Mum came home this weekend, and has now gone back into hospital, she wasn’t eating properly and coughing up blood.  I’ve been trying to get hold of dad most of the evening, but I guess he is still at Warrington general….inevitable?  I wish I could say I had more faith in the health service of this country, but I feel like my taxes are simply flushed straight down the loo at the moment.

And if I hear one more news story of how the government are improving things in the NHS by sending in “specialist managers” etc…  instead of spending the money on more doctors, nurses and beds….well, I’d explode but to be honest that would be such a waste!

…/rant off

Hmmm….it would appear that something had genuinely fried in my old router, asI am now on a replacement “Phillips” off the shelf jobby, and everything is back to normal.  Wierd how all the core functions of my old router remained ok?  But then again it was a Belkin…maybe that should be enough for me…ya know; limited shelf life and all?

I’m just glad my network is repaired and the new router supports ADSL2+ as well, which is just as well since I have registered an interested in Tiscali’s latest upto 8 Meg service…it has certainly been an interesting few days, mum had her operation on Thursday, things went well, and she will be home either today or tomorrow.

I am still perplexed at my current inability to connect to “selective” sites when using my Belkin Wireless ADSL Router (and I don’t mean porn by selective here - they’re fine ), I cannot see any sign that it has been compromised in any way, I have reset it twice and redone my entire LAN address range.  I have also formatted and reinstalled a machine to rule out Virus as a cause.

Yet - still it refuses to play ball, the odd thing for me, is how it allows me to connect, resolves the name of my entered URL(s), and then just sits there and hangs - like someone has decided to permenently DDOS my router??? (I would never have thought myself to be “that” special )

What else could be the explanation?  I don’t have the luxury of a different router to try.  I simply can’t accept this as a “router” fault! the numbers don’t add up.  I may give it a second or third thought over the weekend, however, at least I can use one of my puters using this “crappy” Speedtouch from Tiscali; the conspiracy theorist inside me wants to believe this is a deliberate ploy by Tiscali for me to buy their own router offering.

Meh!  Who knows?

…So, nothing to do with a virus after all,  I binned one of my machines and chucked a Linux Distro on it.  Still the same symptom…

I re-installed Windows XP on one machine from a formatted disk, and STILL the same symptom…

I switch off my router, install the crappy modem I got from Tiscali on one recently installed Windows machine, problem fixed…

…Gorram router seems to be a little fried?  That’s ALL I need!

I can ONLY access this blog from work at the moment, as I appear to be riddled with the old Sasser Virus (again) at home, so this may be my last update for a little old while…normally I would expect to be blocked at work and ok from home, tres bizarre!

In other news I hate pop tarts!

Got an email from a colleague today, giving me the heads up on Mars! Apparently in August it will be so close you can see it with your naked eye, so close it will be almost as big as a full moon! 

Made me chuckle a lot - it’s such a shame it’s 3 years out?

Mars Invades our airspace!!

In other news……it’s Friday!

***Feels decidedly cheated by the weather report***

…As Mr Universe wopuld put it.  The more I watch the Firefly Series, and the more I watch Serenity - the more taken I am.  It is more than just a clever mix of genres - Western meets Sci-Fi! It’s a complete phenomenon that has given birth to a ferverant followership in it’s fan-base worldwide - who call themselves (myself included) “BROWN COATS”

I am chomping at the bit, to see a sequel to the movie and/or a season 2 of the prematurely cut Firefly!  It’s got everything you want.  Plus the right cast - when are the media moguls gonna listen to the fan base??  This is a dead cert…

There are “Browncoat Shindigs” going on all the time, in lots of countries as the fans of this short lived series strive to keep the signal going and to spread it out across all of the verse!

Put it this way…I currently don’t have SKY - if they were to bring this back onto Sci-Fi Channel as has been suggested in the past, I would go out and get SKY.  It’s that simple.  Some programs are just worth that sorta commitment.