Nipped to the health food store attached to Tesco and checked out their food; in general whilst they have a larger range it's rather expensive unless on offer. There's a lot more tofu, but only of the chilled type. Did pick up some 'no egg' though, and may try baking a cake to see how appalling (or not) it is.

A fair bit of the remainder of the evening consisted of reconfiguring the firewall to use NAT and the new Be Internet connection, a task made longer than it should have been by utorrent being annoying and claiming it wasn't working when it actually was..

This also necessitated scrapping all my externally exposed hostnames (like gladstone) because I've moved from 8 IPs to one (I could have 8 again for a tenner a month, but decided I could do everything I wanted by NAT mapping). So now there is only Blears known to the outside world, which as I hope to offer things like an IRC server (a 'community service') it should be best to name it after the secretary of state for communities and local government(*)

I'm not actually certain how fast my connection is.. Whilst the router seemed to be synching at about 12Mb I'm limited by my firewall which only has 10Mb network cards and a 40MHz sparc processor! I didn't think my ADSL connection would be fast enough to overwhelm a sparcstation 10 for some time, but it seems so. Good job I have these new fanless boxes lined up.

In any case I'm getting well over 100KB upload speeds, have had at least 200KB+ download speeds and various speedtests have shown anything between 6 and 7.5Mb. We shall see if this improves when I put an AMD Geode based system with 100Mb network cards in. Regardless, it's still fast and I can watch Youtube videos without them stuttering! A fair bit of laughing at Armstrong and Miller ('text message swearing') was had and I must buy their DVDs.

(*) For all who aren't aware, my computers are named after members of parliament. My main workstation is usually Gladstone, and there are others including Mellor (media PC), Cook (bittorrent), Portillo (firewall), Heath (OS/2/DOS box), Cameron (SGI box - because it's all pretty on the outside, but still the Same Old Shit inside) etc