Anyhow, this time, she had discovered a very odd link to me with another member of her tree. The surname of this person was “EberSpacher” which, at least to my ear, is not a common name and certainly not one I have in my tree. The link she discovered was in an archive of a newspaper and it was posted as part of a will/probate search for relatives, the strange part? well, it turns out that before going into a nursing home on the IOW for the last few year of her life, this lady lived in the house that Sue and I have now!

When we took on this place, the building society used by the previous occupants contacted us and asked if we would like a pile of historical documents about the property, its previous owners and the original builders etc. Of course I grabbed the pile quickly and following the recent email was able to use it to confirm that the “Eberspacher” mentioned was in fact the sister of a lady who had married one of our house  builders, and that I could also confirm that she had been left the house in a will as I have a copy of the probate document in the pile of stuff I was given.

I was able to fill in a load of holes for the emailer and I’m sure I have some more stuff for her somewhere (might even be a few photo’s of the people involved). She was over the moon with it all and I now have a lot more interest in the history of our house as well as completing a very odd circle of ownership via unknown relatives in the outer spiral arm of my family tree…..

My BT broadband speed seems to have settled at 2,720Mb/s over the last few days. It seems that BT are playing games again….

When I phoned them today to ask what was going on they promptly offered to reduce my monthly payments…. took me almost 2 seconds to accept!

These are the views from our house in Winford this morning (click on the pics for bigger versions):

The back garden probably best shows the scene, but here’s one of the front too.

Thank goodness I have a colour camera eh?

Checked the BT HomeHub again today and now find it’s reading 4,320 Kbps!

Somebody at OpenReach is fiddling with things again…

UPDATE: Mmm… I spoke too soon, today Wed 06/01/2010 it’s back to 3,776 Kbps….. ;(

I have no idea what BT have done to get the improvement, they haven’t moved the exchange, that’s a certainty, and I haven’t seen any Openreach vans along the road. I can only assume they found a fault somewhere and I have gained 600Kbps from the repair.

I seriously doubt anyone from either BT or Openreach will ever read this post but, in case they do, well done men…. may you repair many more similar faults

Those clever people at Ventnor Blog have today launched a new Island Events site at http://events.onthewight.com/.

In their words….

People often say that nothing happens on the Isle of Wight but having run VentnorBlog for the past four years, we know this is far from true – so we’ve setup the Events On The Wight Website to prove these nay-sayers wrong.

Crammed full of Island-wide events from Art exhibitions to Zumbatomics (that’s aerobics to salsa type music to uninitiated), we hope that the uncluttered, easy-to-use site gives you many ways to find an event – whether it be by the day, venue or type of activity.

Great work and a really useful site to add to your bookmarks.

About a year ago I applied to help with a UK broadband speed survey at SamKnows, I now have access to the results and can see how a stack of measurements actually turned out for my connection.

Perhaps the most obvious statistics are those regarding straight speed, so here’s the result for the year:

As you can see it’s been far from the 8Mb maximum to which I’m entitled although, of course, the clever guys at BT insist that 8Mb is an “up to” figure! Looking at the graph shows a wiggly line between 2 and 3Mb with a maximum somewhere around 2.7.

I have just finished a call to BT about the numbers and they insist that all is well and is “up to” 8Mb which of course it is but then 57Kb would be as well. They promised to carry out some extra diagnostics on the line but could offer me no clue as to when my line would be upgraded to something over 6Mb – the sort of connection I could be convinced was “up to” 8Mb.

Thanks to SamKnows and the extra customised router/software they supplied, my system is still being monitored and the results collated and added to others to give a true representation of what is happening across the UK.

The whole thing is a little resource hungry and slows the PC down a fair bit even when it isn’t actually serving the stream – the next step is to move the application to another machine and stream from that. I may even up the resolution and size a bit….

For now, I am experimenting with it connected to a telescope to get in close to a bird feeder in the garden. Eventually I hope to use the thing for astronomy but before making any permanent mods to the camera I thought I’d lash something up with “gaffer” tape.

Please bear with me if the camera goes off line, the tape has probably broken! – one day it’ll have its own page I think.

Click on the logo to visit http://www.axethebeertax.com/, they have 5 basic demands of our government:

1. To stop plans to increase beer tax by up to a third
2. To enforce existing laws – not create new ones – to deal firmly with irresponsible drinkers and premises
3. To end the irresponsible promotion of alcohol in supermarkets, pubs and elsewhere
4. To trust responsible adults to make informed choices about what they drink, not punish them for the actions of an irresponsible minority
5. To support the British pub as a vital part of social life in local communities.