structured

Our office is located in a business centre which means shared infrastructure. It works pretty well however I wanted to make a few wee changes and this meant a trip into the comms room. Let's just say it's non-trivial to make changes.

BT, on the other hand, should know better. Our home ADSL sucks at the moment so +1/2 got in touch. "ah, we can't help you unless you have our equipment installed". This seemed pretty dubious but they sent us a home hub anyway; it arrived yesterday and +1/2 started setting it up. I have a history of not getting on with BT equipment and associated software so I wasn't expecting the best. Sure enough +1/2 gave me a call to say the bundled software wouldn't install and so the installation was stalled.

I doubt the software had ever actually been tested on OS X: it couldn't find the wi-fi adapter in two different macs, the text fields into which you had to enter information had black text on a black background, etc. Complete crap.

We finally figured out how to get the software to talk to the home hub and... it worked! I was pretty surprised. We settled back to setting up the other computers with the new hub and then... the hub stopped working. Soft reset: no luck, the hub just sat there and constantly rebooted itself. Hard reset: the same.

Disconnect the BT hub, reconnect the old router, all works flawlessly. I wonder if the improvement in ADSL has anything to do with the BT vans parked outside the exchange rather than the crappy BT hardware?

+1/3 and +2/3 are still away and it's super-quiet. Weird.

In other news: Pentax are about to release the K-30; not too expensive, great low light performance, weather sealed. Drool.