The Wonderful World of Worky-Not

Yes, it does sound rather like a nasty place visiting the top of the Magic Faraway Tree, doesn’t it? Sadly, it seems to be where I’ve been living for the last few weeks.

Last weekend, my Virgin Media TV set top box went all wonky and none of the interactive or on-demand thingies on it worked. I managed to fix it myself (turned out it was cables), but we’re so reliant on the Catch Up TV facility that we rarely watch programmes when they’re actually aired any more – we just, uh, catch up instead. No doing that last week!

The weekend before was The Weekend The Internet Went Odd. I also have Virgin Media cable internet, and for some reason my upload speed dropped to, well, pretty much nothing. This had the effect that many sites seemed to simply cease existing, and I couldn’t upload anything. Obviously. It mysteriously started working again midweek.

Also that weekend, I got stuck in traffic driving into the city centre, and had to sit up a hill, in the pouring rain, for about half an hour. My poor car (a three year old Ibiza) didn’t like this much, and caught a cold, barely having the power to drive up the slopes in the multi-storey car park. It was still a little sick after we’d been shopping, but thankfully, appears to be OK now. The worst thing was, my breakdown cover had expired (without me realising) just two days earlier.

Then there was the new Belkin F5D7230 router I bought recently. I’ve been getting lag in some online Xbox 360 games, and decided to replace all my ageing networking kit (some of which was 10Base-T!). So I bought this pile of crap here. I set it up, and it was all fine. Until I tried to change the admin password. I changed it, and then it refused to accept what I’d just put in. I had to hard-reset the thing and start all over again – same problem. It turns out that if the password is shorter than 6 or longer than 12 characters, it doesn’t work. Naturally, you’re not told this anywhere. I upgraded the firmware, but that didn’t help. Worse still was the problem with port forwarding (which it calls “virtual servers” or something), which just refuses to work at all, is a known problem, and there’s no fix. So I sent it back!

Its replacement, a Netgear WGR614, wasn’t totally perfect either. Everything worked, but it doesn’t allow custom port forwarding. That is, it’ll forward external port X to an internal port X, but not X to Y. So I had to figure out how to change the port sshd listens to on my Mac mini instead (this was very helpful, if you’re interested). Anyway.

But there’s more! Last night, we came home from watching The Nimmo Twins, getting in past 11 o’clock. And it was freezing. So I thought, lets put the heating on before we go to bed, shall we? Sadly, boiler said no. I turned it on, upped the thermostat, and… nothing. Well, there was a click but that was all. The pump had kicked in, but the boiler had not. Cold. So very, very cold.

So at ten to midnight, I was there dismantling the fireplace to try to figure out what the bloody hell was (not) going on, eventually realising the pilot light had gone out. But how to re-light it? No idea. There was a big black button, which took some effort to push and made clicky-bang noises, and after some experimentation (don’t try this at home, kids!) I found a grey knob which turned and could be pressed in. Using this in conjunction with Clicky-Bang Button, I made fire! But, it was not to be, because releasing the grey thing made it go out again.

After some time holding the thing in hoping it’d “catch”, it finally decided to stay lit. It was still lit this morning, so hopefully it was a one-off, but it was far too cold this morning to contemplate it happening again. Brr.

And it seems Worky-Not is still at the top of the tree, as the internet broke at work today. Which was nice.

Addendum: I forgot to mention the two dead wireless access points at work today, and the fire we had on Monday. Amazing scenes!