Of DSL and Movies

I've been having a bit of withdrawal recently. Saturday our DSL connection started acting flakey, and this isn't a tender, butter filled pastry kind of flakey. After a restart of the connection it will run fine for several seconds, and then it slows to a 4800 baud crawl. Yeah, that slow. I blame it on the thunderstorm Friday.

At the house I rent with my roommates, we own our DSL modem. See we got DSL before Bell South started advertising it. At the time the only modem they offered was a PCI card with no firewall. So we got our own PPPoE modem and router and took care of it ourselves. And it’s worked great for around 4-5 years. Only periodic router or modem restarts.

The technician comes by and indicates that it is probably our modem, and says that if it is there will be a charge for service. Great just get it working. He brings in a new modem and lo and behold it does the same thing. Ha ha vindication. Don’t be blaming our hardware just because you haven’t seen a 3Com ADSL modem before. Yeah 3Com stopped making them in like 2001 or something. He goes to the Bell South Test Your Speed page, and after 3 minutes of trying to load the applet, it claims that java isn’t installed. He said, “That’s not supposed to happen.” Yeah bud I think you have some infrastructure problems somewhere. A line technician is supposed to come by today and replace some jumpers or something farther up the line to see if that is it. So here’s hoping.

What that ramble means is that updating this blog at home is iffy. I would normally set my IBM T42 work laptop, that the University purchased he he, on the table beside me and reencode video files, check e-mail periodically, look up info on the web, or anything else I want to do over the wireless link at the house. Since it isn’t working right I’m having to take advantage of the fact that it is slow between semesters and I can get some of this done at work. Oh well, I’ll muddle through.

I seem to get talked into a bunch of stuff. I will be joining the vast horde of unwashed geeks as they slink for their various places of refuge to the movie theater to partake in the next edition of George Lucas’s Star Wars legacy. I’m rather surprised I’m going considering that I have work at 8 the next morning. I made a compromise with some friends so that the theater will be closer to home, and with that compromise the door opened for other friends to join us. All in all I would say a good decision to make and probably a good time to be had by all. We’ll see what Episode 3 has in store. I’ll probably have something about that tomorrow, if I’m awake.