Perfect The Last Few Days

Still not a lot of news from us up here on the Sunshine Coast. Just 'the usual' comings and goings.

A large electrical store chain has gone into receivership and was having a Closing Down Sale beginning on Thursday. Trish wanted to visit Maroochydore and the Sunshine Coast branch of the store was nearby so we decided to pop in and check for any bargains.

The traffic was horrendous, we didn't even stop to check out any deals but just headed on to Maroochydore to complete our chores.

Friday drinks was conducted at our place this time. Friends Ian and Kerrie had other friends from NSW up. The four of them had just had a week on the Gold Coast. Ian and Kerrie were now hosting them for a few days at their place. So all six of us had a rousing time and enjoyed a chat and a few drinks in just delightfully perfect weather.

Amazingly the humidity has been down around the 30% mark the last few days as we have had very dry south weatherly winds which is most uncommon for this time of year. The temp has been in the low to mid 30's but with the low humidity it has been extremely comfortable. Today the wind is again coming off the ocean from the east so we have overcast skies and humidity back into the 60% range.

Last Sunday I helped one of our older Computer Club members get her new wireless modem/router set up. She wanted the freedom that a wireless internet connection can bring. Her grand daughter had visited recently and wanted to know why she didn't have a wireless local network. All went well during the setup but it struck me that it was an awfully slow connection. She said it is like that on Sundays! She was also having problems getting her emails through as well so I checked all the settings and everything seemed to be as it should, it was just slow.

I again had a call to see if I could pop in again as here internet wasn't working. Her emails were still slow so we got into her Bigpond Account Webmail and deleted all the larger emails and started again. Emails came through but it was still so slow. I rechecked the settings, put the old modem back on again and still things were slow.

I even went as far as to disconnect everything and taking the new wireless modem/router downstairs to another telephone point and seeing how that worked. It was still slow. I had been on this job for over 4 hours now during my two visits.

The problem had to be with the internet provider so we jumped on the phone to check the line and the service. After around 10 minutes on the phone it turned out that she had used all her internet allowance for the month and he speed had been throttled back to 'dial up' speed. This had never happened to her before. We later suggested that as she only had a 2GB per month allowance, the recent visit by her grand daughter had seen her eat up the whole 2GB.

For the same price she can now get a 5GB per month allowance. Unfortunately if she goes down this path she is again locked to her provider (Bigpond) for another 2 years, something I do not recommend!