Welcome back!

The last time we updated this blog was 16th June and we were in Atlanta Airport taking advantage of their free WiFi system. In fact we were so engrossed that we almost missed our trans-atlantic flight. The only compensation was that we missed all that queing and jostling of actual boarding and strolled on board albeit with a slightly chastened expression on our face after the stewardess said “Here he is…..!”

When we arrived home we wanted to make sure that our last entry was correct and were alarmed to find that we couldn’t raise the blog-site. What was wrong?

We tried various ruses including going to the WordPress home page which we could see. But when we tried to link to blog sites from that nothing happened although our browser (Firefox) did try valiantly! We then switched to Safari but the results were the same.

Our connection with the cyber world!

We put it down to some sort of fluke and left it for a day or two but then something else happened and we found we couldn’t look at the Controlglobal website. Life suddenly started to look bleak. No more Walt sounding off.…!

Again we possessed ourselves in patience and said we would wait for a few days.

Then a real problem arose. I couldn’t access my bank. This was tragic as I couldn’t see how much they owed me – well we can live in hope!.

We took action. We contacted my friendly Mac man, Adrian at Screenway where we had a discussion and tried various things but to no avail. He was able to download all the pages I couldn’t. Finally he suggested that we drop in the next time we were in town and we would delve deeper into the recesses of “OS X” the MAC operating system.

A few days later we tried something we perhaps should have thought of earlier. We dusted the (almost) forgotten and aged predecessor of our current MacBook Pro, an ancient Powerbook G4. Surely that could not have the problem? But it had. It couldn’t see the pages.

We surmised that the problem then wasn’t in my MacBook Pro but in one of two places either there was something I had done to the blog site and coincidently to Walts blog or there was a problem with the service provider.

More in hope than with confidence we emailed our service provider. We should explain that because of where the Read-out offices are located broadband access has been problematical and we made made ourselves known to every politician local, national and European and even the radio and local news media in our quest to be connected. We finally made contact with a small company, Airware, who use a wireless system and it has been working well for us over the last two or three years.

Within about two hours he came back to us: “…that sounds like a problem with broken MTU’s somewhere down the network.
I’ve made some changes to the link between Caoran and Fanore tonight.
Can you see, if that solves your problem ?”

We looked and we saw and we were delighted.

So we thought that we’d pay tribute to the two guys who helped Martin in Airwire and Adrian in Screenway. Take a bow lads!