Hello? Is this thing on? I haven't been back here in ages, since my 'proper' hosted site, Rossbrown.net got um.. Wordpressified. I just thought I would leave a final post here as a kind of postscript, but actually... I am kinda digging the whole Blogger interface. Very funky!

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A final post?

Since I have finally made my personal website blog-friendly, I will not be using this blog anymore. It's been an experience, blogging here for the last year. I just read some of my earliest posts and man...are they long! And frequent! Just looking here, I haven't posted here for two months. Just shows how my priorities have changed, now I've got better things to do than blog blog blog.

I'm going to leave this blog here, rather than deleting it, but from this point on it will not be updated. To catch up on my current activities, you should visit my personal site - www.rossbrown.net

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Just as I thought I was finally free of NTL, they have sent me a bill for October 1-31st. If you are curious why they are billing me for a service I clearly don't have (they collected the equipment two weeks ago), you obviously aren't familiar with their unsurpassed level of incompetence. At least they can be proud of something I suppose - "NTL - even worse than BT!"

If you ever find yourself unfortunate enough to be one of their customers, beware that complaining / registering a fault will take you the best part of an hour - and that's before you even get to speak with anyone.

It's their attitude that pisses me off more than anything. When we moved out of the last place we phoned them well in advance and waited the obligatory 50 minutes to speak to a CS drone and arranged for a so-called engineer to come and collect the STB and cable modem on the Friday we were moving out. Unsuprbloodyprisingly he didn't turn up. No phone call, nothing. By then my attitude towards NTL was way past caring, I fully intended to leave the boxes on the doorstep for theives / vandals / the weather to take care of. As it happens, we were back in the house on Sunday, doing a spot of last-minute cleaning when there was a knock on the door. Guess who? Yup, a monkey in a boilersuit with an NTL wagon.

He said "NTL - I'm here to collect your boxes".
I said "Weren't you supposed to come on Friday?"
He said "Yeah, well I thought I would come on Sunday - everyone's in on Sunday aren't they?"
Take your boxes and...

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The kittens are already noticeably bigger than they were last weekend. I'm not too surprised, they eat enough for a small horse. There are some pictures of them in my photo gallery.

Yesterday was a momentous day - Ableton Live 3.0 was released. I got a free upgrade (because I only just bought v2) and spent most of last night playing with the new features. It's a pretty amazing piece of software - I am coming to think of it as Photoshop for music. Put simply, anything you can imagine can be done. As quoted on the reviews page:

"You can use it for live performance, you can DJ with it or engineer some weird, trailer park crossbreed of the two."

Yup, my music can definitely be described like that!

I keep meaning to post to say that (so far) Virgin.net ADSL has been loads better than the terrible excuse for broadband that is NTL. Since I went online with Virgin.net I've had none of the problems that I took for granted on NTHell - no DNS dropouts, no transparent proxy issues, no random disconnects and what's more the Usenet server is actually functional, I get twice the upload capacity, it's cheaper and just feels a lot faster.

By checking which proxy I am using I found out that I am actually still being proxied by one of NTL's Inktomi Traffic Servers. Looking back over news items from 2000, it seems Virgin.net sold 49% of their business to NTL. Given that Telewest are set to buy up NTL any day now and BT just teamed up with Yahoo! - pretty soon the UK's broadband market will be sewn up by a handful of companies.

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I saw this great site about the World Beard Championships. Since I have started cultivating a small beardy growth of my own, I have become somewhat fascinated by beards. I've got a hell of a lot of catching up to do if I want to enter when they come to London in 2007...

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I've started noticing strange things in my referrer logs (the record of sites that visitors have supposedly come from). I am getting hit quite a lot by dodgy-sounding porn sites which I have never heard of, let alone expect links from. After a bit of research, it seems that this is just another form of spam. In some ways, I'm flattered that spammers think my site is likely to generate more traffic for them but in others I'm bloody annoyed that they see fit to waste my time and energy. I'm a pretty staunch anti-spammer and will do everything I can to stop them from messing up my stats.

It's just another example of how spam is choking the Internet.

Here are some wise words from Bill Hicks for anyone in "email marketing".

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I'm baaaack.....

