Failure is the Key to Success

Our internet connection has been extremely intermittant this evening.

Pinging the next VirginMedia router on our route out has given awful results all evening. You get a batch of low latency 7ms pings then it goes up into the 200ms and 300ms. Then you get a time out, or maybe 5 minutes of time outs. Then it comes back and you start all over again.

Checking on the service status page, I see issues with TV/Internet all over their network this evening. I hope they hurry up and get this fixed because it’s a nightmare to surf when the connection drops between pages.

I’ve been tagged by Vijay with the Scattergories meme.

Here are the rules:

Use the 1st letter of your name to answer each of the questions. They must be real places, names, things . . . nothing made up! If you can’t think of anything, skip it. You CAN’T use your name for the boy/girl name question. If your name happens to start with the same letter as mine, sorry, but you can’t use my answers!

I’ll say thanks Vijay, but it was a bit of a challange and some of my answers were stretching it a bit.

I’ll tag Gary, James and Bobby, hopefully they’ll have an easier time of it.

Tags:scattergories meme

At lunchtime today Jo mentioned she was having trouble connecting wirelessly to our network. This has happened a few of times in the last couple of weeks, but retrying or in one case restarting the router resolved the issue.

Not today! Wired connection was working fine, but there was no wireless. After resetting the router and re-entering the configurations, I had intermittant wireless, but now no routing of wireless connections to the internet. Also, it was no longer logging any connection details.

I have had the router since February 2005, so it has been on for most of that time continuously. I updated the firmware from the default Linksys to Hyperwrt when I got it which gave me the ability to log the incoming and outgoing firewall connections and messages. This has had its uses; a few weeks ago I was able to identify a test signal from my VOIP service that was trying to connect every few seconds.

So, unexpectedly, I had to go out and buy a replacement router this afternoon. Linksys routers used to run Linux. There is a great support for 3rd party firmware upgrades to the Linux based routers, one good site for this is Linksysinfo. Unfortunately, a few years ago, Linksys changed their routers from using Linux, which means the 3rd party options are now limited.

I now have full connectivity restored, but have had to sacrifice the logging ability as this isn’t part of the standard firmware.

Tags:network router

Spam, don’t you love it. I just about had it under control in my inbox. My spam filter was tagging most of it and moving it to a spam folder. About 30 a day were being tagged and only 4 or 5 would get through.

This morning my inbox looked like a bomb site. It appears that somebody has been sending spam forged as coming from accounts on my domain. Throughout the day I have received over 450 emails bouncing ‘my’ spam messages from locations all over the world. I’ll have to start making checks now to make sure that I haven’t been blacklisted anywhere.

Tags:spam

One of the people in my family tree is Charles Moulden. He is my great-grandmother’s brother, he is also Lyall’s grandfather’s brother. When Lyall and Diana were over last year we worked through a lot of family tree information and Lyall was telling me that he thought Charles had been in the army and had died in India.

I was able to find him in the 1881 census aged 8 with the rest of the family. I had trouble finding an 18 year old Charles in the 1891 census, but I did find a 20 year old Charles Moulden as a private in the 5th Lancers in barracks. I wonder if he inflated his age to sign up. The 5th Lancers did serve in India, so this looked to match what Lyall had told me.

A couple of days ago, I was searching the army death returns indexes on FindMyPast and found the following entry for Charles Moulden:

• Moulden, Charles, 21 Meerut 1892 p129

After a bit more searching it appears that the 5th Lancers were in Meerut, India in 1892, so it looks like this may be him. I’ll have to do some more research, but at least I have some facts that match what was thought.

Tags:5th lancers,family tree,moulden

Talking with my mum this evening, we got talking about family tree and my grandfather. I was talking about where I found him on a boat to Lagos and my Mum mentioned that my grandmother Lillian had traveled out to Africa to be with him and had taken my father with her. It was while he was there that my father had caught malaria. I knew that my father had had malaria, but I always assumed it was while he was in the Navy. I’m not sure whether it was Nigeria or Sierra Leone that they travelled to yet.

The Findmypast site still only has the passenger lists up to 1929 at the moment, but once the 1930’s are up I will have to look for Lillian and my father as well as my grandfather.

Tags:family tree,hedges