Brimur’s Place

… well some of them anyway! :) 

I have two broadband/phone connections, Smart Telecom 8Mb E49.99 and BT Ireland 6Mb E46.99. The difference between the two are simply amazing. Smart says their network in contention free due to the way they manage their network and at no time of the day does my download speed fall and die, they have no cap on their broadband, and currently I receive free IPTV over my boradband line. A quick test to Dublin on Speedtest.net shows the following…

So thats 9.2Mb download speed on an 8Mb line!

This is to Limerick, almost 10Mb…

Their customer support is tolerable but where they exceed is their EXTREMELY helpful forum http://support.smarttelecom.ie/forums where smart engies are online to fix issues such as a slow server, latency issues, interleaving problems. Its great to just go on there, tell them you problem and have it quickly solved!

BT Ireland are another kettle of fish. BT offer a 6Mb package with a 30GB cap and a contention ratio with is very noticable in the evenings and weekends. A test to Dublin shows the folllowing…

Here we see a 5.1Mb download speed on a 6Mb line

And to Limerick (which is alot nearer to Cork but says it isnt) …

I first got BT back when it was Esat about 2003. That was a 512K line.  I remembered how bad their customer service was but decided to give it another shot becuase where I am living now they offer a better package than Eircom. I was quickly reminded how bad their CS is when I started having issues on my line and no one would answer the phone. A wait time of 25 -30 minutes in not an unusual occurance! Speed varied dramatically and some sites namely file hosting sites were unavailable during the day. On top of this they have one of the worst websites I have ever encountered… and they are an ISP!!! The site takes forever to load and when you finally login to log a fault, check a bill etc the site logs you out or you get an error saying something like the ordering system is not available! Shocking stuff from an ISP.

I know I am comapring an 8Mb line to a 6Mb line but see what you get from Smart for just E3 extra! I just felt like a rant there and now I feel better!

Man, I know people say time flies when you are having fun but this is also the case when you are busy! I am just back from a week in London doing a Red Hat Enterprise course and exam. I was quite pleased with myself actually. The exam was broken into two parts  troubleshooting and administration. Thats about as much as I can say since I signed a NDA with them. But I will say that I got 100% in the troubleshooting section and 93.1% in the admin section so I passed! Woo hoo says I. The week before that I was in Amsterdam and the week before that and maybe the week before that! I missed my home like crazy, and my gf too of course! So I am back in the office today and settling back into an almost unfamiliar office! Hopefully that will be the last of my travelling till next year. 

So, what is on my mind at the mo? Well yesterday myself and Lou did a bit of Xmas shopping, stuff for our house for Xmas as opposed to pressies for others. Drink, sweets, drink, decorations, drink, a potatoe masher and I think some more drink! We never got around to buying the Xmas tree but we have seen a nice one and may return to that store to get it before its gone. Luckily I have all my pressie shopping done except for those few things you pick up when you are strolling through town a couple of days before xmas. You know the calm after the storm and before the worry that you may have forgotten someone!

Im looking forward to Christmas day this year, after we have done up the house I will be cooking the dinner for my son, mum, and my bro. I love to cook, its the cleaning up afterwards I am not too keen on! 

Well thats about it for now, I’ve got a work xmas party coming up this week and a 12 pubs o’ christmas coming up too so that shouold be fun, if I can make it to them! :O

This photo was taken by Stefano Unterthiner and won top prize in the Animal Portraits group for Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008.
I just thought the background looked like the Lost Island

One of my favourite sci-fi shows ever and its coming to Blu-ray. What is going to be very cool about this is that this, shortlived, cancelled before its time show was actually shot with hd digital cameras, just like the firefly movie, Serenity, which will be out sometime next year on Blu-ray!

Well September has definitely been the busiest month of the year for me so far. Just to lay it all out I will start at the begining.
The month started out with Electric Picnic in Stradbally, Co. Laois. It was a great weekend and as usual I did alot of strolling around chatting to strangers. And no I did not go there by myself! I ventured to the weekend festival with my good friends Owen and Podge and were joined by Ronan, Lorraine, Seamus and a few others.

It was a great weekend as I said. Maybe more pics later. Anywho soon after that I had to go to Amsterdam with work which was also a bit hectic as the morning after I was to get home I was off again on hols. The hols lasted 10 days and involved visiting my family in Greece and then hopping on a cruise ship and visiting Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, Santorini and Mykonos. Pretty cool eh!

These are just a few of the hundreds of pics I took in each place. Its amazing to go to sleep in one country, or even continent for that matter and wake up the next day in another!

So just back from hols this week and this weekend one of my best friends growing up is getting married. He is the one getting married and I am nervous about doing a prayer of the faithful! How sad is that!

And that pretty much sums up my month so far. Just to finish it all off I am moving into a new house next week too. Gorgeous house in the southside of the city. Its a big move for me since Im a northsider!!!

Thats all for now…

Just installed the Google Gears FF extension a while ago and after a restart had a nice chuckle over the description of the extension. See here for more info if you don’t get it!

after nearly 10 years!

Maybe its time to move onto a more productive project like searching for a cure to cancer…