albino irishman

I think I may have an undiagnosed Post-it note fetish …

Well tomorrow will see this house switch it’s ADSL provider from [Telstra Bigpond][] to [Internode][]. If you’re currently a Telstra Bigpond user, and I know there are a lot of you out there, and you’re wondering why I made this decision, a quick heads up on what facilitated the change.

### 1. Value
This is a big one. Telstra’s plans are close to the worst, if not the worst, in the business when it comes for cost/megabyte download. I cannot stress this point enough. Lets do a rough comparison of the [top five][1] ADSL providers that [Whirlpool][] users are signed up to. Take into account we’re only comparing ADSL1 not ADSL2+ and these are only the home plans, not Small Office/Home Office (SOHO) or business ADSL.

#### Single Student ($30)
iiNet: 600Mb prepaid, shaped, 512/128 (iiPhone bundled)
Internode: 500Mb prepaid, shaped, 256/64
Telstra Bigpond: 200Mb prepaid, excess $150/GB, 256/64 (uploads counted)
OptusNet: 300Mb, shaped, 512/128 (600Mb off-peak)
TPG Internet: 1 Gb, shaped, 256/64

#### High Flyer ($90)
iiNet: 10 Gb, shaped, 1500/256 (10Gb off-peak, quota doubled w/ iiPhone)
Internode: 40Gb, shaped, 1500/256
Telstra Bigpond: 10Gb, shaped, 512/128 (uploads counted)
OptusNet: 20Gb, shaped, 1500/256
TPG Internet: 25Gb, shaped, 1500/256 (+VOIP)

Looking at those figures it’s not hard to see that Telstra Bigpond is lagging in the bang for buck area. It’s a good thing they’re providing everyone else on the list with wholesale ADSL isn’t it …

### 2. ADSL2
ADSL2 is a relatively new thing around these parts. Theoretically you can get some insane speeds if you’re leaching off a wireless connection adjacent to the ADSL2 enabled phone exchange, but realistically it will at the very least kick the pants off ADSL1. The [graph][2] on this page should give you a pretty good idea on what you can expect in terms of speed when it comes to ADSL2. Currently Telstra Bigpond doesn’t provide ADSL2 services, only ADSL1, and when it comes to the geekage that’s happening around this place - that just don’t sit right.

### 3. Free Stuff
Any ADSL provider that doesn’t provide “free” downloads should never be considered - and Telstra Bigpond, while providing this facility seems to have the crappiest free service in ADSL land. For the non-geeks reading this article, “free” downloads are those that don’t count towards your monthly quota. As an ADSL provider when you’re letting people download at speeds faster than Granny’s dial-up account, you should be providing them with as much free stuff as possible so they don’t go busting that quota in the first couple of weeks after updating their Debian distribution.

### 4. Reputation
Now this is probably the most subjective point on this list, but probably close to one of the biggest. Telstra Bigpond, or Telstra in general, really seems to have a bad attitude when it comes their customers - be that the average Joe or businesses. Due to how they were started (government based and funded) they’ve been the biggest provider of telecommunication services in Australia. This gave them a virtual monopoly over this industry, stifling competition. I like competition. It makes for lower prices, sometimes better service, and a fair go.

So basically that’s the list. If I think of more points I’ll tack them on, but if you’re still using Telstra Bigpond broadband after that … have fun parting with your hard earned cash. I know someone’s laughing at you, and it isn’t me.

[Telstra Bigpond]: http://www.bigpond.com.au/ “Telstra Bigpond”
[Internode]: http://www.internode.on.net/ “Internode”
[iiNet]: http://www.iinet.com.au/ “iiNet”
[aaNet]: http://www.aanet.com.au/ “aaNet”
[Whirlpool]: http://www.whirlpool.net.au/ “Whirlpool Forums”

[1]: http://bc.whirlpool.net.au/
[2]: http://www.internode.on.net/adsl2/graph/index.htm

Nobody likes to lose. I think in some way it’s encoded into us from day 1. This probably has something to do with the negative reaction we have when being beaten by another entity. Depending on how much we’ve invested into what we were beaten at has a direct relationship to how strong the negative reaction is.

However, like most things that we experience, how we chose to percieve what happens to us dictates our experience and what we learn from it. In most cases while you have a negative reaction to what’s happened, by changing your attitude and choosing to see the flipside of the situation you find a positive to your negative.

In this case while I don’t think I’ve got the full grasp on the lesson, I certainly need to play some more 500 ;)

I was going to bash out a longer post for this - but brevity would, I’m sure, be welcome for people that would find this most useful. And additionally, the less I say in each post the less I can stuff up.

After doing some serious damage to my [Wordpress][] installation today, where I basically dumped all my themes and plugins into the trash (thankfully the posts are stored elsewhere) on the assumption they wouldn’t be removed, I had to go looking for my [Textile][] and [Markdown][] plugins again. Previously, both of these markup languages were managed by a single plugin that allowed the user to set the language for each post. Unfortunately, as I found when trying Markdown on the blog (the reasons for the need to upgrade to 2.0.3), I couldn’t use this tool to have both types of markup coexisting, i.e., a post using Markdown followed by a post using Textile.

Good news is that you can make this happen without to much fuss and no fiddling around. Simply follow the links and download the plugins available, install them the same way you have with your other plugins, activate, and whamo, you’re up and going!

*Wordpress 2.0 Textile Plugin*
[http://www.huddledmasses.org/jaykul/textile-plugin-26-released/][textile_plugin]

*Wordpress 2.0 Markdown Plugin*
[http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/][markdown_plugin]

*Wordpress 2.0 SmartyPants Plugin*
[http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/][smartypants_plugin]

[Wordpress]: http://wordpress.org/
[Textile]: http://textism.com/tools/textile/
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

[textile_plugin]: http://www.huddledmasses.org/jaykul/textile-plugin-26-released/
[markdown_plugin]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[smartypants_plugin]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-smartypants/

If you’ve been browsing my “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/ “photos”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/38174277@N00/ you may have noticed some weird happenings - things not showing up, access being denied on some photos etc. A good example of this is the shot I’ve taken of my sets a couple of minutes ago. The kid in the preview is not part of the photo set, or any photo set for that matter. In fact, where the heck did that kid come from?

I’m assuming this is a Flickr problem mostly because I tried to fix a few things I thought were my fault and ran into more weirdness in the backend. Hopefully this will get fixed up sharpish. It’d be nice if they had a status page, similar to what “dreamhost”:http://www.dreamhoststatus.com/ has, so we don’t think it’s something we’re doing wrong and that we know to be patient. “Gamma”:http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2006/05/alpha_beta_gamm.html teething issues? Possibly.

I’m still trying to get the rest of my photos from home up on the website, but I haven’t had too much time in the past week. Most of the free stuff has been spent configuration the home network so we can share media between all the desktop machines, wired and un-wired and to the xbox. It’s been an interesting, and at times harrowing, experience but lots of fun and plenty to learn.

_Update:_ Seems the Flickr people have been “working”:http://flickr.com/forums/bugs/23158/ on the issue, though it would have been nice to see something on the blog to this effect considering how major the issue was. -Everything seems to be working nicely, though- I lost a couple of pictures I uploaded yesterday and one of the set thumbnails isn’t working properly.

Born. Living. What more do you want?