I've only been with this ISP a few months but they are pretty bad.

I have been intermittently losing my connection even though the DSL itself is connected. I get "routhedEth cannot reach the DHCP server", when I looked at their forums it is a common problem. Support recommend re-running setup but I haven't had that problem since they suggested that - I have however had my dsl connection itself go down repeatedly since.

They sent an email out a few weeks ago warning of planned maintenance on the Sunday but said nobody should lose their connection. A couple of days later they sent another email saying that the maintenance has now been cancelled. On Sunday I had no connection for the whole day. They blamed it on their single link going down (they blamed BT actually) but I thought it was an odd coincidence that it went down the day of planned maintenance.

Then they sent out an email with a few megs of a firmware update attached for the router. Aside from what a bad idea security wise this is I held off applying it since I didn't trust them. A few days later they sent another email asking people to revert back to the previous firmware because there were problems with it. According to the forums the firmware also had a "Beta" banner plastered all over the interface.

I'm pleased that I missed one of their other email gaffes where they sent an email to their subscribers with everyone's email addresses in the cc: field.

The router they supply and strongly recommend you use is terrible, it is unstable and has a poor interface.

My previous ISP (and £25 ADSL modem) was totally stable it was just the speed and throttling that made me move.

Support are based in Bulgaria and, while they may mean well, it can be hard decoding their responses.

I had to reset an MSN id today and faced with a CAPTCHA that I had difficulty reading. I thought I would hit the button to use the audio version instead and just type it in, nice.
Just as I was thinking this was too easy the sound kicked in..... I listened to it twice and still couldn't make out properly what was said and had no interest in listening to that nightmarish noise again.

I've always thought I am a morning person.

After getting up late for a week or so I found I wasn't any more or less tired when getting up. I did however feel like my evenings were shorter when I get up late (and consequently work and get home later).

In conclusion - i'm not a morning person, i'm an evening person :-)

Here's a dashboard widget i've been working on.

I wanted a way to control my Squeezebox from the mac dashboard and found the Slimcontrol widget. With changes to slimserver (and maybe OSX) since it was last maintained quite a few things didn't work but luckily the author GPLed it when he stopped working on it so I fixed the bits that weren't working and added display of cover art, plus the "cd player" look :-)

I am using SlimServer Version 6.5.0 and OSX 10.4.8 - if you have problems please state your versions.

Download from the google code project page.

If you can't get it to work with cauth (I couldn't) then you can get it to work by switching cauth off in your slimserver preferences.

There are still some things that could be improved and some bugs I noticed.

Known bugs:
If the dashboard hasn't been shown for a while it can lose connection to the server.

Todo:
Style the volume slider - i've trawled the documentation and failed to find a way to do it, the alternative is a DHTML replacement which would make a round knob possible :-)

I see the vapourware that is Art Levedev's Optimus keyboard is failing to coalesce. I was slightly surprised to hear they are to show it at CeBIT. I am much less surprised to find out they aren't showing it after all.

Even though it doesn't seem to exist they keep reducing the claimed features for example now the OLED screen isn't part of the key and the transparent keycap will move over it rather than being part of it. Despite this their latest press photos(I nearly said 3D renderings ^_^) still have keys that look like the OLED screens are part of the keycap itself.

The price has also gone from the price of a "good cell phone" to $1500

I've been improving and extending some javascript recently and have been missing something like Junit or Test::Unit.
I started writing a quick set of assertxx functions to be able to test and then start test driving the new code.

After a short time I felt like I was re-inventing the wheel and a google later I found jsUnit. It has the nice comforting green bar and finds testxxx functions at runtime. Check it out.

I see that the BBC are trying to move with progress instead of against it and have now got into the YouTube phenomenon.

Too often companies resist progress, when ultimately they will have to embrace it anyway, after wasting effort resisting it.

I'm using Typo for this, it is fun writing my own website software but to be honest there isn't much point re-inventing the wheel when there are plenty of decent ones around.

Typo is also a Ruby On Rails app so I should be able to poke around it's internals if I find I need some feature or other.