You’ll have to excuse the look on my face, that was like the 9th photo with the flash, and I was starting to see big purple blotches eveywhere.
Movember 14th 2008
Oh, and I don’t have a receding hairline, I just have a humongous freakin’ HEAD.
Here’s the rest in (what I’m hoping is) some sort of chronological order.
How do you know your six-year-old is sick?
A whole day of being inside with no TV, and he didn’t go insane once.
So what did we do? Not. Freakin’. Much.
I did some dishes, and hung out while he zoned out on the couch. Made some cardboard coasters wrapped in wrapping paper. Wait, no. The coasters were wrapped in paper, not him. He was sick, not high. (Though he did seem to enjoy working with the glue a little more than usual.)
So we watched the Empire Strikes Back (his first time), and then we watched the credits to find Nilo’s name (Ripley has met Nilo, and kept asking me “did Nilo make that?” for the first twenty minutes.)
Doesn’t get much better than THAT.
So, after much kvetching and grumping about how it was all going to work, and how was any of this possible, Arwen happily let herself be convinced by a telemarketer to move our phone service to the same company that handles our television. Unlike my recent excursion into the deep waters of RRSP transfer and 19.75% Visa cards that *I* went though, Arwen simply was nudged that last 1% into making the move. We were sorta happy, and a little nervous about how VoiceOverIP was going to work, but we were jumping in.
As an added bonus, we also got highspeed for the same price we were already paying at Telus. Here’s the kicker though. It really WAS three times faster than we’d had before. Being the “just stick a cable in it and see what happens” type, I hopped off our Telus network and onto the new ugly Shaw modem to see what would happen, and here’s my result.
Hauling Packets Through the Kestle Run
See those numbers there? Yes, that’s about 5 megabit. That means around 500 kilobytes per second. That means AROUND 10 minutes to download a CD image (and I do a fair amount of that, in my travels as a Linux-boot-CD loony). The only thing that’d been keeping me with Telus was the whole “They guarantee the speed you pay for” argument, which is all fine and good, unless the speed I PAY for keeps being lowered, with more and more restrictions about what I can and can’t do.
For comparison, here’s our Telus numbers.
Two or so years ago, without warning, and allegedly for my own protection, Telus flipped a bit in their firewall that meant I could no longer run a mail or web server on their services without “going pro,” which meant suddenly paying double ($108/mo) for highspeed at 2.5mbit per second. So that meant Telus was now literally TWICE as expensive for HALF the speed. That, and the whole Telus blocking the union that serves them. Seriously people, th’hell? Won’t block kiddie porn or hate speech, but when a site shows photos and videos of people breaking the picket lines? Oh, suddenly Telus is The Deciderer about what I can and can’t get to on the internet.
After I moved the server up to the fabulous and freakishly service-oriented Fused Network folks, we backed off the Pro package and went back to “standard,” which was only $45/mo again. Fair enough, we’re back where we started. Whatever, I’m not running a server any more. Fine. Except that now, instead of the 200K/sec I was used to, we seemed to be getting somewhere around 150K/sec. Actually, it was consistently 159K/s. Works out to about 1600 in the numbers show in the graphic up there.
Yeah, 1.6MBit. It was consistent, but consistently crappy.
After a few visits at homes in the area, and doing some testing of THEIR speeds, I found that people on Shaw were getting somewhere between 4500kbit and 7000kbit without paying any more than I was. And those numbers are all after the “honeymoon” phase with things like free first months, and free super-uber-duper speeds before they put you back to normal.
They lost me as a cel customer after six years because I got a “bare minimum” deal for Arwen and I to have two cel phones, and ended up having a $20/mo deal that actually cost $45, once I added the “extra features” that I suspect most users would consider standard. (Caller ID, Voicemail, and forwarding TO VOICEMAIL). I’m sorry, do you know ANYONE who has a cel phone, but only plans on calling OUT? If I had missed a call during that time (I was unemployed, and needed a cel so I could get out of the house instead of sit at home trying to come up with new ways to NOT just sleep all day), I probably wouldn’t be working where I am now.
And DAMN do I love working where I am now.
and now, for our friends with highspeed and speakers, some music that makes me smile when I’m fighting the proverbial man.
This post triggered by SuperSecretVault, so don’t tell anybody. Not to be confused with SuperSpecialQuestions. Oh wait, is there a SuperSecretAnswers.com? Maybe I should grab THAT.
When I was a young buck, having just migrated across Canada in a two-toned yellow Datsun 210, I got a delivery/driving job in a pizza place (Smitty’s Pizza of Kingston, proudly delivering sans-muffler and plus-BC-plates). Every day, around 6:30 or so, we’d make a pizza for dinner for ourselves. Every teenage boy’s dream: Paid to drive around army bases like a pizza-scented idiot.
Today started out really nice, and then kinda got bent outta shape. By the time dinner rolled around, I was a basket case. I’m good now. Laundry folded, kids long-since asleep, icecream has been nommed. We watched Pineapple Express and I either wasn’t stoned, or wasn’t 18 enough to enjoy it. Seriously, what was the point? It was your standard “Two Hapless Dudes try to Run Away from the Seriously Bad Guys,” movie, but with way more shooting, stomping, and death. Think Half-Baked meets Lethal Weapon III.
Okay, don’t think that. It wasn’t as good as either of those movies.
So today started well, and ended well, but In the middle, between breakfast and dinner was some stuff that wasn’t a whole bunch of fun. Ripley was manic today. He was having fun, but in that challenging “I don’t know when to quit” kinda way. The kind that makes me crazy. Makes me think of me. Must be hard to deal with me when I don’t know when to shut up. Sorry, world.
Tate? Tate was a butt-head today. Exhausted, I think. Still getting over that egregious flu we all had a few weeks back, I guess. I think he’s also going through a growth spurt, so everything just kinda hurts. Even sleeping, I bet. He’s also figuring out the power of getting your back up and saying “No,” really sternly. I mean, it’s not that it works for him, but he’s understanding that sometimes you try to put up a fight even if you think you’re gonna lose. It’s not the toy-putting-away that’s the point, it’s that you raged against the dying of the light, and didn’t want to go to bed, even if it was 7:30 and you were having crying jags about the xmas stuffy you found in a box that had just come outta storage. When you’re three, you try anyway. Something I’ve said to Ripley on hard days comes back to me today: Tomorrow will be another day. Tate is usually pretty quick to forget such difficulties.
We’re watching Harry Potter and the How Many of Us Are Married Yet, and Alan Rickman DOMINATES. Everything else is segue.
I’m shaving my moustache off tomorrow, unless I suddenly land a gig in Roadeez! the SpeedMetal Musical.
Last day of Sportball with Tate (let’s hope he keeps his shit together this time, and that I do, too).
Oh, and since Digsby seems to have forgotten what Free means, I’m most-likely going back to Pidgin as my instant messenger of choice, expecially now that it has added the Facebook chat plugin. With that, I really don’t need Digsby any more. Too bad, though, ’cause I enjoyed that application while it lasted. I understand that they need to keep the lights on somehow, but did you need to go SO far off the deep end in your first excursion into adware?
