Have you ever stopped to wonder what the initials DSL or ADSL (as we have in Spain), mean? Nope, nor had I really, but it dawned on me yesterday, when after years of it sorta working (not without problems), my connection first slowed to a pace that would make a snail impatient, before disappearing up its own orifice.
Ha, I really didn’t know that the “A” stood for Asymmetric either and, there being something “unbalanced” or “odd” about that is no surprise to me at all. 
Anyway, so there I was cut off from my (cough) “always on” connection (again) and, as it usually does, it tries to reconnect itself. After several false starts, where it said there was no dial tone, the computer at the other end wasn’t answering, etc., ad nauseum, it finally connects, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y.
When it connected, the little balloon pops up saying at what speed. Usually, it lies, claiming to be 1.0 Mbps, but they warned me I’d only get half (far from the exchange). So I just treat it as a starting point, halve it, take away my European shoe size and arrive at an approximation of the true speed - that has never before exceeded 400 odd. This time, the stupid balloon said, proudly 64k.
As broadband speeds go, I don’t think it gets any slower than 64 kbit/s.
But this did not behave anything like any sort of broadband I know. It didn’t even resemble the performance of a 64k modem. Maybe it was a Commodore 64?
Now, yes, I’ve been through all this before and you can not get help from Telefonica’s help line until you’ve run the diagnostics, disconnected, restarted your computer, reconnected … only for them to tell you what you knew all along: that the exchange / ADSL in this area is fu… well, has a problem.
No, really, if you ring them up, after you get past the 20 minute wait and all the “Press 1 to be verbally abused by machine” nonsense, if you dare to admit that you haven’t done all this unnecessary stuff, they tell you, like you’re a naughty child, to do as you’re told and call back. And they just hang up on you.
So, like a dutiful lemming, I hit the ADSL monitor thingy to run the diagnostics.
They’re bloody smart, you know, these monitor thingies, ‘coz something came up marked in red saying I didn’t have access to the internet. No, really?
Then it asks me if I want to recuperate the last working connection and, naturally, I tell it yes. Then it says it cant to that (so why ask me?), but proceeds to remove the connection settings from the computer.
This was last night. At that point I gave up, switched off, went to bed.
This morning I checked my email via a free modem dialup connection that chunters along at 36k. If the ADSL is slow, you just can’t imagine how painful that is. Gmail will not even load on it, except in barebones plain HTML. It’s like going so slowly, you go backwards, through time, to another century!
So, next we had to drag out the installation disk, the manual, the record I had sensibly made of all the settings when I did this the first time and reinstall all the software for the ADSL all over again … grovelling around on the floor unplugging and plugging, waiting, restarting, testing things that didn’t need testing.
And, at the end of the day, actually, I can’t really complain:
That’s the first time it had ever broken the 500 kb “sound barrier”!
It’ll never last. (And it didn’t, ‘coz later it was taking forever to load pages.)
Can we do without broadband? I tend to still think we’re all a bunch of spoiled brats for having such “modern conveniences” as internet at all, but it’s hard to do anything these days without an intenet connection. People expect you to go online to their website, to book things online, to send them stuff by email.
And with web pages three times as large and “heavy” with images, codes, etc., since 2003 and 22 times bigger than they were back in 1995, it’s not luxury, it’s necessity to have had one’s speed and capacity increase along with it.
Why, even the world’s oldest blogger, María Amelia, says, today coincidentally, that the internet has it’s defects. She can’t watch online videos, nor listen to songs by Raphael, because she doesn’t have broadband. Is there some nice person who could give a broadband subscription to María Amelia as a gift?
But then, at least I don’t have Telefonica’s latest “advance” in broadband, that Microsiervos report in their WTF? section. Click here to see the evidence.
Yes, it really does say negative -2492.62 kbps as in backwards.
Alvy says, “You can interpret this as, instead of downloading pages, you have to go up and get them!” And, surprise, surprise, reports, “This happened to Medra on making a speed test to find out why their ADSL was going so slowly.”
And it there’s the Telefonica Net logo on it. Priceless!
Help me with my housing, health and other issues, please.
Today, I have really struggled not to let my sensibilities as a “politically correct” (actually, I’m not) Brit, nor as an “immigrant” cloud my judgement on this story, but this report has me absolutely hopping mad livid.
