sutton050

Its the day after THE day we wait for all year, yes today is Boxing Day and so yesterday was Christmas Day and I've had a fab day, thank you for asking!  Lots of food, a little drink, a fair amount of chocolate, a home made cheese cake to die for and about an hour in the freezing air enjoying the hot tub with all the bubbles on... Hands down has to rate as one of the Best Christmas Days for me ever... and I hope yours were all as good. Now, I know you're all asking, why have I been so quite on the old blog and YouTube Channel?  Well, you know moving house completely threw things off, but also, in case you missed this news, I'm changing jobs. Yes, after 14 years I'm leaving where I've been and I'm going to be doing something else.  Quite what I can't tell you very much about, probably for a fair while.  But what I can tell you is, I start the new role on the 2nd January, the team I have been assigned to is brand new and we travel to the US in mid-January to c

It has been just under a month since I started to measure my internet connection speed, I've been paying for 50Mbit, and receiving pittifully less at all times of the day, and huge dips during what is tabbed the "peak time".  We get massive slow-downs whilst streaming - constantly - opening say ITV player and then opening a web-site for wikipedia totally freezes the player until the whole wikipedia page has loaded - remember wikipedia is mainly text, there's very little media data being exchanged, but the player is just cut off; it's dreadful. There's no reason for this, when I was paying for 200Mbit I was receiving around 33-36MBit at all times, so deciding to pay for only 50Mbit I was to save money and still get this speed I had had - since I never ever got more... But it seems this is totally beyond Virgin Media, they're playing speed throttling shenanigans .... However, the clever chaps at Andrews and Arnold engineering might just have the solution for

Phase one of my plan is now complete, I have monitored the speed of my internet ALLLL day, from just after I got home in the morning, through until just now. No-other unit or device was being used through from around 4pm until just now - the wife and I went to watch the new Thor film at the cinema - so, how can Virgin Media explain that clear throttling down mid-afternoon... It is awful and far below anything listed on their website, utter and total garbage speed.  Yet we see a general level of 25+ for most of the day You will need to click this chart to see the image close up. My data points were taken with my script - see the previous post - every 10 seconds, it has generally used resolved to the Server in Leeds. The time markers (green) were added by myself, artificially, by eye.  But they give you the gist of the time, and I will also upload the raw CSV somewhere... I am now going to hit twitter. Edit - This is fabulous, I've just gone to the link I was provided to send info to

You know that moment in Misery where Annie (played by the excellent Kathy Bates) raises the lump hammer to Paul (James Caan's) ankles?  That hopeless moment, where you know what's coming, and she's determined this is the best, and he's helpless to change things.... Yeah, his feeling at that moment is the same feeling I get whenever I try to solve my service problems with Virgin Media.  I've tried in the phone centre, they either won't talk to me, or deny I'm an account holder - the account being in my wifes name, but I'm a registered up user of the account etc etc.... Or they simply deny there's an issue.... "I can ping you now sir".... Really, a few ICMP packets get through and you think it's a-okay do you? Or I get told, reboot your superhub... Or variously asked "are you on wifi or wired"... It makes no difference when the speed recorded by either is less than 2mbits!!! And I've just been told in a reply on twitter &quo

I'm continuing to have my issues with Virgin Media, let me explain.  Last month I came to them asking to remove the superfluous junk offering items, as I was simply paying more for items I didn't use, want nor need. They could not help, in fact they flat refused to, so I cancelled 66% of my services off completely, TV, Phone all gone and never ever to return - well done them... The next item was the 200mbit broadband I was paying for, below is a historic speed test I carried out a lot, as you can see I never, ever, got near 200Mbit, but I always got over 50Mbit... Being quite a logical person therefore, and based on this evidence, this proof I had for myself, I downgraded the internet from the Vivid200 to Vivid50, i.e. 50mbit... Yeah, save money, it can do 50 mbit easy, right... Right... RIGHT?..... WRONG. This is tonight's speed test... Last night it was slower than that, I had a download speed of 1.22mbit, and upload of 620K. Yeah, rocking the 1990's internet speed. A

Back in May I came to these pages to thank my Russian viewers and I mentioned I had passed the 1000 viewers a month mark... Well, here we are on the first of July, with the numbers in for June... 4143 viewers.... What the? Where are all you guys coming from?  The google stats don't tell me :)

Добрый вечер Dobriy vyecher Good evening I have so many viewers from Russia at the moment, I thought I'd say a big hello to you all... How are you all navigating here folks?  Do let me know. I see some served in from Yandex, some from pages on Reddit, however the vast majority of Russian based viewer stats are just direct references, so somewhere my pages are clearly syndicating... BTW, I'm pushing 11,000 viewers a month now folks!  Combined with passing the 1000 post mark this is a glorious place for me to be in! THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!

I just ran across this site which takes your CV (probably data mining everything about me) and it extracts your education, your experience and your personal insight to generate a value for you. I've just put my CV through this, here's the Skill Cloud.... it's not exact, I know for a fact "Comics" is not on my CV anywhere, B2B software isn't either... BiLingual is a stretch as I speak poor GCSE school French... And a bit of English... But the value it's placed on my CV is interesting.... That is a lot more than I earn.... A LOT more... How valid their valuation is, what metrics or heuristics they apply isn't made clear, it might just be a simple look up and tick the box followed by summing a set of weighted values.  But for my location this is not a realistic estimate, no-one would pay this for me here. Based out of London, New York or anywhere in California then maybe, but here in the middle of England.  No way. But I take this that my current employe