We moved house last weekend - because we've moved in with Candi's sister we had to downsize. This meant taking a load of stuff over to Candi's parents for storage, so effectively we moved twice. Not much fun :-(
We did manage to hire a Luton van with a tail lift quite cheaply though, so that helped. My younger brother also came up to help us and brought two of his mates with him - I don't know what we would have done without their help, it made a huge difference. At the last minute I decided to let my brother have custody of my hifi because there's not really room for it here. He took it away with him in the boot of his car - unfortunately I think the remotes for the CD player and amp are packed inside a box in storage. It shouldn't matter too much, but because the CD player is a 200 CD jukebox and you can search for CDs by title, a remote is pretty essential. If I was him I would buy a replacement...

One of the things about living here is that we can have pets. Candi has been going on about getting a cat or dog for as long as I can remember, so it's not really that surprising that she's going to pick up two kittens with her sister tomorrow. They are coming from a farm and apparently are very healthy and all, but the woman is charging £50 for them, which I think is taking the piss a bit. It's not like they are pedigree cats or anything and they haven't even had their shots. Still, she is happy.

I've been without broadband access at home for about a week because of the move. I had to switch from NTL to Virgin.net ADSL. If you ignore the fact that Virgin didn't tell me I was being activated today until... well, today - I'm pretty impressed with them. They offer a monthly contract instead of a 12-month tie-in (which is handy considering I may not be here for that long) and they are cheaper than BT (more accurately, BT / Yahoo). I bought a shiny new Netgear ADSL / wireless router to replace my MR-314 (otherwise I would need an ADSL router as well - I decided to go for the all-in-one solution). I may put my MR-314 on eBay but I'm not sure if I may need it again in the future. I must say, the DG724M was dead easy to set up, the admin web interface is a huge improvement over the MR314.

I've just received my newest toy, the Ableton Live / Evolution UC-33 bundle. I have had a play with the demo of Live and I was very impressed. The bundle seemed like good value so I went on about it so much that Candi bought it for me as an early Birthday present. I'm still getting to grips with it, I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to MIDI and making music with my computer but Live is much easier to use than anything else I have played with (Cakewalk, Cubase, Reason etc). I'm going to use it for creating remixes and mixing tracks together, I've already done a 30 minute mix of all sorts of stuff which has come out pretty well, considering it's my first attempt. As with all these things though, it's a matter of making time.

One of my friends at work has just bought Unreal Tournament 2003 (UT2K3) and told me about a load of patches, maps and mods that are available for it. I hadn't bothered looking before, so I was quite interested to see what was out there. The Star Wars Troopers mod really caught my eye, I've just downloaded and installed it - off to have a look now....

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So much has happened in the last month... We managed to get an excellent last-minute holiday to Greece in early September. The weather was fantastic but best of all I managed to go away for a week and completely forget about work. Just what the doctor ordered. We stayed in a great spot, I've set up an online picture gallery with the best pics in. Have a look, it's dead good - leave comments if you like.

We're moving house this weekend. I've taken some days off as holiday to pack and prepare for the move. In fact, that's what I should be doing now.... It's been a good year here in Caversham but to be honest I'm tired of the place. It's great for walking into town for work and going out, but the property is too small for us really. It will be nice to get to the new place which is much larger and out in the countryside. I'll probably get round to posting some pics of the new place eventually too.

What else... minor update on rossbrown.net - changed the text on the front page and added a link to the gallery. I've also added other digital pics I have taken, the flood earlier in the year and my trip to Lake Como for the Shell Ferrari Historic Challenge. Also some crap I have done for b3ta.

My brother has put in an offer on a 1-bed flat in Westbourne, waiting to see how that turns out. He's coming up this weekend with a couple of mates to help us move (what a star!) so we've promised to help return the favour if and when he gets his own place.

My cousin has just bought his own domain and got that up and running. Check it out - www.xian-zai.com. He's used Geeklog and used my icons from neverhappy.com! Not that I mind, he is family after all!

I've been playing around making music again. I haven't done much since I got rid of my Roland MC-303. I'm not really a musician, but I love music and I love mixing. I discovered Ableton Live and ended up buying it. It's a fantastic product, the only PC music making tool that I have really managed to get into. It treats each loop like elastic, allowing you to stretch and warp it, mixing records together that really shouldn't go! I'm waiting for my order to turn up, I ended up buying the bundle with the Evolution MIDI controller as well - I really can't wait. I haven't been this excited since ordering my new PC last year.

Neverhappy.com continues but isn't really going anywhere. As predicted, I am the only one who actually posts anything - maybe I need to trash it and rethink the subject matter. There doesn't seem to be much interest in the e-business thing, or maybe that there are so many sites covering that subject already. My friend's site emptyspiral.net has been a runaway success, in stark contrast to neverhappy.

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