Fucking Tiscali

Karl’s ISP has had a boob-moment and has, for some absurd reason, banned Jemjabella.co.uk, Site5.com and any website hosted at Site5.com. It also seems to have blocked any website starting with the IP 212.*

It’s bloody infuriating because I can’t access my e-mail, ftp, etc. I’m at my Mum’s at the moment.. The main problem is I’m trying to revamp my weblog backend and integrate a decent CMS (all hand-coded of course) /etc etc.. and some of my original code (only stored online at the moment) ..I can’t get to.

I also have updated Review-You (it’s merging with Elea’s ‘The Review Files’) and I can’t upload it, or set up her account/etc. Grr.

So, if I don’t reply to comments, e-mails, etc.. it’s because I can’t, not because I don’t want to/too lazy to (for once, heh.) We’re in contact with Tiscali and hoping to get it sorted soon. It’s been like this for 3-4 days now..!

Edit by Karl: We’re back. It wasn’t a ban! It was a router on tiscali’s main backbone somewhere that was dying. It affected customers at random, blocking things like Dell’s websites and ours.

Tiscali’s phone tech support:useless. Hard to understand (not being racist, but PLEASE..if you WILL work on a helpdesk, learn the terms, learn the language, and get some training?), slow, needed telling at least 6 times ever slower what the problem was.

Tiscali’s e-mail tech support: better. Just. I submitted a long techie mail with traceroute data from site5 to Tiscali to show the prob was with this router 3 days ago. 24 hours later, I get a mail asking me to try accessing the site by it’s IP only. I replied with “no luck, I want to escalate the call now”. 24 hours later, I get another mail-SAME AS THE FIRST! With my original reply/data beneath…”please try this, give us these details..blabla”..

So..last night I replied with “you’re REALLY trying my patience. PLEASE READ THE E-MAIL FULLY-I DID THAT.”. Still waiting for a reply.

However, I must thank the good people at ADSLGuide forums-they’ve been a source of support and amusement throughout. Us Tiscali customers have to stick together..;)

Specifically, I must thank the gent who gave me via PM the e-mail addy of a tiscali tech support chap from Tiscalis own forums (which were so badly set up that I was logged in with the wrong details, yet every time I tried to post I got “you are not logged in” *cough*.).

I must also thank the Tiscali tech Support operative “Mr Tibbs”. Cheers matey-if we could clone people, they should clone you..a voice of sanity amongst madness.

Last, but not least-I must thank the Tech_Support, and Computer_help communities on livejournal, and LJ user “Microchip” for their assistance and support.

So..we’re back, we seem faster, hopefully it stays that way. Now it’s just a matter of closing the support calls, and trying to find the tiny USB tiscali modem, which we…um..lost..*cough*

Posted on: October 27, 2005 · Category: Interwebs

Home from Holiday

I would say it’s good to be home, but it’d be a lie. :( I love being by the seaside, even in rainy Wales.

I know some of you are probably bored titless by holiday posts, so I’ve prepared a comment for you to copy and paste. Because parts of it are generated randomly by PHP, all comments will be different and therefore I’ll think you lovingly hung on every word It didn’t actually work because of my crappy weblog system (which will be rewritten) so here (and I’ll just pretend you read everything)..

Hii Jem!

I’m glad you’re home! It wasn’t the same without you.
I’m glad to hear you had a great time, your photos are just amazing!

[insert your name here]

Anyway, let’s go back to Friday. First was the early morning rush-packing because none of us packed earlier and I don’t know why. After getting everything packed into Karl’s Mum’s car we set off… 30-odd miles down the road someone coming the other way starts flashing his lights and doing a ’round-y round’ motion with his finger. After resisting the urge to do a certain other motion with my finger, I listened to Karl debating the sanity of this weird wave-y guy and then came to the conclusion that there was probably a speed camera-wielding maniac police officer further ahead or some dickhead driving too fast in the piss-pouring rain had crashed.

Unfortunately for them it must have been the latter because moments later we were over-taken by a noisy multi-coloured blur which I assume was a speeding police car. We watched lots of people turn around in the road and pulled in to consult a map — deciding to take a back road which, looking back, was probably a stupid idea… we almost had a crash of our own due to a close encounter with another car coming the opposite way on a single-lane road.

