Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Mobile broadband... mutter mutter

I've been away from my desk for a few days, spending some time in a hotel in Kent with Dave, who had meetings in the area. It made a really nice change; we had a couple of meals out in the evenings, and also managed two different coastal walks. I can't really call them 'seaside' because we were on the Medway estuary which is a little, um, muddy - but it still made a refreshing change from Birmingham which is about as far from the sea as you can get.

We recently acquired a mobile broadband USB stick so I took that and a laptop with me, hoping to use them to stay in touch. It worked just fine at first - connecting to the internet and accessing webmail. But then I tried to update my blog. And found that instead of the usual Blogger navbar, I had a weird pink stripe across the top of the screen. When I investigated further, I found it had slapped an 'adult content ban' on me which wouldn't let me access, or update, any site with supposed adult content. For some unknown reason that included Blogger, every other social networking or blogging site, and a page about a novel that I wanted to research. The restriction was absolute, and the only way to get it lifted was to enter details of my credit card and pay the broadband provider £2. Supposedly they would refund this instantly, but I had visions of the transaction going wrong, the ISP eating my £2, and locking me out of broadband altogether, so I decided not to bother. Which is why it's been such ages since I've updated this.

Sorry! But you can blame the mobile broadband. I am. ;)

No comments: