oh so many bits and pieces

[solarbird]

Hi, mobsters and gunsels! It’s been a busy week.

I had fun playing a half-set at the Mandolin Cafe open mic last night – they’re under new management! But not with our, aheh, assistance. I hope it goes well for them, it’s a nice place. I went down expecting to play two and be off, but they do a base set of three, and I got to go back on again later. People seemed to like it; that was cool.

Most of my time the last week or so, though, has been hauling murkworks.net out of, oh, 2000ish?, and into 2011. We were l33t, once – we’re giving up a Class C we’ve had since 1993, thank you very much

Domain Name: MURKWORKS.NET
Created on: 03-DEC-96
Expires on: 02-DEC-12
It was murkworks.seattle.wa.us before that, and lorbit.UUCP before that

…and while we’re not going to go back to that particular kind of awesome, our new pipes throw us back into the top 7%, which I gotta tell you, does not suck.

We’ve also gone through cleaning out a lot of cruft (some of that even physical goods), thrown Frontier (damn them to hell) out on its decrepit aluminium ass, ditched Sprint entirely, deleted one landline (keeping one for 911 calls), pulled the DirecTV dish off the roof, and basically have been putting the starch back into all our infrastructure shirts. Spring is finally here. It’s time for some cleaning.

Mirrored from Crime and the Blog of Evil.
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Comments

[technoshaman]

Spring is finally here. It’s time for some cleaning.

fuck yeah, mudkips! Hauled off several hunnert pounds of silicon-hearted decrepitude over the weekend, and had several hunnert pounds of allen-wrenchy goodness (IKEA sofa bed and bedframe) delivered the next day...

Congrats on the new bandwidth. Mine should be ready by the time I get home; Qwest called me to tell me they were testing, and I pointed them at the landlords so they could peek at the jacks...

How you got a landline if Frontier is outta there? or just pitching them for data?

(I wholeheartedly agree, they suck ostrich eggs through a nanometer buckyball straw... like unto an Eight-Pound Orek.)

[solarbird]

No, Frontier is dead to me. Comcast does residential telephony now. The line now sounds like a normal phone line instead of paper being balled up and put in a gas jet. Seriously, the Verizon/Frontier line has been terrible since day one; it had graduated since Frontier took over into almost unusable. (And sometimes outright unusable. Dropped calls on a landline. I mean, seriously what.) The neighbourhood box - the one between us an the CO - has needed replacement for a decade, and corporate has kept bouncing it, and since Frontier took over, things have gotten much worse.

We were down to about 60% throughput on DSL packets last weekend. Anna said it was because it knew we were ditching it. STABBY STABBY STABBY!

[technoshaman]

Comcast residential telephony... over IP?

I had Speakeasy VOIP once; it was... ok. Not actually as good as Qwest. But later Speakeasy got smart and put QOS on both ends of the line, and it was business-quality... and then they went and got bought - twice - and that was the end of them as a residential ISP... :(

But I agree with you about Frontier. Stake it through the heart, sever the head, stuff the mouth with garlic, douse the whole thing with holy water, and then incinerate with sunlight bounced off a paraboloid mirror.

[technoshaman]

p.s. the one problem I have with VOIP is the power has to be on to use it. ILEC-based POTS comes with its own power.

OTOH, now that all the cell towers have E911 and generator capacity, you can at least still make calls for the first few hours of the Apocalypse... and after that, you need to be headed elsewhere before the zombies arrive.

[solarbird]

Yes, VoiP. But: with dedicated separate service with built-in eight-hour battery backup. Then we throw it on a UPS that'll run its tiny power draw for extra hours. It's not perfect, but it's better than cell, and tied to a specific address, not just a cell tower.

[technoshaman]

innnnteresting.