Month: October 2007


My Internet Sucks


In the past few weeks, I do not think there is anything more annoying than having your crappy school network drop your connection to AIM every 2 minutes. You can’t set away messages, because when it reconnects, you’re not away anymore. I get 40 people yelling at me for signing on and off too much and for not answering their IMs even though I’ve been away from my computer for three hours, but AIM says I signed on 3 minutes ago. I have tried everything to combat this. AIM 5, AIM Lite, TerraIM, different ports, the TOC 2 protocol rather than Oscar, encrypted connections (using AIM Lite) and none of these seem to prevent my screenname from bumping. I flushed my DNS cache, changed my DNS servers – no luck.

Here’s what I do not understand: the connection peaks at 40MBPS (and maybe goes down to 3MBPS when everyones using it), yet it can’t hold a connection to AIM, which uses less bandwidth than runs the Yankees scored this postseason. This is not rocket science. It’s a simple connection that could be maintained on a 14.4k dial up modem in 1994. Something is seriously wrong with the network.

And what’s worse? It only happens to me. No one else (well it actually it does, but much less frequently). I seriously think our network staff hates me and set their firewall to “drop all his packets and give him lowest priority” mode. Priority so low that it cannot even connect to a simple chat server. I’m not downloading terrabytes of streaming video and running 3 servers – all I’m trying to do is stay connected to AIM for more than two hours without being annoyed.

Solution? AIM seems to be better on wireless, but that’s no good because it introduces another problem – abysmal speed and signal strength. There are only 2 access points on each floor, and they don’t do so well when everything is cinderblock. You’re lucky if you get a ping reply from the default gateway less than 800ms, if you don’t time out first. What kind of cheap knuckleheads thought two access points one each floor would be sufficient? And how come the wireless network does not even talk to the wired network? What morons set that up? For the first 3 weeks of school, they couldn’t even figure out why traffic would not route to a critical business school Intranet site. Seriously, stop going around and punishing people for sharing “copyrighted” material and start fixing your piece of crap network.

Thanks. (And that was the first rant in like 8 months, yay for my site being active again! Of course I write this at 3:30AM, rather than sleeping and worrying about midterms. What a student…


I Should Update More


I haven’t updated in forever. Oh well, I don’t really have that much time anymore. Or anything interesting to write. Well, there is a lot going on, but I don’t go publicly posting my personal life history. If you know me by now, I don’t really do that. And I don’t really rant much anymore. But I should start doing that because it’s fun. Especially since my opinion is right and yours is wrong. Anyway. Later.