A large sign was seen outside a computer shop, of the franchise “Beep” (ironically relevant to censor any number of words I’ve uttered in response to it), in the village of Alcudia, on the island of Mallorca.
The offending article (right), which has a background in the colours of the Romanian flag, has lettering which says, “Se prohíbe la entrada sin previo aviso a perros y rumanos, de lo contrario saldrán echando (h)ostias.”
In English: “Entry is prohibited without appointment to dogs and Romanians, otherwise you’ll be kicked strait out.”
The person who spotted the sign, went back to take photos and sent them by email to blog Mi Mesa Cojea, commenting that this was not “The USA 50 years ago, nor South Africa 30 years ago, it’s Mallorca, 2 hours ago!”
After the blog published the item here, the story was picked up by the press.
Mayor, Miquel Ferrer, says the town hall has ordered the removal of the sign.
The co-owner of this franchise store, who runs it with her husband, a former candidate for mayor, meanwhile, explained to the Mallorca press that “a series of Romanians had stolen material to the value of 3,000 euros.”
And that’s supposed to be an ‘effin excuse? Not in my book lady!
Apart from the fact that it’s nobody else’s responsibility if you fail to protect your materials or aren’t properly insured, this is just so ignorantly xenophobic.
There have been reports of Romainians involved in various crimes in Tenerife, but just because some Romanians steal, or even if a lot of Romanians steal, does not mean that ALL Romanians steal or that any humans can be treated like dogs.
Dogs should not be treated as some Spanish people treat dogs, but …
Only a Nazi could possibly think that this sign is acceptable.
Help me with my housing, health and other issues, please.
The Steam Powered Internet Machine from 2006. The Guardian
No really. Well, OK, since I’ve just “written off” my main email account as spammed to death and started again with a brand spanking new one, I also decided to do some house cleaning and, with the exception of a few important items, deleted all emails over a month old. The liberation of decluttering!
But, I really was using email back in 1991, in the UK. Admittedly, it was only inside the firm I worked for, but internationally within the partnership.
I was online in 1997, which I consider to be late to the party, but it wasn’t available here in Tenerife much before that (6 months, give or take.)
From 1999, I was making money online and, in mid-2001, was earning more per month than I did working for that exalted firm of beancounters accountants.
My blog really was started in 2003. In fact, it only looks like it started in 2004, because I re-dated a few posts into January of that year, to make it tidy.
Indeed, I’ve been playing with computers (no, actually, for work purposes, not games) since the late 70’s and using luggable PCs at home since the mid-80s. Any earlier and they really would have had to have been steam driven!
(Don’t go thinking I’m obsessed and keep everything tidy though!)
Anyway, I don’t tend to waste spend much time around many marketers’ blogs, so I wasn’t aware of something that’s going on, which Neil Shearing describes in this post and asks, Is It Evil To Pad Your Blog With Backdated Content?
Yes, it’s evil to try to fake a long track-record online.
On the other hand, if those marketers were online to send those emails in 2004, then presumably, it’s possible that they could have had an “old fashioned” website, where their newsletter archives were stored. If they did, what is wrong with converting it to using an easier to maintain blog-driven system now?
The old dates are appropriate, because the content is really only being transferred from one URL (archive) to another (blog post).
It would be very pedantic to insist on it being done, but I suppose it is strictly correct - to state that it is a repost of something previously published elsewhere. You can’t link to the elsewhere it came from, because you’ll probably do 301 redirects for those anyway. And then you start to wonder if you should be writing “this has been moved from” on every page you ever moved?
Even if they didn’t ever get around to posting archives, because it was a pain in the backside, what’s wrong with them doing so now that blogging software has made it easier for the non-techy to publish what’s important, their content?
Always assuming that the content is “evergreen.”
Some of my own content about Tenerife previously appeared, or may have been rewritten from, articles I wrote for various newspapers and magazines in the past. Like everywhere else, there are certain places that don’t move and regular, annual events to mention and, there are only so many ways to say it!
Lots of authors, of various subjects, will be in similar positions.
Then there are genuine cases for backdating posts, also because the author couldn’t be posting now, like with The Diary of Samuel Pepys.
