Today was a wonderful day of fossil hunting on the east beach in Whitby. We were ready to get down onto the beach before the tide was out enough to let us on, and got off not too long before it would have been back in again (but with more time to spare than the last time). Fossils were found. Rock pools were studied. Fun was had. Donuts and candy-floss were consumed on the way back to the car.
It was a pretty ideal day.
Here's a small assortment of photos.
We're all happy-tired now, and full of dinner. Back home tomorrow. But, all being well, only after a quick trip to the Whitby Lobster Hatchery.
I woke up this morning to find that EE had sent me an email at around 00:30 last night.
We're sorry we didn't stick to our appointment or give you 24 hours' notice that we couldn't make it.
We've added a £32.31 credit to your next bill to try and make up for it.
You don't need to do anything, we'll add it automatically.
If you have any questions, please visit our help page.
And then at 08:17 this morning, I got an SMS:
Hi from EE.
We're sorry for not sticking to our appointment or giving you 24 hours' notice that we couldn't make it. We've added a credit of 32.31 GBP to your next bill. You don't need to do anything, but please go to ee.co.uk/go/compensation if you have any questions. Thanks.
Which is kind of weird, because I remember someone turning up yesterday, and my broadband speed is now 935/107 Mbps at the router (vs. the 35/2.7 it was at the start of yesterday). Perhaps it's their way of saying sorry for the failure to deliver the other day? Who can tell though, it doesn't actually say when and why.
We came to see if we can connect your property to our Full Fibre network yesterday.
The good news is we can, but the engineer found that the existing network connection point wasn't suitable for private land's underground connection, so we need to plan a new way to bring the fibre cable to your home, which may also require a specialist engineer for a flat roof connection.
We're really sorry for the delay, but we're on it and will update you again in the next 10 days (we're usually much quicker).
We promise Full Fibre's worth the wait. It's the UK's most reliable broadband technology.
The flat roof thing was... interesting, but okay, I'm sure they know what they're doing and that it's some automated system with a restricted set of outcomes.
Skip forward one day and I get an SMS out of the blue:
Hi, it's Openreach on behalf of EE/BT.
Sorry we missed you.
Book a new date for your Full Fibre installation here: [removed]
The "Sorry we missed you" was very odd. They didn't miss me. I saw them two days earlier. But, again, okay... I followed the link and it also seemed to be written as if one of us had missed an appointment and I needed to pick another day. Anyway, I ignored what it said and just used the date picker to pick the next available day (which was today: as in the day I'm writing this).
Fast forward to today and there's a knock on the door at around 08:30. Around two hours later, and this is what I was seeing:
To be clear: this isn't the actual speed of the connection. This was a quick test from my Mac, in my office, via the Wi-Fi connection. I don't currently have a Mac or PC wired into the router so can't measure the full speed. Testing on the router itself, it's much closer to 943Mbps/100Mbps. But, yeah, I'm good. I finally have full fibre again!
There was an immediate downside though. Once it was all set up, with the new router (which I swapped to as it has Wi-Fi 6, so why not?), I noticed that the ping times between my Macs were all over the place; this was also noticeable in that the ssh connections were so jittery to the point of being almost unusable.
Bugger.
So I did a bunch of digging online and, without getting too deeply into it (because I'm not a networking guy): the problem is AirDrop/Sidecar. They don't play well with a Wi-Fi 6 connection, so do stuff in the background that causes your ping times to be all over the place.
The solution? Turn this off for the Wi-Fi connection on the affected Macs:
I can't find anything that suggests I'm going to regret doing this for the couple of Macs in my office, and for my MacBook Air, and having done it, the performance is fine again.
This is why I avoid anything to do with networking: it always seems like if you improve one thing, it degrades some other thing, and it's only ever fixed by remembering to tweak some reasonably obscure setting somewhere on some particular item of hardware.
I forgot to post this yesterday. I was out on a lunch walk and noticed the clouds in the sky were looking like the right kind for some atmospheric optical fun. Sure enough, I looked up, and...
A nice partial 22° halo. It's been a wee while since I last saw one.
I knewit was too good to be true. While a little bit of me hoped it was going to happen this time, mostly I was expecting it to not happen.
It didn't happen.
Today was the day when Openreach were supposed to turn up again and deliver me a full fibre connection. The engineer was booked to turn up some time between 08:00 and 13:00 (as before). I was ready at 08:00. I was ready before 08:00 if I'm honest.
By 12:00 there was no sign of them. Despite there being an hour left to go, I'd written them off as a no-show again. I was wrong this time though. There was a knock on the door about 10 minutes later.
