gradual versus abrupt change - hello speed

so we in this house have blueyonder as our broadband supplier, every now and then they bring out a new deal for new customers which includes a bump up in our speed without a rise in what we pay... and i appreciate this...

we use a broadband router made by D-link that we bought a few years ago when i moved in, i set it up with G who used to live here, who i still play chess with online, also residing here at the time was dr K, being from melbourne, who used to titter to herself every time we talked about it, routing being a euphemism for... anyway..

one of these situations where you learn enough about it to solve whatever problems come up, then don't have to think about it for 6 months so you lose the knowledge... then have to relearn every time a glitch comes...

in a way i think of the router as being magic, in that i don't understand it, and roughly half of the problems we've had with it have been solved without me knowing what i did (if anything) to solve them...

then a few months back i discovered about it's firmware, from D, the midlands arm of my immediate family living up in leamington spa, and that the firmware we were running on it was 3 years old...

i also learnt how to do a few things to it, for example optimising it for bittorrent, a very useful thing believe me...

so i knew i could install the new firmware, but i was also afraid that it would stop working and i wouldn't know how to fix it, and then all these little things i'd done to it that i'd have to redo...

and i put it off.

until today...

i asked edge (guitar playing resident) to be on hand for the possibly messy aftermath, and i did it... and it was really easy, (although it allowed me to save my settings, but wouldn't let me load them again, so a slight pain there), and i went online to check it was running ok and i found...

more speed...

i guess the old firmware didn't know how to deal with 1 meg of broadband so it just carried on like before when the speed was upped...

and the new firmware does know how to deal with 1 meg,

and it is here amongst us ladies & gentlemen, we are so damned zippy all of a sudden...

now maybe the jump would have been this noticeable anyway, when blueyonder gave us the extra speed, but maybe we've had a few jumps from them that we haven't noticed...

i relate this to my goddaughter grace, who used to live round the corner from me but who now lives (with her mum josiah) in brighton, so i saw her all the time when they were right here, and nowadays i see them once or twice a month, or less, checking how she grows and changes these days there is always some big jump to deal with and celebrate, instead of the gradual awareness of change when i saw her every day...

grace will be 2 years old in a month, she is about 9 months younger than our broadband in this house...

she can say recognise

i miss her

x