I know what you're thinking...

...It's about fucking time. You're right, of course, it's been ages since I actually wrote anything vaguely worthwhile here, but I have excuses. None of them are very good, but they are excuses nonetheless - most involve my resit results, coming back up to uni and trying to sort out Burn FM.

For those who care, I passed my fucking resits - although finding out that I passed was a challenge in itself. Equally challenging was finding out that I had to go and queue for an hour for the privillage of paying my university fees - bastards. Anyway, the main reason I'm typing anything at all is because I've been drinking, which is always a good excuse for long ramblings about nothing in particular or general crap which I will no doubt regret sharing with the general public come the morning.

So, what have I been up to since I got back at uni? Well, primarily trying to sort out Burn FM in time for the braodcast, which starts this friday. It's all gone very well in every respect and for once I'm actually reasonably happy with my life, although I think being back at uni and around Antonia has a lot to do with it - having someone you get on really well with is always a good thing. Still nothing on the romantic front, but I refuse to let this year slip by as I did with the last - somehow or other I will make some kind of effort and to hell with the consequences, quite frankly. Not that any of you will care, but I had a bizzare dream the other night in which the Burn FM committee, sans Antonia & Terry, deicded that I wasn't fit to run the station and kicked me out, at which point I told them all to go fuck themselves and never returned - I'm starting to worry that my dreams might be prophetic given past experience.

Anyway, things are finally looking up for me, with any luck I won't be hugely depressed for most of this year and who knows, I might actually pass it and get a degree - I've been reliably informed that stranger things have happened, although I don't believe it myself.

Until I next have a few pints.
Spad.

NTL "Technical Support" sucks...

As you may presently yourself fully be aware, my grammar sucks, but more importantly I've been having problems with "Document Contains No Data' errors since coming back from uni to my NTL connection.

Anyway, today I bit the bullet and rang NTL's tech support, ostensibly to complain about their piss-poor quality of service. I know it's their fault because the exact same PC & Network setup works fine on my Telewest connection at uni.

Anyway, after spending 10 minutes convincing some random employee that I had indeed patched my PC to protect against the Blaster worm (They won't offer tech support if you haven't) I got put through to the 'real' tech support people.

Everything was going great up until he asked me to go to Tools->Internet options and I had to explain that I don't use IE. "Ah", he said, "so you use Netscape". I tried saying I used Mozilla but he didn't know what I was talking about so I just decided it was best to be creative and I said yes. "So you're using Netscape 4.7?". Not wanting to further confuse the man, I decided to keep it simple and told him I was using Netscape 7.1.

At this point he put me on hold to check something. When he came back he informed me that NTL only support IE & Netscape 4.x (!!!) so I'd have to use IE if I wanted tech support. As I knew the problem was on their end I figured I might as well go along with the IE thing because, hey, it might work.

Next came the standard questions about how I was connected to the net. I gave the standard lies about direct connections because from previous experience with NTL tech support their scripts tell them that if anyone is using a router or gateway server then you have to unplug it all and connect directly because we all know routers and gateway servers cause these problems.

Cue 10 minutes of random changing of IE settings and re-registering DLLs (Or at least pretending to). Once that had failed to help, I once again suggested that the problem was on their end because I didn't have the problem at uni - at this point he decided I must have a laptop because I used it in more than one place - but to no avail ("Nobody else is having this problem" - or at least nobody else is smart enough to know, especially as IE doesn't give any kind of error message).

Finally, after a second phase of being put on hold, I finally got what I needed - namely a list of NTL's proxy servers (Not their transparent proxy caches, but their actual proxy servers). I was then able to play proxy roulette until I found one with a reasonable load level that wasn't dropping every other connection.

Woo. Now all I have to do is pick one at random every time the problem starts recurring to essentially route myself around the traffic - something their load-balancing systems should do for me.



Spad.

The end is nigh...

Well it's all over bar the results now. I handed in two pieces of passable coursework and took my two exams - one of which went rather well, the other, well let's just say I'm not optimistic about it - and now I await my results. Good news is my results will be out "Sometime in September" - equally, I'm going back up to uni 'Sometime in September' and term starts 'Sometime in September', which is nice to know.

Worst case scenario, I get thrown out of uni and have to find a job without any decent qualifications.

Best case scenario, I pass my retakes with flying colours and get to take my 3rd year.

Most likely scenario - probably the former, although there's still a vague twang of hope in there somewhere. I'll keep you updated.

Spad.