Gourmet Graffiti

It’s been a while since I posted anything.

You know something; there are times when you go to some random site and they tell you to sign up for something. You give your email address to them oh so relunctantly and regret it later for they send you nothing but spam.

Your mail box fills with this stuff and you know what you got to get rid of the account. Get a new one and start life as you knew it all over again. Not good!

So what is the answer to the problem you ask. The answer is to use a temporary email address from one of the many providers out there. They all have their own system of dealing with mail.

Example is pookmail.com which lets you have an address for a day. Well not really. Anyone can see the mail, not just you but just pick a real random name and you should be fine, I suppose anyway.

some of the providers give you around five minutes to receive mail and then poof, its all gone, no worries, no spam, no restarting life. Great isn’t it.

The Spray Can

If you walk past web cafes in most third world and developing countries it is hard to miss the fact that they would usually lack management software. They would normally manage the time manually, filtering sites is a long way away and their would be no VIP treatment for anyone let alone blocking access to other programs and services on the PCs themselves. To most, a few computers hooked up to a basic router is the equivalent of a good cafe.

Most of them can’t stop users from accessing unwanted material or manage their security in terms of virus infections an hacking. Sometimes users are getting more than what they paid for or just not the real deal at all. Many leave the PC in an extremely dilapidated state, riddled with adult content and viruses galore.

It would be nice to go into a cafe that is well managed. Using some management software I suppose you can really improve profits as well, less wastage, better customer experience, easy maintenance and less headaches.

It so hard to find good net cafes these days, people opt to use wifi hotspots a lot more. I suppose that is a lot better in all respects. Maybe the humble net cafe will slowly phase out as more and more people attain notebooks and mobile devices.

hmmm. Difficult question it is really. what really is broadband, an always on unlimited type connection. Maybe its anything 256k and above and up to 56k is narrowband. So where does that leave 128k, 144k etc. Is it mid-band?

If we take the first definition, always on, does that mean 128k Adsl or wireless is broadband and dual ISDN is not because you need to dial.FCC states somewhere that a connection over 1Mbps is broadband, less than that and above 56k is midband.

OK, another situation, we mostly consider downstream speeds, what about upstream speeds, is say 256/256 broadband or is 1024/128 broadband. Most Adsl providers give less than 256 upload speed so does that count as broadband?

My situation, 128/128k always on Wimax connection with unlimited downloads and no shaping or throttling. Is that broadband or mid-band? Although download limits don’t count but what about symmetrical speeds?

Wikepedia talks about multiple streams or pieces of info travelling at the same time. Ok, say the line is full duplex (Adsl) but say 64k or 32k speeds is that broadband?

Conclusion: I think some people need to get together and sought out this definition dilemma. So many things specify a need for broadband connections to the internet but they fail to standardise the meaning of the word, in essence people are twisting it to suit themselves which is not right. ISP might say that it is broadband but you can’t play a game on it which requires broadband: disappointed non-geeks are not a good sign of progress.

The Spray Can

I recently tried the free domain name service OpenDNS after my ISP’s DNS servers suffered some problems. Although the ISP DNS servers were O.K at first, they began to show problems like blank pages and occasional service shut-downs. Although at the time I had not read any reviews of the service at the time. Most of the time people don’t have issues with their DNS service but chose to use OpenDNS because of the features that they offer like spell correction, faster load times and anti-phishing filters. In my case I was really looking for a solution to a problem, however, my experience was rather short lived. Since I do not reside in the US which is where most of their servers are located, I ended up getting certain sites in the US edition rather than the localised editions of the sites. Having also read of some reviews and a few comments about the service, I have since then decided to use the openDNS server only as my secondary DNS. The primary remains to be my ISP’s DNS server.

Has anyone else had the same problem? What are your views, post your comments.

later