A Period of Technology Hell

The last week has been technology hell for me. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.

Firstly, my new Motorola Cellphone would corrupt pictures taken if they were recorded onto the Transflash memory card. After a series of formats and other experiments, I determined that I was simply taking photos too fast for it. It needs time to process the picture that's just been taken, and if I take another one too quickly the picture gets corrupt.

My website host problems. My blog.nztechie.com subdomain is still not working. I email or call my host and they say they have done it, but it doesn't work. I email again and they apologise for not doing it and promise to do it. This is as yet unresolved.

Finally, my Internet problems. Ive been suffering constant disconnections all the time and its really annoying me. As part of my troubleshooting, I plugged in my really old Dynalink RTA300 which I bought in 2003. The Internet connection appears stable so far. I uploaded a video to YouTube without a disconnection. This is looking promising.

The bad news is that the current ADSL Router I use (RTA1320) has died. Since being disconnected, it will not turn on anymore. I will have to see how the returns process at Ascent Technologies goes. I did buy the modem on 7th November 1996.

At least I have my old ADSL modem to keep me going for now. Unfortunatley, it has no support for my VoIP adapter and seems to cause problems with email over SSL. I need a replacement fast.

Additionally, there is my ongoing problems with my Windows Live! account. I have 50 contacts, yet Windows Live! Messenger is only showing 15 contacts. Adding more contacts causes them to be deleted when I log back in. Happens on any PC I use, so its a corruption (some weird setting) on my account. A gentleman called James from Microsoft Escalations in investigating for me.

Useless Information: A cesium atom in an atomic clock that beats over nine billion times a second.

More changes for the blog

Today, I made a CNAME record for blog.nztechie.com so it would point to my Google-hosted blog. I was advised by my domain host that it would take 4 hours. However, it seemed to propagate instantly and my blog was now under the nztechie.com domain.

I updated the links on the nztechie.com homepage to reflect the new URL for my blog. I also updated the RSS feed which I had recently added to my website.

Since the change, my Blog title graphic is not operating as it used to. I have temporarily reverted it back to the previous text title until I resolve the problem.

On other matters, when I use my Motorola V3x and record a video in better, or best mode, it will not be accepted by Youtube. It will also not be played by Apple Quicktime, or by the Nokia Multimedia Player. Tonight I purchased a 1GB Transflash MicroSD card from Harvey Norman (NZ$35). The specifications for my Motorola V3x call for a maximum external memory of 512MB. The unit appeared to detect and utilitse the full 1GB of storage available.

The extra MicroSD card did not extend the maximum video recording time of 3 minutes. I am contemplating using one of the online hacks to extend the video time.

As appears to be standard among smartphones, including my last Nokia 6680, the V3x seems to have trouble using music on the memory card as a ringtone. I moved my ringtone from the memory card into the main phone memory.

Using the Motorola V3x with Windows XP as a mass storage device does not seem to play as well as my Nokia did.

Useless Information: When Coca-Cola began to be sold in China, they used characters that would sound like "Coca-Cola" when spoken. Unfortunately, what they turned out to mean was "Bite the wax tadpole"