If anybody cares, here is my progress on Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
http://www.thegtaplace.com/sastats/index.php?user=echris1

I would go to wherever this is just to park my car here.

In a rare good experience with a helpful, knowledgeable customer service representative, our fat pipe gets fatter as our speeds are bumped from the old 15/2 to 15/15. Now we can give as quick as we get, which means bad ratios should be a thing of that past.

Pictures are fun.

What does Saturn's moon Enceladus sound like?

There is definitely something about mining. It's very enjoyable. A soothing, repetitive, simple process with very visible profits. Not sure what it is, but it attracts the way my mind works. It does sort of imply a brute force approach. If we do this often enough, this will happen, this is the expected output, just keep throwing numbers at it. It's sort of like my job. We take a lot of crappy calls, but we still sell a lot of stuff every day. You just have to wade through the bad stuff. And after that some nice relaxing on Core 2656 (even though it's 2657 now) as well as on a trial account of Eve, which is largely time based, which means no grinding just a bit of clicking every few hours, which works just fine for my schedule. Also, imitation cheese, while only half as expensive as regular cheese, has no dairy in it. It's a bit firmer than normal cheese, and doesn't melt right, so don't buy it if you want to make a grilled cheese sandwich, you get more of a warm paste on toast. The toast is still pretty good though. And now to open the window and jettison my cargo hold.

Well, here it is late at night. I'm sitting here, waiting for my phone to ring. It's only done it a few times, with nice long breaks in between. Unfortunately, it's a bit too late for everybody else, so there isn't really anybody around for me to talk to. Tomorrow there is a bit of school, then back in the afternoon to some more work. It doesn't really matter how often the phone rings anymore, I'll get paid about six bucks either way. I send in a form today telling them to take more money out of my paycheck to pay taxes, so hopefully that will make up for the fact that I haven't paid any all year. I am on track for exactly half an hour of overtime, and if the weekend ends up paying very well again, those 24 hours I have scheduled on Saturday and Sunday will really pay off. In between all of that will be classes, maybe a play, some homework, two tests and five papers. It will be a fun couple of days to say the least. But I've got a case of Dr. Pepper, and either way I'll be good to go. Most of the money stuff seems to be cleared up, at least for now, and things are getting back to normal. Even the Jeep drove around for quite a while with it's lights constantly on when I went grocery shopping and to do some late night banking. Well, I'm off, I might study a bit in this last hour of my shift, or not, who knows. I would have to get away from the phone long enough to find my book. And 20 minutes at a time might not be enough for that.

Closer

Accept the virus!

Good Cactus.

So I just set up mobile blogging and have all of there extra messages to waste. Because of that I wanted to see if this would work.

So here is a shot of the equipment Verizon put up in my closet. It is the Optical Network Terminal, which connects the phone line to the fiber, and runs coax to the tv's and the router. That way we have internet and TV, along with no more copper phone lines. It also has a battery backup for about eight hours, in case power goes out so that you can still make phone calls, since fiber needs electricity to work. So the coax splits, connecting the set top boxes and the router to the ONT, and also allowing the set top box to communicate over the internet through the router to get programming information. And soon I will screw around with this some more to tweak some more speed out of these nice shiny fibers.

So it's been a while, even though I know I said I would post some speed results once the service was up and running. Anyway, here are the new results after our fancy new fiber optics lines got lit up:



So far the service has been excellent. My phone lines don't crackle anymore when it rains because they switched it over to the fiber as well, instead of moldy old copper, and the connection is crazy fast. The only problem is that the router they give doesn't have a very big NAT table. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you, along with my attempts to fix it.

The NAT table in the router keeps track of all the connections to various places around the interweb. If you take something that uses a lot of connections, ie torrents, it quickly floods the NAT table and no more connections are possible. This means that anything that is already connected, if your playing WoW or downloading something, will stay connected, but anything more, say trying to browse to a website, won't work, or take forever, or usually just time out. I'm pretty sure Verizon knows about this, and just wants to keep people from using their fat fiber pipes to download a hundred gigabytes a day. Of course, that is the exact reason why I wanted this service, so I went looking for some kind of workaround.

