Frank has been looking around for a better internet provider than effing TalkTalk and it turns out that we have to go back to British Telecom first. All other providers rent the phone lines from BT and if you were with somebody else they apparently cannot switch you over to their network. So much for free competition, this is still a monopoly position for BT and it's sooooooooooo mega annoying. So our phone line will be switched to BT one of these coming days and we'll have no internet until Frank has found a new provider. No internet means no SylkeWeb and no surfing for me. Gah, that's just horrible!

Anyway, have a good week or so without me. I'll miss you all! Sniff.

… and now nothing works. Beware of TalkTalk.

I hate sales people who don't know what they are talking about. They promise you what you want to hear (broadband with static IP address) instead of what they really have on offer (no static IP address). We fell for it and now we need to look for a new one to get SylkeWeb back on-line permanently instead of intermittently.

On top of that, ever since we are with TalkTalk our connection has become really flaky. I'm not happy at all.

Damn, this is super annoy3ing333, but my3 key3board 333is3 333play3ing up on me - as yo3u can see. When I pres3s 33c333ertain keys, I'll get loads of 3s. So, I'll spare you and me from this and won't post anything until I have a new laptop.33333333333333333333333333333333333333
*3sigh*33

I've been trying before to get rid of comment spam but it doesn't work well without some more drastic measures. So, from now on, if you would like to leave a comment and are not a registered user of this website yet, please take a moment to register yourself. This only has to be done once and with the help of a cookie the site will remember you.

Please don't be shy, I like comments

Some of you might have noticed that I added a 'log in / register' function a little while ago (in the sidebar to the right). This didn't really serve any purpose so far, I was just playing with WordPress to see how this works. Now with the upcoming birth I was thinking that I could actually use this for those people who would like to get an email notification when baby is born. I already have a list of addresses that I compiled myself, but there might be more people or different addresses to be used. So if you want to make sure you get a mail from Frank in your favourite email account as soon as possible after the event - and I am sure that's before any post will be on this blog - please take a minute and register yourself as a user with a valid email address on this site. Thank you!

Today I received 81 spam messages sent as comments to this blog. I had some before but this is starting to take the mickey. Especially as this vastly outnumbers legitimate comments.

So, to not have this rubbish appear on my site, I took a counter measure.

From now on for anybody to have comments appear automatically in a blog post you will have to have at least one approved message already posted. If you have not posted a comment before, your message will have to wait to be moderated by me first. After that it will appear on the site. This might take only a few minutes, or a day, or even longer, depending on the availability of Frank or me. It's a shame but unavoidable.

Having said that, please comment! I like to get legitimate comments!!!

It took only four months to transfer the domain name from our Irish ISP to an English one. My administrator just said, 'next time you can do it yourself'! Stupid bastard! And now he's threatening me to format the hard disk because I'm not nice.

Never mind the domestic banter, you should now be able to reach this site either by using http://www.sylkeweb.com or http://brathahn.demon.co.uk.

Important: There is one thing to look out for - if you want to log into the Photo Gallery, make sure to be on SylkeWeb rather then the Brathahn domain name.

I am still shocked: our web server in Dublin gave up last week!

Thankfully I have a great home network admin who happened to be on home leave at the time. He took the hard drive with him to England and applied all changes of the web site to the back-up server that was already over there. So, until the domain name of sylkeweb.com is transferred, welcome to brathahn.demon.co.uk!

What else is going on?

Yippeah: We are selling our house and looks like the first and only viewers will be getting it. They made an offer straight-away!

Sigh: I'll be driving over to the Eastleigh for the first time soon. Gosh, this is an undertaking! I am planning to take a first load of my stuff over. Sofia will be going with me and I was hoping she could do some of the driving. To hire a van and take it to England I had to make quite a number of calls. Turns out, you need to have your own car insurance to drive the van, which means Sofia won't be allowed to drive. So first I'll need to get my car insurance transferred for the time to cover commercial vehicles, secondly I need to get some special travel insurance. All of those I can only get once I know the registration number of the van. But the van people can't give me that until very shortly before I get the van. I can't even book the ferry without the registration. For Goodness' sake, is anything easy in this country?

The added problem is of course my pregnancy. It's very tough to pack boxes and carrying them is a complete 'nono'. I have to say I know some very generous people who kindly agreed carrying all the stuff into the van on Thursday night!!!