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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Thursday 22 July 2004 (Day View)

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22.07.2004 – Thursday 22 July – Town, Telstra & Dialup

10:51am

• Now, when trying to connect to my ISP, I simply get no response at all – so I phoned Telstra, who did their normal things, checked the line, phoned the ISP from wherever their office is, and said they could find no problems. I tried phoning a Brisbane 1800 number, and Joe, both of which now work – so I guess that’s slightly better than last night when even 1800 numbers didn’t work. The lady from Telstra phoned back, and very politely attempted to convince me that the problem is probably just with my ISP’s number, and that it’s probably due to local congestion and thus unfixable, despite the fact that it’s never happened before, and occurred at four past midnight last night, and affects numbers other than my ISP’s number. I had to insist there was a problem before they’d actually report it. Rumour has it that a tech from Telstra will phone me back after having a more detailed look. I’ll probably be in town.

11:06am

• I figured I might as well phone Dodo and complain to them too, so Mr “Dodo Messaging Service” got to take my username and contact number, and assured me that someone will, eventually, phone me back – probably when I’m in town and can’t be contacted. I’m glad I paid my student fees yesterday, as it might be a bit difficult had I had to pay them today.

12:17pm

• I tried dialling up again, and it worked. I suppose it’s been fixed.

Afternoon

• Dad noticed a pinprick leak in one of the smaller radiator hoses, and while he and I were replacing it, we inadvertently snapped part of the small thermal block that it joined to, which was badly corroded. We then drove to town, where I paid for my airfare to Cairns. We also dropped by the “Golden Spanner”, bought a bit of hose to bypass the broken thermal block, and ordered a replacement. We stopped in at the Den on the way home, to drop off three boxes of frozen pies from the bakery, and a quick drink.

Night

• Shan and Kylie-Ane drove up, and, after driving out to Home Rule and collecting Ella, we drove to town, where they got some DVD’s, and we all got a pizza and some chips, before heading home via the service station and a drink and ice cream. We ended up staying out at Home Rule for a while after dropping Ella there. Her and Kylie had managed to go entirely stupid on the way home, and proceeded to excel themselves at this, which makes even the silliest joke quite funny. I wouldn’t normally laugh at something as stupid as the stupid “Badger, Badger, Badger... Snake!” thing, but it’s hilarious when there’s other people rolling around on the floor laughing uncontrollably. We progressed to my amused site, and had a look at a few of the funnier things there, with everyone finding the “Telstra Customer Experience” quite entertaining. Watching Kylie and Ella get shocked by the surprises at the end of the “Illusions” and “Vision Test” things was good too, and it was quite a good night.

4:58am

• I’ve added a header parsing and sending section to my amused, the-i, and uni sites. This should allow caches to cache them more often, thus reducing bandwidth, increasing site performance (from a client perspective) and theoretically saving me money. There’s a lot of info available on the ‘net explaining how to prevent browsers and servers from caching a site – but precious little on how to ensure they do cache it.
  There’s no guarantee that the way I’ve done it is entirely correct – but I went through the entire HTTP/1.1 RFC while figuring it out – and can already notice the speed increase as my browser locally caches pages I’ve visited, so I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.
  I see this as the logical conclusion for those people who, like me, have gone to trouble to turn their “dynamic” URI’s into “static” ones. Whether it makes any difference to search engines or not, I don’t know, but it would make sense if they cached pages that are less dynamic in preference to those that are more likely to change. Obviously, if your pages actually do change frequently, you wouldn’t want to use this technique – or would at least want to modify the “expires” header to something a bit closer than a year from the current date, which is what I’m currently using and also the maximum recommended.