One for the Money, Two for the Dough
Coming home to DSL instability after a long day makes me a very very sad panda. The pathetic thing is DSL woes, coupled with the painful post-Labor Day surge in commuter traffic, results in my hanging around the office later into the evening. This is not necessarily better for my mental health. Experiment time, I’d been brooding that one of my neighbors (in the evenings, only a problem in the evenings) was utilizing something that cranks out enough RFI to make sync problematic. However, given the temperature, I’m wondering if the modem might be getting too hot. Cheap-ass equipment. We’ll see if a fan pointed at the thing helps at all, or merely makes the interference problem worse. I am very loathe to downgrade speed, it’s not that 3 versus 1.5 down is painful, but going from 384 to 128 up would hurt.
On the weekend preceeding Labor Day weekend I ended up making something I hadn’t made in many many years: cookie dough. While I occasionally indulge in cookie dough ice cream, going right for the pure fix hadn’t been done since Bush I was in office. Yes, there are premade tubs of chip-laden goo available in the refrigerated foods section, but they always suffer from a displeasing tangy preservative aftertaste. Salmonella be damned, after a week of difficult project news, sore muscles from renewed exercise, Brazil-esque paperwork agony, I wanted chocolate chip cookie dough the way God and Nestle intended: from scratch from the recipe off the back of the Toll House Morsels package. Of course, over the next week, I only managed to eat a portion of the plentiful bounty, but a scrumptious bounty it was.
In other indulgence news, I tried out RiffTrax Monday night, after a rare trip to Hollywood Video to rent the infamous Star Trek V. I always enjoyed MST3K, so it was sweet to hear Mike again, even if I was a bit more of a Joel guy. However, I think I am a bit spoiled from picking that particular episode since Kevin Murphy guest hosted along with Mike. Reading impressions, it sounds a bit lonesome with Mike solo (DisembAudio doesn’t count, although I was amused the Kevin pointed out that he sounded like Bob the Tomato.
As to DSL, the experiment while I composed this blog entry has shown that no, the fan doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t help either. The real kicker is that losing sync for several seconds at a time is painful, but what really is a kick in the groin is every once in a while it doesn’t lose sync, but the connection must be getting confused and dies. When this happens, I not only have to power cycle the modem, but my router/firewall before PPPoE will reconnect. When that happens, the firewall does some QoS checks, which means that the downtime is upwards of three minutes. When that happens once an hour, keeping a download going, much less trying to play WoW with a connection blink every five minutes will result in homicidal tendencies faster than photoshops of Suri Cruise hitting web forums.
Speaking of WoW, my main character, an undead mage, now has a complete set of Tier 1 armor and exalted reputation with the Defilers. I think I’m ready to do more productive things now.
On the weekend preceeding Labor Day weekend I ended up making something I hadn’t made in many many years: cookie dough. While I occasionally indulge in cookie dough ice cream, going right for the pure fix hadn’t been done since Bush I was in office. Yes, there are premade tubs of chip-laden goo available in the refrigerated foods section, but they always suffer from a displeasing tangy preservative aftertaste. Salmonella be damned, after a week of difficult project news, sore muscles from renewed exercise, Brazil-esque paperwork agony, I wanted chocolate chip cookie dough the way God and Nestle intended: from scratch from the recipe off the back of the Toll House Morsels package. Of course, over the next week, I only managed to eat a portion of the plentiful bounty, but a scrumptious bounty it was.
In other indulgence news, I tried out RiffTrax Monday night, after a rare trip to Hollywood Video to rent the infamous Star Trek V. I always enjoyed MST3K, so it was sweet to hear Mike again, even if I was a bit more of a Joel guy. However, I think I am a bit spoiled from picking that particular episode since Kevin Murphy guest hosted along with Mike. Reading impressions, it sounds a bit lonesome with Mike solo (DisembAudio doesn’t count, although I was amused the Kevin pointed out that he sounded like Bob the Tomato.
As to DSL, the experiment while I composed this blog entry has shown that no, the fan doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t help either. The real kicker is that losing sync for several seconds at a time is painful, but what really is a kick in the groin is every once in a while it doesn’t lose sync, but the connection must be getting confused and dies. When this happens, I not only have to power cycle the modem, but my router/firewall before PPPoE will reconnect. When that happens, the firewall does some QoS checks, which means that the downtime is upwards of three minutes. When that happens once an hour, keeping a download going, much less trying to play WoW with a connection blink every five minutes will result in homicidal tendencies faster than photoshops of Suri Cruise hitting web forums.
Speaking of WoW, my main character, an undead mage, now has a complete set of Tier 1 armor and exalted reputation with the Defilers. I think I’m ready to do more productive things now.
Posted by Nathaniel Trost on
Wednesday September 6, 2006 at 10:01pm