlook or Eudora like other customers. But I want a mail address I can have for the rest of my life, and I would like the rest of my life to be very very long, please.

OK, in the long run perhaps email addresses like these won't exist anymore, we may have some other generic tag. Perhaps all people in the world will have a unique name like I have. I am the only Magnus Itland in the world, and there is no reason why there should ever be more. Or if there are, they may be called Magnus V. Itland or some such to tell them apart from me. People just don't use their imagination. If you call your kids John Smith, you get what you order, anonymity. But why would anyone want to be anonymous unless they plan to do evil? If you do good, you will come to the light so that your works may be known.

Be that as it may, I am online again, at a cheaper price. The download bandwidth is down from 4000 to 3000 kbps, but that's OK. The upload speed is now up to 500 kbps, which is good. If it were up to me, I would have higher upload than download speed, since I have so much to share. ^_^ No, not copyrighted music. Although I do have lots of fan-translated Japanese cartoons... I think of that as cultural exchange since it is not available for sale. For your information, Aishiteru ze Baby is still in the top spot.