Do you have a ‘super-fast’ broadband connection but are a bit less than happy with how quickly you are able to navigate the web? It wasn’t until last night when I was almost tearing my hair out in frustration that I sussed out what was going on. I was swearing and cursing at all the other people in the building who were sharing my connection, but didn’t realise that it wasn’t bandwidth that was the problem but my ISP’s DNS servers.

DNS servers serve as the internet’s ‘phone book’. They have to be fast and effective to make your web experience a pleasant one. A typical web page can make hundreds of requests to your ISPs DNS servers each time there is a request for graphics and text.

If your DNS is crap (or becomes so over time) then it’s Bad Times. You should have a DNS response time in tens of milliseconds, not hundreds. For if your pages are graphics intense, for example, you might have to wait several seconds (GASP!) for your page to load.

However, there are free DNS providers out there which can be a damned site better than many ISPs. Good Times! If you know what you are doing, you could consider changing your router’s DNS settings to make use of one of these Third Party DNS solutions.

I am with Be Broadband at home, and have been spoiled by a 24Mbps service for almost a year. But my surfing has started to become noticeably slower these past few weeks and some pages have simply come up with Explorer errors. Not funny when you’re in the middle of a bidding war on eBay! Speaking with other Be users, they’d found out that the ISP’s DNS has become flaky to say the least.

I dipped into my router’s settings and changed the DNS IP addresses to use the OpenDNS service and, all of a sudden, my internet is back to what it was like months ago – i.e. as fast as shit off a shovel!

I highly recommend trying this out. You don’t have to sign up or register even, simply make a note of their server addresses and put them into your router or modem config.

TICKLE TEST – give it a try yourself by clicking on the link below. (Beware – this took 30mins out of my working day. Maybe that’s a plus…. )

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Pete, your Super IQ score is 141 (Tickle Tests)

Your overall intelligence quotient is the result of a scientifically-tested formula based on how many questions you answered correctly. But it’s only part of what we learned about you from your answers on the test. We also determined the way you process information.

The way you think about things makes you a Complex Intellectual. This means you are highly intelligent and have extraordinarily strong verbal and math skills. Compared to others you are a highly conceptual and complex thinker and are able to understand information in an abstract form. You also show great attention to detail. In fact, it’s hard to find something you’re not good at.

How did we determine that your thinking style is that of a Complex Intellectual? When we examined your test results further, we analyzed how you scored on 8 dimensions of intelligence: spatial, organizational, abstract reasoning, logical, mechanical, verbal, visual and numerical. The 3 dimensions you scored highest on combine to make you a Complex Intellectual. Only 6 out of 1,000 people have this rare combination of abilities.

I think the title sums it up quite nicely.

Took my laptop and hard drive around to a mates in order to demonstrate Virtual DJ and give him a bit of a DJing lesson. Plugged the wrong adapter into my hard drive. Not even so much as a fizz or a pop. It just didn’t work. It continued to not work either when I got it back to mine. Nothing. Nada! Not a fucking Wall’s sausage! Even when I took the thing apart and tinkered.

I backed (most) of it up a couple of months ago but I’ve lost a LOAD of painfully researched, catalogued and tweaked music, as well as loads of pictures, documents and programs. And my porn collection. (

Shit happens. But lately, it all seems to be happening to ME.

Damn you Sweden!