Now, to offer some helpful advice – by switching ISP you can double your uplink speed from the nominal 448kbps of “standard” ADSL to a nominal 832kbps. If your exchange is “unbundled” (check http://www.samknows.co.uk), you can even get this with some of the cheaper ISPs such as TalkTalk. I use a more expensive provider (adsl24) as I work from home and rely on “business grade” broadband and with their their “office” tariff and get 8Mbps down and 832kbps up.

BTW, the asynchronous in ATM doesn’t actually mean it’s asynchronous :-), it just means that it’s packet based rather than switched circuit.

Yes, it’s asymmetric (digital subscriber line). However ADSL does use Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) as the data link layer between the home and the exchange. </even more completely irrelevant pedantry>

As others have pointed out, ADSL was designed as a consumer product where the amount of downloading usually far outweighs the uploading.

As above re: 2 year old. Get them to walk more, but have the option for them to be pushed when they tire. We fitted one of these “Buggy Boards” to a regular pushchair: http://www.buggyboard.info/page.php?buggy=111

when you run a website like STW you have to pay for the physical server that contains all the content including the forum. then you pay for the electricity. then you pay for the “bandwidth” (i.e. amount of data sent and received) used by the server. think of the bandwidth like the “minutes” in a mobile phone contract – you probably get some bundled, but for a heavy bandwidth (i.e. popular) site like STW you pay extra according to the extra amounts you use. So, you are paying for the priviledge of people downloading content from your site. When you, as the user, download a forum page from STW it is eithing using up their “minutes” or actually costing them money. If the STW site itself contains the pictures you want to see, then it costs STW more to provide them to you. If the forum page contains a *link* to another site, the “text” from the forum page is delivered to you from STW but the picture itself is fetched by *your* web browser from the other site – using their minutes.

because if you posted the pictures directly you’d be using up STW’s servers’ bandwidth, which costs them more. If you post a link to a photo on a server somewhere else (e.g. flickr) it’s the other site’s servers bandwidth that is consumed in delivering the picture to your web browser.

We’re on our 4th Islabike – up to the 6 year old Beinn – with our eldest. Smaller models are still going strong with 2 younger siblings and the occaisional loan to friends (who inevitably also then buy islabikes). For no-fuss, no gimmick bikes that last, I don’t think you can go wrong.

Try ING – they came in at half the renewal quote of our previous insurer (NU) for our listed(*) building.

(*) Actually we’re in the curtilige of a listed building, but for insurance purposes it’s pretty much the same thing.

Just went through the same thing with a similar amount of money. Went with Lloyds and got 1.88% for 3 months; this was a bit higher than their advertised rate due to them being “our” bank, which also reduced hassle factor that worked in their favour; most other high street banks had similar or lower rates. I think we can trust Lloyds for that long given implicit UK gov backing. Beyond that, we’re thinking about stockpiling mattresses…

If you want to look “off the highstreet”, have a look at Cater Allen or Close Brothers (both suggested by our lawyers) who were offering >2% last time I looked.

try https://www.opendns.com/start/

Aus – if it has got a “PCMCIA” slot – aka CardBus – then I’ve got three of suitable wireless cards knocking about, price depending on whether you want wireless b (only), wireless b/g or super-g. £3, £4, £5 respectively. What OS have you got? Any wireless card will be easiest to set up under Windows XP (service pack 2), in which case it should be “plug and play”. Happy to advise if you don’t know what you’ve got. Paypal fine.

Cheers
Dan.