I love to ride my bicycle

I cycled to work today. I guess that’s a pretty unremarkable thing really. It’s not so far for me to go, it’s not especially steep anywhere. There are even enough people who cycle along parts of the route to make a little social. For me, today, it felt assertive, manly. It was cold and it was the first time I had ridden to work since New Years. (Yes, that resolution isn’t going so well…) What’s that? You want to see my route? Well what about privacy and things like that?

Kodak Zi8

This year my I got my wife a Kodak Zi8 as a combined Christmas and birthday present. As ever I did a fair amount of research before picking anything up and I have not been disappointed! This type of device has been brought into the mainstream by Flip who produced a remarkably cheap and simple video camera for everyday use. These devices are a little larger than a mobile phone. Which is a good thing really as the Iphone 3Gs represents the most serious competition out there. You certainly can’t take a call on a Kodak Zi8!

What to do when your internet access goes crazy.

My Symptoms: Is this happening to you?

Wired internet and network access becomes very slow.
Wireless internet access remained at normal speed.
Multiple PCs/Mac experience same issues.

When I say slow, I mean ten times slower than dial-up!

The short answer: Replace the modem/router box.

The Ethernet ports in my router had failed. I replaced the router and was back to snappy internet and network performance in ten minutes. If your symptoms match mine, this could well be your problem. Because it might not be I would suggest that you read some more about what happened to me. Oh go on!

Because I run a vista machine at the moment I naturally made mistake number one. I googled for ‘vista very slow internet’. Don’t do that, whatever you do. If you do, and I did, then you will learn all about something called autotuning. Along the way you will learn to do things like run elevated command prompts, use the netsh command. You will read endless pages about TCP/IP protocols and then you will work out that there is in fact nothing wrong with your Vista after all.

Word of the day: truculent
–adjective
1. fierce; cruel; savagely brutal.
2. brutally harsh; vitriolic; scathing: his truculent criticism of her work.
3. aggressively hostile; belligerent.

Happy New Year

Wow, 010110.

Sounds like something in binary huh?

I have had an interesting couple of days and was about to wander off on a reasonably lengthy rant about it all when I realised that I should probably just wish everyone a happy new year and have done with it.

Ok, resolutions.

1 – blog every day
2 – write 52,000 words of a book
3 – fit back into my old jeans
4 – read 52 works of literature
5 – learn a new word each day

There, I think those are all achievable and realistic. Anyone else have resolutions they want to share?

The first! Word of the Day: Bellicose
–adjective
inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; pugnacious.