Well, it&#39;s been a while since things went snap crackle and pop (thank god) so I deemed it appropriate for a small update. Recently I&#39;ve just been biting the bullet and living the hum-drum life at work, however last week I was sick so had a few days off. I wish I could say they were enjoyable but due to the fact that i was in pain I can&#39;t say it was all that much fun.<br /><br />Outside of work I&#39;ve been hard at work launching two new sites which have been a long time in the making. Overall I&#39;m pretty happy with them, they&#39;re working nicely, haven&#39;t had any bugs (at least not that I&#39;m aware of) and everyone&#39;s pleased with them. So that&#39;s nice. Hmmm. Isn&#39;t it. Apart from that I&#39;ve been photoshopping like crazy, I dunno why but I think my inner artist was calling to me and with the lack of paint and an easel the next best thing is to work in photoshop, you can see the fruits (gone slightly bad) in <a href=&quot;/gallery/index.php?folder=content/Photoshopping/me/&quot; title=&quot;direct link&quot;>the gallery</a>. Yes, they&#39;re of me, but hey, I&#39;m vain and it&#39;s my blog and I&#39;ll do what I want.<br /><br /><br />One thing that&#39;s been driving me up the wall recently is my &#39;net connection. So, I upgraded to 8meg, with a company called EvolutionDSL a few weeks ago. At the time of placing the order everything looked good, nice speeds, no limits etc. Then the connection happened and the advertising was all false. The &quot;speeds&quot; are nothing less than, well, shit. Now I live pretty damn close to the exchange and I know for an undeniable fact that the line I&#39;m on can handle the absolute max speed available. I say available because with evolutiondsl, the speeds aren&#39;t &quot;available&quot; they&#39;re throttled to the extent of actually downloading files at speeds I never thought I&#39;d see again since I left dial-up <em>years</em> ago.<br />So I&#39;m migrating again, to a different provider with a long-standing and good reputation, I was too easily swayed by the &quot;too-good-to-be-true&quot; syndrome of EvolutionDSL. To be honest though, &quot;MaxDSL&quot; i.e. 8meg broadband is pretty shit from its conception. First off it&#39;s backboned by purely BT infrastructure (which is inherantly shit) and BT don&#39;t have anywhere near the capacity to carry that much bandwidth on a national scale to suit the demands of heavy broadband users. In fact, they can&#39;t carry normal, casual users, especially not at peak times. If you want my advice and you&#39;re tempted to upgrade... hold your horses. If I were you, I&#39;d go for an LLU (local loop unbundling) service who maintain their own infrastructure and actually have the ability to offer the service that they advertise. My recommendation would be <a href=&quot;http://bethere.co.uk&quot; rel=&quot;external&quot; title=&quot;be*&quot;><em>Be*</em></a>. However you&#39;ll be lucky if you can get the service because they&#39;re currently rather lacking in their coverage. My exchange gets  Be* 24meg in July, and yes, I&#39;ve already ordered it   I just hope BT don&#39;t arse about and delay it.<br />