A glimpse of the future

I don't know how many of you readers were fans of the Back to the Future trilogy when you were a bit younger, but I was.

More importantly I was massively interested in how the future looked because I wanted to know what I would be doing in 2015.

And while - sadly - we're still nowhere near ubiquitous hoverboards and flying cars, there was an announcement this week which moves us towards those futuristic visions of what home-life will be.

Unfortunately it's not rehydrating ovens which converts small pizzas into giant ones.  But it is still pretty impressive for those of us with MySky boxes.

Because as of next Friday those of us with the hard-drive recorders will be able to programme the boxes remotely via the internet.

For those of you with tweens who throw a strop in the local Pak'n save because you forgot to record Hannah Montana this could well be a lifesaver.

Me, I'm more practical. I'm thinking of those times I'm down at the mother-in-laws and I don't have control of the remote.

A quick logon, a few clicks and my own box will make sure I don't miss the rugby in preference to a dodgy rom-com.

I'm sure some of you will point out this functionality has been available over the internet for quite a while in other countries, and even in New Zealand if you're brave enough to have built your own PVR out of an old PC and some software - but this is mainstream New Zealand folks.

And given we're only a couple of years after the UK in getting this functionality that's probably something worth cheering.

Of course later this year we'll have TiVo boxes in Aotearoa as well and they will also have the remote programming functionality. We'll have to wait until a bit nearer the time, but it will be interesting to see what impact TiVo has on the MySky subscription rate in New Zealand! But that's for another blog.

And speaking of the future, I got a little glimpse of it in the last few weeks.

A couple of weeks back I noticed some people working in a cabinet at the end of my street for a few days. They left and my internet speed dropped by about 75 per cent. When you download a lot as well as game via the internet, this is a biggie.

I gave my ISP, Orcon, a ring to see what they could do. Within 10 minutes I was speaking to a real person who took me through all the steps they needed to in order to confirm the issue wasn't at my end.

A few minutes later and he seemed to reckon it was the installation of the new cabinet which was the issue and they would investigate.

Two days later I had the confirmation. The cabinet was causing the drop in speed and Orcon would move their own equipment from the exchange to the cabinet.

One week after that it was done and from a maximum of 180Kb/s download speed before cabinetisation (and <50Kb/s download after the initial cabinetisation) I was getting download speeds of up to 600Kb/s and boosts of up to 1200Kb/s.

No more 2.5Mb broadband for me - it's up to 13Mb depending on latency and how many of my neighbours are using their connections.

I don't want this to sound as a recommendation - all I want to do is recognise my ISP identified the fault, fixed it and I now have a much better service than I did before. Telecom also helped with its cabinetisation programme so all-in-all I'm one happy downloading bunny.

The future is bright, the future is bloody quick broadband!

And finally for today, that speed meant it only took me a couple of hours to download and burn the release version of Window 7 Ultimate. Thanks to a Technet subscription I've been able to secure my genuine copy this week and install it on my laptop.

The great news is - so far - it's been stable. It installed first time and then downloaded a driver for my video card and reset the resolution to the maximum allowed - something XP and Vista never did - and it's definitely a step up from the resource-heavy Vista.

I'm no Microsoft fanboy, so to admit I'm fairly happy with what they've produced is something of a first for me.

The only downside was I couldn't upgrade from the Windows 7 Release Candidate I had installed so I lost my files, but that's not biggie seeing as I rebuild five or six times a year anyway as I test new operating systems.

So have you played with Windows 7 - either in beta or with a Release Candidate? Who's your ISP and are you satisfied with their performance? And does programming your MySky box via the internet excite you as much as it excites me?

Let me know what you think.