My internet at home is slow today – so I checked various thingymajigs and noticed that there are about double the normal number of Wi-Fi routers switched on and in range compared to an average daytime – and all of them are secure.

Evidently lots of people are working from home today and sucking up all the bandwidth from the local switch.

Unintended side effect of the snow – congestion on domestic internet connections.

I should have stayed in the coffee shop.

Online advertising can sometimes throw up oddities, especially when an advert appears next to a news article which is disparaging about the product – or similar such hilarity. With the rise of contextual advertising though, where the contents of the webpage decide what adverts will appear, this should in theory be a declining issue.

However sometimes you get something so bizarre that you are left scratching your head in bewilderment at what just happened.

On Facebook, my comment this morning was somewhat disparaging about T-Mobile, and lo!, for there appeared a T-Mobile advert. Understandable, as I doubt the algorithm to stop the advert appearing had my text as one of the stop phrases.

However, it was the other two adverts which made me blink several times in disbelief.

Quite what is the message they are sending – that is you are single and gay, then maybe trying older women would be an option? Or maybe if you fancy older women, then you might also like to try out a bit of man-on-man action?

It’s bad enough being perpetually single without these sorts of confusing messages being directed as me!

I’m in Germany this morning – or so claims The Internetâ„¢. As it happens, I am sitting inside my usual coffee shop in Canary Wharf and sitting at my usual table (after it was vacated by interlopers) – but the internet is convinced that I am in Germany.

As it happens, this is not a new occurrence and every time I log on to the T-Mobile Wi-Fi service in the UK, all the adverts on websites switch to German. Google is usually better at knowing my real location, but even they sometimes get it wrong and just now tried to bounce me over to the German Google website.

As the location data is based on IP address tables, I could understand some glitches, but it does seem that either T-Mobile UK is routing all its internet traffic via a German proxy, which would be very odd – or they are identifying themselves as German to query systems – which would be equally odd.

However, as a diversion – it could once have been possible for me to be sitting in London – and also be in Germany. Where Cannon Street train station now stands used to be a German enclave between the 13th and 15th centuries. Queen Elizabeth 1 finally rescinded their privileges but the land itself remained the property of the Hanse merchants right up to 1853. It was only eventually sold to make way for the train station.

There is a plaque by the train station commemorating this heritage – and a photo of it (take by myself) is on Wikipedia

So – had the internet been around in the 14th century and I was sat inside the German enclave, then the adverts I am seeing today on my web browser would indeed be correct. But I am not – so they are wrong.

(Oh, and the Y button on my laptop seems to be glitchy this morning – damn)