Apologies

Checking my stats tonight, I saw that I had referrals to this site from stantonythegreat.org.uk. I thought this a bit strange, since I don’t have a link on that site. Then I realised that through all my messing around with my domain name, I had messed up that site, which is set up to reside in my old hosting account.

The site has been moved to new hosting and the links have been fixed. My apologies to anyone who might have though the views on this blog represent in any way the views of the Herefordshire Orthodox Fellowship of St Antony the Great.

No Forwarding Address

I seem to have a lot of emails that have just disappeared into the ether between the earth and the moon (a location frequently referenced by my Evidence professor in law school).

I bought some genuine web hosting a couple of days ago (not for this blog, but for some other stuff) and decided to point my holford.org.uk domain at it to restore the old HolfordWeb site. Bad move. When I changed name servers, I lost the MX records where the domain is hosted here. This is bad because the web hosting can’t provide mail service just by me changing name servers on a domain.

So I brought the domain back over and pointed it back to this blog (go ahead, try it) and confirmed all of the mail forwarding. Now sending test emails they don’t kick back as errors, but neither do they forward through. I tried to ring my domain host, but they have been shut for two days because of the flooding, as they are located next to the River Severn.

So I’m stuck in email limbo. The only good thing is that I have been getting a lot less spam.

Information Superhighway Robbery

It’s rip-off Britain once again.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has compared UK broadband with service available elsewhere in the world. In terms of low cost, we are 19th out of the 30 richest nations in terms of what we pay to our providers. The average British price is £14.50 per month. Not surprisingly it is less than £8 per month in the States, just over £8 in France, and apparently averages a mere £5.40 in Sweden (the my Swedish resident namesake will have to confirm this).

Again, not surprisingly, we are getting less for our money. Our 8Mbs maximum speed is apparently the internet equivalent of molasses. And were that we all got 8Mbs! I’m paying for 8 but tend to get a bit under 2. I should be getting 5.5 (because after they sell you 8 they tell you to only really expect 5.5), but thanks to line noise at the exchange box, it ain’t happening. BT seem to have no motivation whatsoever in cleaning up the noise, as this would probably mean spending money.

In Japan, they get 100Mbs. In case you haven’t done the math, that’s a bit over 50 times what I’m actually getting.

I’m not saying I’ve haven’t made progress. I started with a 1200 baud modem on a 8088 machine in 1989. Things have changed a lot since I got on the actual Internet with a 14.4 on a 486 in 1993. Nonetheless, the world is passing me by.