The solution it seems is to connect the verizon router to our router, switch the verizon router into bridge mode so that it doesn't really do anything, connect the computers to our router and enjoy internet access, then take a cat5 cable and connect our router back into the verizon router, so that it can give an ip address to the set top boxes. That way Video on Demand and the channel guide still work. This is where the problem comes up. I can get our router working, but I'm having a hell of a time getting the TV parts to work as well. I think I'm just not moving fast enough after releasing the IP address. But I'm getting tired of calling Verizon over and over to force an IP release.

So soon I will try again, and hopefully get it all working. The more people that get connected the more people there are contributing to the solution. Probably have some pictures of blinking lights and things soon.

So today is the day we are finally getting Verizon FIOS service. Supposedly it's going to take most of the day, which means I will be sitting around the apartment all day, probably reading a book while all kinds of fancy optical equipment gets installed. If I can get a hold of Ashley's digital camera, I might follow the guy around and take pictures of everything. If that doesn't work, I guess I could try my cell phone's camera, but those aren't that great. Anyway, for comparison purposes, here is the best out of the five speed tests I ran this morning on my old Verizon DSL, and later when everything is up and running I'll post another one.

It's about seven in the morning right now, and I am mere hours away from getting on a plane and beginning the long trek back to Germany. We have a seven and a half hour layover in Chicago, but hopefully we can go do something in all that time. Then it's off over the Atlantic and three weeks of good food, good beer, and good family. It has been four years, so I'll be interested to see what's changed. I'm not quite sure why I came to post here that I'd be gone for three weeks, seeing as how I haven't posted in longer than that anyway. Maybe this trip will bring out some creative juices again. I am taking my camera, as well as a crappy digital one, so there will be plenty of pictures when I get back. I think it has been even longer since I took a picture, but it's hard to tell. I suppose I should develop the roll I found in my camera today, and that will tell me how long it's been. Unless of course it's something that happens all the time, as opposed to an event, which would be much easier to pinpoint in time. I almost said history, but that sounded a bit full of itself, I'd hardly consider the last six months or so history, since all I really did was work and then take a bit of summer school. Well, the fog outside is clearing up, and I'd like to have another look at it before it's all gone, so I'm going to go, but depending on the free Wi-fi situation in the various airports, I might be back sometime today.

Wow, last posting was a very long time ago. Let's see if we can't get this going again somehow. Class is in a few hours, but here I sit now. Woke up, heavy thunderstorm outside, pretty good stuff, nice and loud. I need to head to the post office in a few hours, to send some things and pick up my passport. I will try and keep this thing updated throughout the trip, with pictures and all. Of course, who knows if that will actually happen, but it is possible. Going to fill out some homework to turn in tomorrow, and probably replace my chair sometime today. I also need to go sell some textbooks tomorrow, to help cover a few things, and hopefully keep my warcraft subscription going. Worked a bit this week, but not as much as I'd like. School and work will be difficult, because of how quickly the classes move. That should get better during the fall, depending on how loaded my class schedule is. So I'm off, sorting some things and moving the room around, I'll probably be back.

So here I sit, on the phone with my brother. Chatting away about nothing in particular. Work, dancing, other things. I don't really know what else, nobody has any plans or anything. Homework, reading, FFXII (which I don't like). Talking about the family and how I screwed poor Sebastian over with fun stuff. Then it's off to a conversation with a lady. No narration there I'm afraid. *grins*

So, I'm back from El Paso. I was going to post some while I was there, but I would always get started, then something would happen halfway through, so nothing ever got sent out. Here I am, crunching numbers and waiting for phone calls. A lonely time. It also sort of feels like a big waste of time, when nothing comes in. At least the stats go up. A few things need to get done on the Jeep, but thanks to my parents and Christmas, I can do some of those. My choices are, headlights, brakes, shocks, windshield. I'm going to go with headlights, due to all the night driving. While I'm not talking to people on the phone, I waste time but earning a few pennies at www.mturk.com. Not much, but I don't have anything else to do while I'm committed. Quitting smoking should happen pretty soon, my last pack is starting to dwindle. So wish me luck, damn Texas raised taxes, and five bucks a pack is just too much. I love a good smoke but not when they are a quarter a cigarette. Well, before I get interrupted by the supposed high call volume coming up, I'm going to get out of here.