Its been a bad couple of days for the Internet.

On Wednesday it was playing up a bit at work: we were all getting strange messages from the proxy server. When I came home I found that my broadband connecting was dropping out after a few minutes, then it stayed out.

Today at work I noticed an announcement on the intranet that our company has moved to a new Internet provider, so we all assumed there was a problem with that. It turns out that the problem was down to us buying a licence for 1000 concurrent connections through the proxy server, which seemed OK to the IT department, but it turned out that having, for example, a news ticker counts as a separate connection, as does each window a user has up, and pop-ups count as another connection too, and basically 1000 was not enough. I think there were some frantic negotiations and the providers agreed to interpret the license as 1000 desktops.

It was all a bit annoying really, as on Wednesday we decided that we ought to buy a new TV to replace the one in the living room which is getting more and more of a red tint to the picture. I wanted to do some comparisons on the web but couldn’t keep a connection long enough. I certainly wasn’t going to risk trying to buy something when the link might go down at any point.

Also, iRiver have released some new firmware for the iHP-120 jukebox I have and I wanted to read all the comments about it on the usergroup website Mistic River and download it, but couldn’t do that either.

Having no access either at work or home made me realise just how much we (or at least some of us) are starting to rely on the web.

Anyway, its all back now so I can start drooling over TVs…