The longest round up

[caddyman]

At the moment I feel quite extravagantly tired. This is the effect of two nights' poor sleep - one, as chronicled, due to odd dreams and indigestion, the other - last night, being largely due to my own incompetence.



I am convinced that during the late afternoon and early evening, the hill outside Totteridge and Whetstone tube gets ratcheted up a couple or three degrees, only to be lowered again after I have walked it, like some horrible bouncy castle maintained by a sadist. At the same time, it is clear that the steps up from the front door to the living room have an extra three or four stairs at that time of day, too.

The keys on this PC have been replaced by smaller facsimiles of their usual selves, and I am having to run the spell checker even for ordinary little words, because I seem to be hitting keys at random - or more to the point, one to the left of that I am aiming for. I wonder if Arthur C Clarke lived in Whetstone when he wrote 2001, and invented HAL? Probably not, but it may have been a similar phenomenon.

Tonight I am supposed to be off to Greenwich directly after work to play poker. Greenwich, of course, is in the depths of South East London. I now live at the far edge of North London. Careful homeward travel is called for if I don't want to end up at the back-of-beyond trying to flag down a cab for an extortionate fare.

I really must get some proper sleep tonight.




Tomorrow, of course, drjohnsilence is making a whistle-stop visit to London from Auld Virginie, and we are meeting up in Clapham for a pint. It will be good to see him, but being faced with a 50 minute journey back north on the Northern Line, filled with beer, and having efficient kidneys paired with limited bladder capacity, suggest that I should actually put some planning into the escapade. Planning and drinking beer seldom work well together.


I remain taxed about the best method of maintaining a broadband internet connection when Adam moves out of the house. As far as I can see, he is paying either £22.50 or £26.50 per month (the website isn't clear) for 512k, with no transfer cap. I think I can get a deal for 1 meg, plus 40 TV channels and some kind of deal on telephone costs for £27.50 per month. The downside is that we risk being broadband free for two weeks, and there is a 30 gig download limit each calendar month. 30 gig seems relatively generous at first sight, but DT sans LJ does like his online gaming, and I can see that eating up the available download allocations with a vengeance. And in the fullness of time, once romney is back from India, I want him to show me where to go to download TV shows in bit torrent, and burn them to CD or DVD. That sounds as though it may well eat up bandwidth at a rate And a half, too.

The trouble is, I have no feel for our current usage. Last night we installed a download monitor on DT's machine. I guess I should do the same.

This is all turning out more complicated than I thought it would. As usual.


Since I can no longer upload to my ntl web space, and cannot send emails from Outlook or Thunderbird, I think that account has now outlasted its usefulness, unless I have any sudden urge to reconnect the PC to dial up for that sole purpose. I maintain my original zetnet account for that, and I have access to that web space, though not the technical ability to take any advantage from it, at least in the short term.

Comments

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

Zetnet too? Small world. I rang them a couple of days ago to disconnect my Surftime package but to keep the space and dial-up through them for emergencies.

[oldnick.livejournal.com]

Having now read the Broadband behind lj-cut section...

I've recently changed to Wanadoo - boxed deal from PC World of ADSL modem, 2 phone filters, software, and first two month's subscription (of £17.99 per month) all in a box for £17.99. 1MB link, 30GB per month cap.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

You can't upload to your NTL web space from a non-NTL connection? I am more and more glad that I use their service only to connect to the rest of the world, and not for mail, web space, or anything else provider-specific...

See you later ;)