The engineer introduced himself, said he needed to go for a walk around first to get a feel for how and where the work needed to happen, and to figure out where the fibre was to come from (I kind of feel like this would be the sort of thing they'd know up front, but it's not my job and I trust them to know it).
Another 5 minutes and he's back... to tell me they can't do the job because the pole the fibre needs to come from is too far away. O_o
Now, I'm not going to get annoyed at this chap; presumably someone should have done some sort of site survey beforehand. Presumably this was the sort of thing that should have happened before the previous attempt to deliver the product?
So now I'm still without fibre, but with part of the job done. He installed the wee box that goes inside the house, and also the wee box that goes on the outside of the house. Of course, he drilled a hole and hooked them both up. So now I'm down an electrical socket, but have gained a box with a little red light that tells me I don't have full fibre.
He left assuring me that, having done this, it ensures that the actual delivery of the cable is turned into a priority. I can't say I'm that convinced, having sort of been here before. Some time later I got this text message:
We're sorry we couldn't get you connected today. The job is a bit more complex than usual.
We are going to get it sorted though and promise Full Fibre's worth the wait. We'll be back in touch in the next few days.
Again, I'm not convinced, having sort of been here before.
If I was a little more cynical and a little more prone to seeing a conspiracy where there was just a cock-up, I'd almost be tempted to entertain the idea that they turned up and fitted the box knowing full well that there was no fibre to be hooked up. Doing half a job is starting the job, after all. Presumably on some sheet somewhere that looks better than failing to do the job a second time.
I'm going to give them a couple of days to get back to me, as per the message, and then I think it's time to chase up EE and ask why, once again, they've failed to deliver me a product they promised me was available.
I'm back home, back in Scotland, after a touch over a week in the Netherlands. It's been a great week. Much like on the flight out, from the aircraft, I managed to get a view of a part of the UK I like. This time it was Whitby.
While likely not immediately obvious, it is there. It was a lot more obvious with the naked eye. Zooming in a bit...
The track confirms that we were in a good position for such a view:
While I didn't grab a photo (I wasn't in a window seat this time so it wasn't so easy to keep track of where we were), I also managed to see Scarborough -- a place where I spent many summer holidays as a child in the 1970s.
Sadly I did miss a view of Newcastle, as when we got close to there, we took a left-hand turn and all I could see out of our windows was sky.
I love flying, even though I rarely do so -- I'm not one for travel. But when I get the chance to fly I find it hard to not just sit there, staring out of the window, marvelling at the view.
Today I got the chance to get a pretty good view of the area close to where I used to live when I first started this blog (and also where I lived when I maintained the blog that came before).
The route I flew actually covered a couple of places from my past life, going fairly close to York (where I was born and spent the first 18 years of my life), then carrying on down into Lincolnshire (where I used to live before moving to Scotland).
Much of the route was over broken cloud that made it tricky to really see obvious landmarks, although around Lincolnshire (without knowing I was over it at the time) I did see some shapes in the landscape that looked familiar. Then, after a small turn, and after a wee while, the cloud cleared and suddenly it was very obvious where I was. I had this excellent view of the Wash.
I know this sort of thing is conventional, everyday, and boring for many folk. Me: nope, not a chance. That I can have this sort of view is still a wonder to me.
It looks like I'm going to have a fairly interrupted work day today. I was woken up in the early hours of the morning by a pretty impressive storm. While most of the lightning was IC, it was almost constant for a good thirty minutes or so. Given it was still dark, it was an impressive show.
Around 08:00, it started up again. Some time between 08:00 and 08:30, I lost broadband. A quick check of the status page showed it wasn't just me...
That 19:00 expected fix time doesn't look so good for getting a lot of quality work done today. I would expect that to be an initial pessimistic estimate, but it still suggests it's likely not a straightforward issue.
You've got to be somewhat thankful for a couple of bars of 5G, an unlimited plan for mobile data, and a Mac-to-iPhone tethering setup...
So after the screw-up by Openreach and EE, where I was promised full fibre and then it never happened, I'd assumed that nothing was going to happen for quite some time. I was told that (likely) Openreach would contact me when they'd solved whatever the problem was, but I wasn't holding out much hope that it would be a swift turnaround.
Yesterday, however, I got an email from EE claiming that full fibre was available at my address. While sceptical about this, assuming it was just some marketing nonsense that wasn't paying attention to the details of where I live, I called them to check. I explained the problem, I had them read the notes on my account, I had them acknowledge all that had happened and they reassured me that, for real, no kidding, no nonsense, this was all gonna happen this time.
So... watch this space. I already have an installation date (it's next month) just from the order-planning call -- something which didn't happen the last time. Within the next few weeks, I will either finally be returning to streaming, and enjoying all the other benefits of full fibre, or I'll be writing yet another post about how EE and Openreach messed up.
