CmdrTaco's Journal: Bandwidth Bust, Comic Crunch, Anime Assault

So when I originally moved to Ann Arbor I plugged in the ph# and address of the neighbors place into one of those DSL report thingees to determine my distance to the CO. It was insanely far, and there was no chance of ADSL/SDSL, but I'm pretty damn sure that IDSL was a possibility (128k, based on ISDN). I remember speccing it out and then deciding to wait and see.

Well I've decided I'm sick of waiting. I've tired of dialing in/out for net access, and to bite the bullet and get the IDSL. Sure, its $100 a month for 128k (at my old house I was paying only $60 for 1.5 megabits downstream- it was awesome) but I just need the always-on-factor. Dialing out is a serious pain, and my line of work requires me to be online pretty much constantly.

Unfortunately my phone number doesn't appear to exist. I plugged in my address and ph# and alas, it can't find anything. At least it could tell me the distance to the CO, but I can't even seem to get that much. And since DSL providers basically have no information except that which their little computer provides them, I'm essentially SOL. And want to give my money to speakeasy! I really do! I crave a static IP and a slow, permanent connection!

Tragic. Its not the end of the world, as we do have a T1 at the office, and thats where I do most of my work... but its still very frusterating.

Almost caught up on my comics. Got massively behind for awhile there. Fortunately I have a box of Invisibles & SinCity trade paperbacks on the way. I have 9 issues of random things left to read (mostly X-Men). I love this stuff.

If you don't visit AnimeWallpapers.com, you ought to. Great collection of excellent wallpapers for anime nuts. Friday nights are Anime nights, and I have the most recently released Lupin III DVD queued up for the evening. Beer & Anime. It really doesn't get a lot better.

I ordered a TivoNet card yesterday. Today I burned the ISO of all the tools I need to get TivoWeb & extraction working on my tivo. Since the warranty expired about 8 months ago, I figured its time to get in there. I don't really need a new hard drive (35 hours is plenty of video for my needs ;) but I'd like extraction so I could dump episodes to my laptop and watch them at the office.

A few people have asked, but yes, I recently got a Mac- returning Kathleens to her, and finally having an OS X box to call my own. Unfortunately since Fink hasn't been updated to 10.2, I'm still lacking a few things that I need, but I've pretty well got things under control now. Its interesting to compare Jaguar's spam filtering tools with Spamassassin's. It's clear now that Mail's filtering gets smarter over time. Feeding it the last 2000 pieces of spam seems to have improved its intelligence and accuracy. This morning spamassassin caught 86 spam, but let about 10 through. All 10 of those were caught by Mail. I'd seriously consider using Mail's filtering, except that it requires me to download the messages... I really prefer to have my filtering done server-side so I can have a relatively clean inbox when I'm working at home on my cursed dialup.

Of course, that brings me full circle to the start of this message. If I could just get IDSL the point would be moot. At least until I get a cel phone w/ IMAP support ;)