So we had one of those days today, when the gods of TOT and out local ISP decide we need a day off, and make sure that our internet connections does not work during prime time work hours, here upon Kph Phangan.

Luckily Joakim and myself managed to get the days scheduling out of the way before things went bad, but that’s just about all we managed to get done today.

I always worry on days like this that some disaster will befall one of the team members, from a work standpoint, and I will be unavailable to resolve the situation.

Maybe I should relent and give out my telephone number to the remote team members, certainly to Taylor out editor at least.

Anyway, as I was laying on the balcony today, hoping that the gods of TOT would forgive us and let us have our toys back, I found an interesting view of the ceiling, so snapped it with my phone, here it is:

A little weird I know, but interesting enough.

Oh well, lets hope our internet connections stays up now, and I can get a full days work in tomorrow.

Tags: Internet, Koh Phangan, TOT

Why do problems never happen singularly? Just like the old adage about buses in the UK, you don’t see any for a long time, then three come along at once.

Well the last week has seen my three buses arrive in quick succession. Firstly I am snowed under with work right now, not a problem in itself, but definitely a problem when considered as part of the overall situation. Secondly, Nuth has been sick, meaning I have had to take care of Leon, no time for work, anyone who thinks you can take care of a baby and still get a full days work in is living on a different planet. Lastly, the Internet in the apartment building has been terrible lately, most of the time it is unusable. So between looking after Leon, and a dodgy Internet connection, I have managed to dig myself in to quite a hole with a huge backlog of work. This week I am going to need to put in something like 60 hours just to catch up! Oh well, fingers crossed I can clear my desk by the end of the week and take a couple of days off.

I am having real problems deciding between these two at the moment. I have switched between them several times over the last couple of years.

I really like IE7, but it has some things that really annoy me, most noticeably the fact you cannot customise the address bar. I like to add my key Google toolbar items to the address bar, switch to small icons and run a nice streamlined browser setup. This is no problem with Firefox, with IE7 it is impossible.

Firefox is fine right now, but it does not have the progressive image loading technology that IE7 incorporates, this is a really cool feature when you are running such a slow Internet connection as mine.

I think for now I have to stay with firefox, it’s the lesser of two evils basically. Why Microsoft decided to make such a mess of the IE7 interface customisation is beyond me. If they ever actually get around to doing something about changing it then I will definitely switch over to IE7, I prefer the surfing experience over Firefox.

Last night saw the first live usage of the mobile audio streaming rig I have put together, this consists of two laptops, one CDMA phone and another phone using a GPRS EDGE connection. The CDMA is used for the upstream and the less reliable GPRS to monitor the downstream.

I streamed 9 hours of dance music from the Temporary Insanity party here on Koh Phangan. Not a single problem was encountered, everything worked fantastically. I will definitely be doing this again, it was good fun and a first for the island.

The next challenge is live streaming video, although I have no idea how I would find enough portable bandwidth to achieve it. Maybe if I could multilink GPRS connections it might work but I have a feeling none of the GPRS providers here would allow it.