Arrive at the caravan after another few hours and unpack. Wrap myself up in a giant orange condom (waterproof poncho) for a quick trip to the beach where I collect a few shells, grab some disgustingly greasy fish and chips from a disgustingly greasy chip shop ‘salesperson’.

wall painting

Saturday was fun, we went to Portmeirion (where the Prisoner TV series was recorded) and that was interesting. The buildings were groovy and we went for a long woodland walk where I was crapped on, and where Robins performed tricks for peanuts. Alright, I lie, they didn’t perform tricks, but the cheeky buggers certainly didn’t hesitate to approach us for them.

Sunday.. we took a trip into Barmouth (oh, yeah, that’s where we stayed) Town and took a picture of “arousal cafe”.

arousal cafe

We popped in to the Centre of Alternative Technology for a bit of “you should recycle more” guilt tripping — funky chicken more walking and a bit of interesting education on clean living and the benefits of solar power/etc. There were some interesting chickens…

After what seemed like a never-ending journey we arrived home to discover that the electricity had been ‘tripped’ while we were gone and the two fridges and the freezer had been off all weekend. What little food was left from before the holiday was ruined, so we had to go emergency shopping.

So now we’re home. I have a new rainbow cup, some paintbrushes that Karl’s Mum bought me and a desire to go and run out into the sea. Not quite possible on the outside of Shrewsbury though.

Posted on: October 24, 2005 · Category: Parenting

Holiday

Off on holiday to Wales (UK) tomorrow morning and I won’t be back until Monday (I think).. have a good weekend everyone!

Posted on: October 20, 2005 · Category: Misc

New Domain

I ordered myself a new domain today. Accidentally. I know that sounds a little bit crazy but it’s simple really — I was checking the availabilty of tutorialtastic.co.uk (that won’t work until all the DNS is sorted should work now) for future reference (’cause at £1.99 a year it’s hard to go wrong) and because I was already logged in to my account at 1and1.co.uk I clicked “Continue” thinking I’d get more info and ended up with a “Congratulations, your order has been processed” page. Ooops.

I’m not complaining because I was incredibly tempted to get it anyway, it just means it processed on the wrong card. I wanted to see if I could use mine and it’s gone through on Karl’s. I owe him for two years domain name registration and 70p VAT. A fiver! Oh no! ;)

Posted on: October 19, 2005 · Category: Interwebs

A Microsoft Bitch and the Q*bee

I must confess I’m a bit of a Microsoft-aholic. Alright, their browser bugs the crap out of me and I could quite happily go on a ban-FrontPage rally.. but generally speaking I find their Operating System/s to be handy, easy to use and usually always immediate in their support of drivers. I use a legal copy of XP Home, Office XP and just recently bought Age of Empires (a Microsoft game). I even admire their ability to dominate the market in a way — it makes me envious of the success of the company.

On the other hand, I am sick of the code-bloat and the proprietary shite, so yesterday I uninstalled my copy of MS Office and have migrated to Open Office. It’s free, does exactly what MS Office did (so far) and is 10 times faster. I would get rid of my OS but there’s a flaw in that logic: every distro of Linux that Karl has downloaded completely refuses to talk to the wireless network. It picks up Karl’s wired network/router setup just fine, but when unplugged and given a trendy wireless dongle it tells it to piss off. Not literally. So, uh.. any suggestions from you Linux ‘boffins’ would be appreciated!

Moving on, I want to give The Quilting Bee a quick plug. It’s in need of a fresh burst of talented designers such as you regular visitors of mine. ;) It basically requires you trading mini ‘patches’ twice a month and being friendly. Can be great fun and brings quite a bit of traffic to my site. (That’s not a reason to join, ’cause you’ll soon be booted :P just an added bonus.) You might even learn to make pixel graphics like this piece of hot-ness!

I ramble.. back to working on my CSS Reboot design and stuff for work. Don’t forget to vote for me. ;)

Posted on: October 17, 2005 · Category: Geek, Interwebs