Still As Life

As you may recall, on the 4th of December, I joined up to the Vodafone 5GB wireless modem package. This has been working out quite well, it has kept me sane these past couple of days where I would not normally have had the internet and would have been stuck with a certain person who I really cannot stand. Yay for technology and it's associated magic.

Anyway, I received my bill earlier in the month. If you read my earlier post, or have been looking at this plan yourself, you would know it is $39 a month for 5gb of data usage, regardless of whether you are on the 3G network or the GSM network. The $39 a month includes the USB modem or PCMCIA card (I suggest the USB modem) for free.

Now I received my bill and it was not for $39. It was for $40.29. This amount made no sense at all, my bill made no sense as it looked like I had been charged twice for the month, and neither of the numbers made sense.

I have just spent half an hour plus on the phone to customer care about this and was transferred backwards and forwards between 2 different departments 3 times! The first 2 had no idea at all, even though the first was billing enquiries and the second was data billing enquiries.

Neither of them had any idea.

Finally, I got transferred back to general billing enquiries and got a different customer service representative who seemed to know what she was talking about.

It seems that unlike the other providers I have experience with, Vodafone don't have billing cycles everyday, so when you join up to Vodafone, you are put into whatever the next billing cycle is. In my case, the next one was on the 5th, and then you are billed twice to make up the extra time before the billing cycle.

I had a feeling it was just something like this, but when you are billed for more than you are expecting it's nice to know why. It definitely should not have taken half an hour to find out though. Surely anyone in any of their billing departments should know something like this and could have told me straight up in less than 5 minutes.

The thing that makes it really annoying, is that I never had to wait for someone to answer when I rang and when I was transferred. They always picked up straight away, so the half an hour spent trying to find out was almost all spent speaking directly to someone, there was no waiting time at all in that.

Labels: rants

The screen shot to the left shows a post that was made on Tailored.com.au by Brendon Sinclair indicating that his blog post that I had mentioned previously had indeed been indexed by Google in less than 6 and a half hours.

As I mentioned in my previous post, it was indexed in 4 hours. However, following up out of curiousity, upon another search now, only just under 4 hours after his new post, it has also been indexed.

"posted by Brendon at 5:25 PM on Dec 11, 2007"

As you can see on the clock on my computer, it is just after 9. While I had performed the search at about 8:50 when I first saw it, I hadn't realised that it was in fact the second post until now, so my time is a little bit off. However I think it is fairly safe to say that Google is indexing frequently updated websites in 3 to 4 hours.

Interestingly enough though, Brendon's following post has not yet been indexed that I can see, though it was made only 10 minutes after the one in the screen shot.

Labels: internet

I have been noticing over the past few days that Google has been indexing my blog within a few hours of my posting. I just Googled for my last blog post and it's not there yet, so it clearly isn't quite instantaneous. However, for a website that is frequently being updated, an index update thats only an hour or two old is clearly quite beneficial for everyone involved.

I had noticed how quick it was updating a few days ago. It was just today that I saw a blog post by Brendon Sinclair on Tailored Consulting about Blogger posts getting indexed almost instantly.

While the circumstances are slightly different and Tailored.com.au clearly has a higher pagerank than Stillaslife.com as well as no doubt getting many more pageviews and so on. Brendon also keeps the blog updated even more frequently than I update mine, so automatically it should be getting crawled more frequently than mine. However I thought I would check this anyway just out of curiousity.

Tailored.com.au has been crawled since his post 4 hours ago. I would like to watch this more closely and see if his website is in fact being crawled as quickly as it seems. As Brendon mentioned in his blog, even if it is only Blogger that is being indexed so quickly at the moment, if Google has found a way to effectively index websites, even within a couple of hours, this really puts them even further out in front of all the other search engines.

I have noticed it has been over the past couple of weeks that the speed has really increased so I wonder if it is something to do with Google's last major algorithm change. I am interested to see if the same thing is occurring on Wordpress and other blogging systems.

As I write this, I have also done a quick search, and now at 3:22, the blog post that was used as a test for this purpose by Brendon is number one when you search Google for "Raymond F. Sinclair".

Labels: internet

Upon reading an article on Google.org recently related to an Associated Press story about a rise in infectious diseases due to climate change, I couldn't help but chuckle to myself.

The article outlines how rising temperatures are increasing the worldwide spread of infectous diseases. Particularly the increase in cases of chikungunya fever in Italy and spreading throughout Europe where it was previously only common in Africa and Asia.

I know this doesn't really seem like a funny thing, but the reason I couldn't help but chuckle is because this is only logical. When the humidity in a room increases, a loaf of bread in the room will get mouldy much quicker. So it makes sense that when the atmosphere in general is maintaining heat and the humidity is building, that diseases, viruses and other fungi would also start to spread quicker. Yet it took an Associated Press article for this to even become widely realised.

Labels: special interest