Post-telephony upgrade

Title sounds a little bit pretentious, but who cares?

Anyway, the big upgrade to the internal wiring of the house finished last night (as mentioned in the previous post). Out came the master socket and a new one to replace it, re-did the IDC connections (they needed looking at anyway, they were starting to corrode) and then replaced the extension socket in the study. As mentioned, I can't fault the things I bought from ADSL Nation, the quality is superb, plus, because they're all
pre-filtered, it means I can finally get rid of all the dangly ADSL microfilters (each socket has a phone AND an ADSL jack seperate).

After all this, the router is now showing a SNR (noise margin) of 10.7dB, rather than the previous 6.7dB, which equates to a hell of a lot less noise on the line. Also, it means that the invariable "reboot the router after a while" because of the line errors has gone away....

So, upshot is, I've now got a stable ~15 Meg ADSL2+ connection, for about £20 of upgrade kit (and a bit of my time, of course). At last I can meet my good friends on second life without worrying about disconnections.

Speaking of second life, my avatar's gone through a bit of a change recently, it's gone very vampire / gothic (sort of). Obviously, in real life, i'm a 6'4", blonde haired muscle-bound adonis with perfect vision, so I thought I'd down scale with my avatar and have him 5'9" with glasses, short hair with vampire shoes and white angel wings, absolutely nothing like me in real life (what do you mean, I'm lying?).

On a personal note, as I've mentioned before, I'm a long term member of English Heritage (which fits in nicely with my fortean interests, of course), so we tend to be scooting around the english countryside taking in all the castles / abbeys / historic monuments that this wonderful country has to offer. So, I took the kids to see Beeston Castle, which is about an hours drive from Manchester, or about 10 miles from Chester. What a wonderful heritage site, fantastic views from the inner bailey, and astonishing woodland encompassing the outer bailey and grounds. The castle was originally built around AD1225, but there was a hill fort and settlement there long before that. There was also a "medieval day" on, so the kids learnt how to hit each other (and me) with foam swords.. wonderful.. it means that now I get the same treatment from metal Thomas the Tank Engine's or hard plastic Dora the Explorers. Thanks a bunch, Sir Edward of Chester!

I am going to get around to chronicling our trips to the many heritage sites we've visited, such as Stonehenge and the astonishing Rievaulx Abbey in Yorkshire, along side a new website that I'm developing which will cover fortean subjects as well. This should go live in a few weeks or so, and will be StrangeHub.co.uk.