To borrow some wisdom from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves …
Azeem (Morgan Freeman): “I once heard a wise man say, “There are no perfect men in this world. Only perfect intentions.”
The crux of the matter is the intent. If it’s to help and inform, publishing still useful information, no matter how old it is, surely presents no problem.
If it’s to slap up any old crap in an attempt to fool both punters and search engines, then that’s evil and, it will soon be found out anyway.
How does the reader discern? Obviously, they just know if the content is helpful to them, but that, like beauty, is still somewhat “in the eye of the beholder.”
Neil’s post raises some very interesting questions and conundrums though, because genuine blogs are not going to be trusted or believed (if they ever were in the first place), if it becomes widely known that this practice is going on.
Readers could use something like the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine.
The theory being that, if a page purports to be from 2004, there ought to be a record of it going back to then. This theory breaks down when it is true, but the site disallowed the internet archive from crawling their content or the content started off on a Blogger Blog*Spot URL, was transferred to various business domains and, was later moved to a personal domain when it was converted to Wordpress (that also had the effect of changing all the file names.)
Ah, yes, true story (much shortened) of where most of this blog has been.
In this case, we’re not even talking about posts being backdated, they were already posted. The wayback machine probably has entries for the posts, under all the URLs that they have resided under, during their moveable feast around the dynamic web, but the reader is not going to know where to look.
Most of the time, it may be appropriate to just remove all date information from old content and post merely the core useful part, with today’s date or none.
There’s a chance that one or two honest to goodness marketers exist are using blogging software with that precise intention, but they simply don’t know that they can, or how to, remove the date information from displaying.
It’s fine to use blogging software as a Content management system (CMS), but marketers must not be allowed to get away with blithely ignoring the implications of doing so. It may need customization and they may need to find out how, or hire someone, to make necessary tweaks to cure potential ambiguity.
Having thought long and hard about this and, related to something I mused circularly about earlier, I came to the conclusion that we really need date stamps - and maybe “valid until” or “read by” dates - to remain on documents.
You never know when something has been superseded. Leave dates on and readers can more easily see which is the latest or compare versions.
Other times, because it would also be dishonest (or complicated, needing an explanation) to omit the fact that content had been published before, it may actually be the best option to reflect the true (backdated) date of the item.
The responsible and non-lazy (so it counts me out!) marketer, in that case, should think about adding a note to the bottom of those old posts which says when and where it was first published. By email, if that is where. If that was to a list, is there a public archive provided that you can link to as “proof?”
If it was at old domains you no longer own, think about finding the relevant entry in the Wayback Machine yourself and pointing to it (there’s no point linking to the domain that could, by now, be a porn site), so that the reader can verify easily that you speak the truth. That is, if your online reputation matters to you.
That’s not so easy if you’ve dragged thousands of pages of stuff all around the net for many years - as I have - like some kind of virtual bag lady.
Neil asks finally, “What’s next? Twitter tweets from 2001? Facebook pages from 1999? Squidoo Lenses from 1994?” It occurred to me that it must be the steam powered internet, but little did I know, even that’s already been done!
Help me with my housing, health and other issues, please.
Mother’s Day here in Spain was last week. In the UK it was in March, but today, Balu has been constantly hanging around either of his “mummies” (me or the dog) for love; for reassurance. That furball has idolized his dog, ever since she picked him out of the box when he was a mere 4 inch long scrap of kitten, seven years ago, laid him on the floor and washed him from arse to tip - with one lick.
Holly has slept next to her adopted charges, kept bums clean, supervised them to make sure they didn’t stray, chastises them for bad behaviour and, many’s the day I will wake up to find her playing with “her kid”, rolling him on the floor, nuzzling into his soft belly fur and seemingly giggling, as well as sneezing, while showing no retaliation nor impatience with the painful claws in her snout.
Today, Balu got me up at 7.30 a.m., he’s been on and off the desk half the morning and, unusually for that time of day, snuggled on my lap, “arms” around my neck, nuzzling me and purring loudly. He’s been sat on the chair beside me and has been following and nuzzling the dog even more than normal.
Animals can always sense when their routine is changing.
Little does he realize quite by how much.
Help me with my housing, health and other issues, please.
