The collected works of ScottyB

The updated Spa-Francorchamps circuit on Monday hosted free practice sessions ahead of the famous 24 Hour event. The race is currently taking place this weekend.

Round 6 of the FIA GT Championship - what is quickly becoming my favourite race series out there.

While I’ve enjoyed watching the live timing and clicking back to the PC every hour or so to check up on the progress - and hitting the FIAGT web site, its just not the same as watching it live on the TV.

I really have difficulty imagining a more amazing event. Spa-Francorchamps - possibly my favourite race circuit in the world. Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, Maserati, Corvette, Saleen, all fighting it out. 24 hours of driving, 24 hours of reliability and consistency. Its an incredible event on an amazing circuit.

Rain has hit the race pretty significantly according to the timing and news updates. I can’t imagine how exciting it must be to watch! Almost as exciting as the last round of the F1 at the Nurburgring I would guess!

I know I’ve said it before, but I really do wonder why the local television stations can’t cover this sort of GT racing…

Link: FIA GT.com
Link: Live Timing

On Wednesday, I’ll be the proud owner of a double-bed.

‘Wow’ you say.

But for someone who has had a single bed since birth basically, this is a revelation.

It’s a cool looking thing, bit of a ‘Samurai’ style to it.. and the mattress is a pillow-top. Felt really nice!

I’m thinking now I’ll have to source some Hattori Hanzo steel to hang on the wall above the bed. A nice Samurai Sword would finish off the unit nicely

Spent most of this afternoon cleaning out the drawers under the bed, moving the stuff from the bed head and cleaning all the dust up from behind it! Gross.

Rant mode on…

As a long-standing user with my ISP, we were informed recently that we had to make the switch to Layer 2 technology.

We sorted the forms and in the process, decided to upgrade from the current 512/128 Unlimited (old plan we’ve had faultlessly forever) to the new Premium 8000 plan.

We were also informed that our old DSL-302G ADSL modem wouldn’t cut it, so we purchased a new NetComm NB5Plus4 Router on recommendation also from my ISP.

On Friday, (before any knowledge of the changeover having been completed), I noticed that I was able to upload to an FTP at ~40kb/s. Significantly greater than I’d ever seen before on the 512/128 plan (usually around 12kb/s up). Could only download at ~55kb/s though (normal 512 rate).

At this point, I still had the old Modem plugged in and hadn’t made any changes. I rang them to confirm this and the representative told me that the switch had been completed and I could plug the new modem in and set it up.

On doing so, I was not able to authorise my user and pass with the PPPoE setup. The Connection Status light remained red.

To cut a long story short, after hours spent on the phone to overseas call-centres, I have done username changes, a password change, set the Router up in bridge mode, and numerous isolation tests all of which have failed to fix the situation.

The last representative I spoke to told me that it was a line fault (unable to sync) and has registered the fault with engineers (who would hopefully get back to me in 24 - 48 hours!)

So I’ve plugged in the old Modem for the meantime - and am back on the Internet, uploading again at the new rate of 35-45kb/s..

If it was a line fault, surely I’d have noticed it in the years prior to this changeover? And why does my old Modem work fine? Surely it wouldn’t be able to sync either if it was a line fault?

This afternoon, I posted a message on the Whirlpool forums - and it looks like this could be a common problem for many involved in the same conversion.

Amazingly, about an hour after I posted, I received a message from a representative who, after telling him my details, informed me that indeed - my layer 2 changeover hadn’t even been done yet, so it was no use using the new Router - and also why it didn’t work yet.

Grrrr!! So why do four representatives from a call-centre all tell me its good to go and all completed and it must be a line fault that’s causing the problem?! Muppets…