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So I’ve got family in for the holidays, and my sister promptly took over the office for conference calls and video editing, leading to a distress call last night when the 2.2GB upload of the final cut of the new promo promised to take 70+ hours. (iperf to Hurricane Electric was running at about 500 Kilobits/sec upload speed, with ~10% packet loss)

I called Comcast at 6:30pm. They had a guy onsite at around 8:30pm, who verified that all my wiring was good, replaced the modem, and spent a merry twenty minutes poking through the flooded cable box out at the curb (he appreciated my big golf umbrella). All to say, “well, the problem isn’t here”, and he promised a network guy would take over in the morning.

Sure enough, by the time I got up and had breakfast, iperf was reporting 60 down, 12 up, which is a bit higher than before the outage.

I think I can live with this performance on the new Comcast line.

[Bonus! My new static IP range is not blacklisted by Paypal. Both my old AT&T and Sonic.net ranges were for as long as I had them, and not only does Paypal silently treat it as “incorrect password”, their customer-service folks don’t even acknowledge that this is possible. For years, I’ve had to open a VPN connection to my office just to be able to log in to my account.]

[Update: all switched over, and the only difficulty in the install was discovering that Comcast still ships routers that hang onto MAC addresses for dear life, preventing you from reusing an IP address on the LAN side unless you reboot the silly thing. This was dumb on a home line ten years ago, and inexcusably stupid on a business line today. On the bright side, it came with native IPv6, so I can get rid of my Hurricane Electric tunnel sometime soon.]

So on March 9th, I got email from sonic.net informing me that their current DSL service was going away on April 10th, and that I needed to call right away to upgrade to their new faster-cheaper-better service.

The person who answered the phone seemed surprised that I’d actually called right away. Then she put me on hold for several minutes while she looked at my account, then she said she’d call me back. She didn’t.

So I replied to the original email, which surprisingly actually went to someone, who answered and said someone would call me back. Today, I got a long, casual voicemail from someone who eventually got around to explaining that the new service isn’t offered in my area, and I’d need to find a new ISP. Yes, I was expecting this.

(short version: they had a contract with AT&T to use their lines for DSL, and that expired)

So now I’m waiting on a callback from Comcast Business to schedule an install. It will cost more, but even their cheapest plan is much faster than the 6000/768 I have now. Internet-only; I’ll keep the Dish for TV, and migrate the landline to an Ooma box.

(the only reason I still had the landline was that Sonic’s agreement with AT&T required it)

Refrigerator so “smart” it joined a spam botnet. When combined with the eavesdropping Samsung TVs, we face An Exciting Future.

(and, yes, if they ever roll out IPv6 in a significant way, that fridge will be serving up kiddie porn to the world, too, with no need for crude NAT redirects or UPnP automatic hole-poking)

I thought they were a good deal when I paid nearly twice that at the beginning of December, but damn.

I have no idea why, but the order of the output of the permute() function in the Perl library Math::Combinatorics depends on the number of elements in @ARGV. This resulted in a rather frustrating debugging session, in which it was assumed that the output was deterministic, and one could reliably shift off the null permutation.

Seriously, when the mere act of adding a command-line option that is completely ignored by the program changes the output, your library is kinda fucked.

Everyone started playing WoW again, and while I had left my accounts lapsed for the past two years, on discovering that I didn’t have to buy the previous expansion, I reactivated an account and started playing Mists of Pandaria. Maybe when the next expansion comes out, I’ll play Warlords of Draenor. :-)

The Surface Pro 2 handles the game just fine, although the small high-DPI display takes some getting used to, and the keyboard has a tendency to treat the “w” key as a toggle (only in this sort of game; some firmware limitation on really long keypresses, I suppose).

I still have the Asus gaming laptop I bought a few years ago, and while it’s not an everyday portable, it’s ideal for our weekend food/gaming parties. However, when I transferred the updated client over and started playing, I was reminded that load times exist. Asus shipped a nice pair of 7200 RPM drives in it, but everything starts up so slowly compared to the Surface.

So I bought a pair of Crucial MX100 512GB SSDs; I could have bought smaller ones, but $190? Sold! They even come with an Acronis license to do the data transfers.

Why the Crucial, besides the price? I’ve had a 960GB M500 in my Mac for a year and a half, and it’s been fast and trouble-free. The Amazon ratings agree.

[Update: oh, yes, that’s much nicer. Also significantly faster for video editing in Premiere]