nocto

excuse the advert but people (ok, family, but they are still people, well i think so…) have asked me to recommend a decent broadband supplier. i’ve used eclipse since the beginning of the year and have had only a couple of blips in connectivity, both sorted out speedily by the helpful and friendly telephone support people who are a hell of a lot better than telephone support people usually are. they generally come first or second in speed tests of uk adsl providers, give you static ip addresses without demanding extra cash for them and don’t pull out the garlic and crosses when you mention you aren’t using w*nd*ws. that’s good enough for me.

some small print on connection problems and other disclaimers: the first connection problem was in about march, they needed to kick me off the system from their end before my router could log back in the system, the second time, about may, my router had had it’s settings hosed by a power cut at my end and i needed to reset it to defaults to get online again. i think i had a third bit of downtime where bt chucked half the country off the net for a couple of hours one evening, hardly the isp’s fault. apart from those i’ve been connected pretty much constantly since the beginning of january. i have no idea if this is good or not as this is the only broadband supplier i’ve had so i’ve nowt to compare it too. beats the hell out of dial up by several light years and then some. i use the cheapo 500 lite service which theoretically has limits on the bandwidth you can use in the day; i work from home and have never run into problems with it but i don’t really do mega bandwidth type work and deliberately leave big downloads until ‘out of hours’. that’s about all i can think of. i’m just a satisfied customer. it makes a change to ramble on about something i’m happy with for a change!

make your own snowflakes at make a flake: this has made me feel more christmassy than anything else has managed so far this year. [which is good as it's not even december yet and i'd really prefer my christmases without the huge commercial run up. bah humbug. but a few snowflakes are fine by me.]

[found via web goddess]

i created a whole page for my
knitting stuff, so go there and see what i’ve been up to if you are so inclined.

subversive cross stitch has me in stitches if you’ll excuse the pun. as cinnayaya says over at sew wrong:

Yeah, cross-stitch is a technique, not a style.

guinness is good for you. well maybe. it’s more fun than aspirin certainly.

a map of all nuclear explosions that took place between the first one, trinity in new mexico on 16th july 1945, and the last ones – pakistan’s nuclear tests at the end of may 1998. i didn’t realise that we’d never had a single nuclear explosion in western europe. the uk inflicted their tests upon the likes of australia and christmas island and france carried theirs out in algeria and the south pacific too.

i also didn’t know that the bombs that were dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki were the second and third nuclear explosions ever, i had this idea there was more testing after trinity.

let’s hope that that map is complete.

[found via caterina.net]

excuse me while i ramble on about the same thing again as apod have a lovely composite pic of the lunar eclipse taken in the clear skies of north carolina on saturday night.

i’ve had absolutely zero luck on celestial happenings here of late. the clouds wouldn’t let up and let me see the northern lights last week and this weekend i missed out on the lunar eclipse too. i drove 100 miles across england on saturday evening without even a glimpse of sky behind the clouds yet alone moon.

bah!

every playboy centrefold, the decades. not what you might be thinking, completely work safe, and utterly gorgeous.

[found via plastic bag]