Ahh, YouTube… I can spend hours upon hours on this thing. I really enjoy going from one video to another – perhaps starting out on something featured on the front page, or something new from one of my subscriptions. Then after watching a video and posting a comment if I have some kind of compliment to the author or to let someone know if they posted something idiotic, I then proceed to watch related video after related video – and watch in amazement as they gradually dwindle in relevance from the video I started at.

Anyway, I was looking at peoples’ cover performances of one of my favourite bands Say Anything and found one by a user called Jaaaaaaa.

This girl is absolutely bloody amazing! Julia Nunes is a very talented singer/songwriter from New York that skilfully plays the ukulele, guitar and melodica. She is of course, extremely talented at what she does. But it is proven through her talking channel that she is very fun to watch even when she’s not performing. She has this immense enthusiasm, silliness and joy that comes through in her videos, which had me grinning ear-to-ear at 2am last week when I discovered her. She is really just amazing to watch, and she has given me immense musical inspiration.

My Internet Service Provider, Soul Communications has actually lifted the block on various inbount customer ports.

I’ve been with them for months, and I have no idea when this changed. I was unable to receive incoming connections on ports 80, 443, 25 and a few others. But now they appear to work.

Previously, I had a complicated system going which allowed people visiting the site to type in a url without specifying port 500.

The proxy at school allows traffic to be tunneled through it, but only through port 443 so I can now take advantage of that, which is excellent. In all the schools in the state of New South Wales, every computer connects to the internet through a proxy which now implements a whitelist blocking service – meaning that unless a Department of Education and Training official has entered an approved website into the list, it will be blocked from every school computer in NSW. This is where my website comes in.

I host a cgi script which is a web proxy from my home internet connection. It is password protected, and hidden from view. Any DET official visiting my site will see an informative website about an educational topic. But for students in my year, they simply log into the hidden area with a password that changes every couple of weeks and suddenly they are allowed access to myspace, hotmail etc which are normally denied them while at school : D

Though now, I can host a SSH connection on port 443 and access this through the school’s proxy, and then tunnel proxy traffic over this connection and access blocked websites this way, which works much better and faster than the CGI script.

A look over at Whirlpool (an Australian broadband website) surprised me with a story about my Internet Service Provider, Soul. Apparently they are in a bit of financial trouble.

When I first linked up to broadband, I had used the daughter site of Whirlpool, www.broadbandchoice.com.au to decide with which ISP to go with. It offers a very useful search for providers, which can be filtered based on factors like speed, availability and contract obligations.

I found my first ISP on broadbandchoice.com.au, Powerband. The prices they offered seemed too good to be true, compared with other plans ISPs had to offer. Powerband allowed me something like 20GB on-peak and 40GB off-peak for $60 a month. Unfortunately, a few months later this company developed cash-flow problems and was subsequently aquired by Koala Telecom.

Apart from the few days of downtime in which technical processes transferred Powerband’s customers to Koala, I didn’t really care because Koala stated Powerband customers could stay on the same plan for the same price, even though their own plans were much worse. But within about another month, news stories on Whirlpool indicated Koala was changing their plans for the worse to avoid their own financial problems.

Fortunately, I was allowed to leave Koala without incurring a contract-breaking fee. I looked into ADSL2+, which offered theoretical speeds of up to 24MB/s. Although in my exchange area, the only candidate available was Soul.

I have been content with my new ISP for about 4 months now, but once again there in ominous news surfacing on Whirlpool’s front page that Soul is unable to pay redundancy to extra employees from their merger with TPG, and may soon be facing legal action from resellers.

On one hand, I’m annoyed at the disruptions to my service that will enevitably follow this predicament, but if I can get out of my contract without a fee like I did with  Koala, I think I would like to switch to a different provider. Since I’ve looked, there are ISPs offerring much larger data quotas, especially with ADSL2+ services.

I laugh at the thought of an American taking a visit to this site. From what I’ve seen, over there they don’t even know what a data cap/limit is. They should also take a look at this Wikipedia article and stop complaining about petrol prices, too.