Over the past several days my internet connection really started to slow down.

First I thought it must be storm related. At one point the digital portion of the TV cable went out for about an hour. I knew there was a problem when I used my GoToMyPC account to access my computer at work. It was no longer responding instantly…but dragging 15 to 20 second responses.

I called Comcast on Thursday to report the problem and the first tech suggested firmware corruption in my router. I didn’t think so – and he gave me a “ticket” number in case I wanted additional assistance. On Friday I called Comcast support again and they agreed there was “packet loss” to my modem and that they would send a guy out. I thought for sure it would be a week before anyone would be available and was pleasantly surprise when they asked if anyone would be home between 8 a.m. and noon on Saturday. “You mean tomorrow?” I said.

John – the Comcast Tech arrived at 11:05 today and tested the cable – good signal levels. He asked me how old my Toshiba modem was. I told him it was installed by @Home, two companies ago. He replaced the modem and everything now works fine.

It’s amazing how spoiled you get with high speed internet service. It makes almost any delay intolerable. It took John 16 minutes to figure out and fix the problem. Thanks, John. Thank you, Comcast.

I have downloaded Newsgator – which is a RSS reader that works inside of Microsoft Outlook. I’ve also downloaded MovablePoster – a third-party plugin that allows me to post RSS items from Newsgator or new items, like this one, to my Typepad weblog from within Outlook. Very impressive.

TypePad is a hosted web application. You write and work in your web browser. That has certain advantages – like being available to you wherever you can reach the internet, home, work, the Sony Store at the Metreon.

It also has disadvantages if you’re not used to it. Both Radio Userland and City Desk are local applications – you write and store information on your computer and it is uploaded (streamed in Radio’s case and ftp’d in City Desk’s case) to your website. If something “goes wrong” you re-open the application and pick up where you left off – try again. Earlier today I was working in TypePad while going back and forth between other websites in what I thought was another browser window. At some point I did something wrong – because I lost the browser window with the post I was working on. Couldn’t find it. It wasn’t a particularly prize-winning post – but losing it was frustrating.

Based on the number of “weblog” tools I’ve tried and occasionally used you’d think I would actually write more. I like to write. But the grass is greener – better tool mentality prevents me from staying with it.

I have a Radio Userland blog known as Guy Bjerke’s Radio Weblog. I have found the news aggregator in Radio very handy. It’s a great tool, but its development seems stalled. (I know – new team at Userland – big things in 2004.)

I have also played around with Fogcreek’s City Desk. It is a great “content management” tool for all kinds of websites. It’s also very reasonably priced. My experiment, which also includes trying to learn a little .asp scripting can be found at www.gbjerke.com.

Trying out TypePad…no spell checker…the entry box is not wysiwyg, so you can’t be afraid of a little html showing up in your text if you insert a link or bold something. Or should that be strong something?

Oh. Why am I trying out TypePad? Well, several weblogs that I read have migrated from Radio Userland to TypePad. Others, like Seth Godin of Permission Marketing fame also use it. I’m just an early adopter. It’s the sticking with it that’s tough.