chrishansenhome

Well, I've made the switch. I have my iPhone, my Broadband box ready to plug in when the switch is made at the exchange, and HWMBO has his new phone. It was surprisingly difficult to get it all yesterday.

At around 1, I left the house and went to Victoria Station, where I had lunch at my old haunt of Spudulike. I was intending to go to the O2 store on Victoria Street, but, lo! I walked down the street and it was no longer there. Oops! I thought to going to Angel for it, but the connections to the Bank branch of the Northern Line are fraught from that area, so I got off the Circle Line train at Embankment and walked along the Strand, where I found an O2 store.

It took nearly an hour to arrange everything. The shop assistant was enormously helpful (and cute, too!) and I eventually got:

• An 8GB iPhone;


• A Nokia phone for HWMBO;


• A mobile broadband dongle that is pay as you go (something I have been told is impossible to find!); and


• A home broadband box for O2 home broadband.

As I walked down the Strand to the bus stop, I got a call on my Blackberry. It was Vodafone, asking whether I'd like to reconsider getting my PAC to switch to O2. I informed him that I was walking away from the O2 shop with my swag and that I wanted my PACs, please. He was most gracious.

I returned home to find an email from BT asking whether I'd reconsider. It's nice to be wanted (unless you're a criminal).

This morning I called O2 and set the train in motion to get the broadband switched over. This took a little bit of time, but everything went very smoothly. It turns out that I get 6 months free broadband, and after that less than £10 per month. The broadband is around 16Mb on my line (up to, of course, could mean less but it will certainly be faster than the BT line). fj has said that O2 is a great broadband provider, and I do hope that's the case.

I am starting to get myself ready for changing broadband providers. O2 (thanks, fj and spwebdesign) seems to provide a better service than BT, and I would hope to be able to change before the end of the year. One thing that I need to do is change email addresses on the scads of emailed newsletters and other lists that I receive (and there are plenty of them). I am unsure whether cancelling BT Broadband will also automatically remove my current email address. In any event, btinternet.com seems to be bouncing lots of emails for me, saying that I am not a subscriber. So, I will make that reality as soon as I can.

I have discovered that sometimes changing addresses on these lists is well-nigh impossible. I have had all manner of interactions with websites. Some allow an easy change, others allow it, but bury the menus needed to accomplish it so deeply that you end up establishing a new account and then unsubscribing from the old one. This is all most annoying.

It will take at least until the end of the month to be certain that I've changed all email addresses that I care about to the new one. Then I will monitor during December to ensure that I've gotten all of them. Only then will I try switching over.

As you mostly might be aware, BT was once the government owned monopoly telephone supplier in the UK. It was privatised, but continues to act as though it were part of the government. This extends to having a license for stupidity.

I got a new BT Hub last week, but had to add a switch so that it would serve all my wired devices. So today I bought the switch and a short patch cable, and thought, "Boy, now I can go to town".

Well.

I set up the switch first, and made sure that it worked with the old router. Then I disconnected the old one, and set up the new one, attached the cordless phone (we get VOIP on this plan as well, with a cordless phone attached to the router), and plugged it into the ADSL socket and the electricity.

The switch worked, and my printer, my Sun box, and my main computer worked fine. However, using the instructions, I entered the SSID and the key printed on the back of the router into the software on our living room laptop. As usual, I couldn't get it to work.

After a while, and after some time wrestling with the interface to the router controller (which was "improved" to make it easier to use, of course), I discovered that the SSID and the key were totally different from those printed on the box itself.

Fiddlesticks!

It is finally working, and tomorrow I'll make sure the iMac and the Dell laptop in the kitchen are working.

The router is quite stylish:



but, a pain to configure.

Worst of all, as is my wont, I was swearing a bit as I was trying to figure out what was wrong. That gets HWMBO all riled up. I've discovered that statin drugs (of which I take 40 mg every night) sometimes have the extra special added attraction of making people more irritable. Oh joy. Not only can't I drink grapefruit juice because of it, I'm cranky too.