Connectivity

Connectivity issues plagued me for over a month now. Dogged perseverance has seen me through them all.

Glitch #1: Uploads to Flickr stopped working; Facebook uploads took forever; e-banking failed; and emails weren't getting through.

First round of calls to my broadband provider raised my blood pressure till one customer service staff took it upon himself to work with me to troubleshoot. It turned out that there was a signal interference that caused the glitch. Yeah!!! problem solved (and I gave two thumbs up to the service provider).

Glitch #2: Three days later, the fault resurrected itself. This time it took more calls to my service provider and sending them more ping and trace route test results. 

Their assumption - problem at the user-end. I made them send an engineer down to check the cable modem just to proof to them that the fault wasn't on my end. It then took daily calls from me to find out if the network fault was being looked into. After over a week the network problem has finally been fixed. 

During the week, I also learned that fibre access was not an option as it had not reach my area. If I wanted to get on the new infrastructure, in addition to charges levied by the last mile provider, I had to pay $450 to the fibre provider.

Glitch #3: My external hard drives were all NTFS formatted. The iMac could read files but could not write to them. I needed a solution that would allow me to operate between Windows and Mac OS. After consulting with friends, I made a trip down to the friendly IT store. After reading information on the boxes of external hard drives and asking questions I settled on Western Digital's My Book Live. Forty-five minutes later, I had my personal cloud storage up and running.  My laptop, Mac and iPhone are all configured. Only draw back - I haven't found a solution that would allow photos taken using the iPhone to be transferred direct to external storage.