The occasional musings of Andy Scheffler
Ever have one of those days where you wake up with a headache, your hair looks like a toupee after you comb it, your teeth ache after you brush them, you start typing the wrong homonyms (‘to’ instead of ‘too’), then the Internet starts getting all wonky and websites start going down?
Welcome to Tuesday.
I have discovered that there is an informal betting pool going on here at work every morning as to when I’m going to arrive, and what t-shirt I’m going to be wearing.
I pondered coming in at 8 a.m. wearing a shirt and tie one morning just to throw them for a loop, but then I realized that would involve both waking up at 7 a.m. and wearing a shirt and tie.
Sometimes I just feel like I’m standing still and the rest of the world is moving past me.
So I got my $300 Tax Relief check today. Yay.
Sorry, Dubya, the bribe didn’t work, I still won’t vote for you in three years. Thanks for the DVDs, though.
I am rather disappointed right now.
I started wondering to myself today when I was working remotely on my linux machine and all of a sudden the connection got very laggy. I figured a bunch of people must be viewing my webpage at the same time. So I ran a command to see how many open connections I had, and I was very distressed to find that it was one user causing that lag. Let me explain a bit of back story.
We have DSL from Pacbell which is 384kbps/128kbps. That means we get 384kbps (about 7 times faster than a 56k modem) downstream and 128k (about 2 times faster) upstream. This is exactly what I had before at my old apartment through Verio.
(As an aside, be glad I didn’t have this journal when I was going through my hell with Verio… in a way, I wish I did, because then I’d have an account of it, but anyway…)
The upside of this arrangement is that the 384 is a lower limit. We actually get speeds approaching 1.5Mbps, the theoretical maximum for DSL. Yay us… blazing fast downloads and all that rot. The downside is that the 128 is an upper limit, which means that if we ever had the possibility of downloading faster, some piece of hardware on Pacbell’s end limits the bandwidth.
So, if you do the math, if two people using 56k modems hit my webpage simultaneously, they’ve pretty much sucked up the entire bandwidth of the DSL. If that one person happens to be on a faster connection, they’re probably going to suck it all up themselves.
This is distressing, because this machine is not the only machine on this connection. There are three other machines, as well as a mishmash of other random devices, that all use this bandwidth. Let’s say Ken’s in the middle of a Counterstrike match and someone goes to my photos page… all of a sudden, he gets a bit of lag and dies. Not a good thing, ’cause then Ken’s gonna take it out on me.
Now you’d think that I would have seen this coming. The thing is, as I said before, I had the exact same numerical specifications for upstream and downstream with Verio, but I never had any problems. Verio must not have been doing the bandwidth limiting thing.
Hrm. Pacbell isn’t exactly the most user-friendly company to deal with. I have very little leverage, as the only other pricing option on their webpage is three times as much per month for 384 upstream (which then comes with a proportional increase in downstream). Which makes sense, numerically.
The other option is to move my webpage elsewhere. But at 45 megabytes and growing with every photo album, I’m highly unlikely to find a free, or even cheap option that’s going to meet my needs.
Argh. Argh argh argh. I think I’m going to call Pacbell. If they won’t charge me a fee to transfer service over to the higher rate, I’ll see if Luke and Ken would be interested in making some sort of uneven split of the monthly charge, so that they don’t pay much more than they are now… (in theory, since we haven’t made the first payment yet.)
I now have a hamster named after me.
Heeeeeeeeee.
Many of you have already seen them, I’m sure, but I just thought I’d throw this url out here:
https://hamusutaa.com/photos.html
The reason why I do this is that it adds a visual element to my journals, as there is quite a bit of overlap between what I talk about and what I have photos of. Especially during Anime Expo, as you may remember the play-by-play journals of that time. Of course, now that I just did a massive update of seven galleries, I’m gonna want to take a break, which is what caused me to have a backlog of seven galleries in the first place.
If you didn’t already know, that machine is on our DSL, which for some reason is very stingy on the upstream bandwidth, so go easy on it, or Ken can’t play his online games.
…is good news, I suppose.
I don’t really have much to say, except that I hate Microsoft Networking. But you all knew that already.
Doo de doo.
I think I’m going to start taking Japanese again, if I can find a decent place that has night courses that aren’t introductory level. As I’ve thought about it, I realize that I remember quite a bit more than I thought, and I could probably very easily test into a second semester class.
My right arm is still sore from that time I landed on it funny. I’m gonna have to go see the doctor. The problem is, I can’t remember who my doctor is. I just signed up for one that was close when I turned in my insurance forms three years ago… bleh.
Luke now has a matching pair of Ken’s ears.
Oh, I’m talking about Diablo II, of course.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you wouldn’t find it funny anyway.
But anyway. I’ve finally gotten everything network related mostly working in the office. Only a little hiccup with the win2k machines not being able to see the linux machine. Hope it works.
I will then no longer have any more reason to rant on LJ about my computer problems. Yes, I know you’re all sad, but you’re going to have to deal with the loss.
I just printed a test page on my printer from my linux machine.
I then printed a test page from my pc using samba.
I am done. Now onto the next project.
