Tech Geekery Which Promises Not to Be Of Interest to Anyone But Me
Posted on October 12, 2005 Posted by John Scalzi 7 Comments
First off, my recent Web site invoice informs me that I used 70GB of bandwidth last month. Actually I used very little of it; it’s the rest of all y’all who have done the honors. Which makes me think, damn, that’s a lot of bandwidth, and it’s not like I’m swapping warez here, it’s just text and pictures. However my Scalzi.com host provider is apparently under the impression that 70GB is well within my monthly pipeline tolerances and as long as they’re not going to complain, neither am I. So, please, feel free to visit anytime. I’ve got the smorgasbord bandwidth plan, it seems.
Second, Sprint, my connectivity provider, as recently decided that my little rural burgh deserves a boost to its DSL speeds, and a cut in the cost of those services, so now I have a DSL connection with 3Mbps throughput downstream and 512kbps upstream — and get this, now when I download I actually get download speeds that approximate what I’m paying for! Which is a genuine improvement from what it was before. And it costs less, as I mentioned, although getting it to cost less involved some interesting reshuffling of my phone services (which are also provided by Sprint. See, here in rural Ohio, you can have any communication provider you want, so long as it’s Sprint). So now in addition to faster download speeds, I have a whole bunch of phone trickery I will never use, such as "Repeat Dial," "3-Way Calling" and "Nuke Vladivostok," which I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to have access to. Also, now I get billed for my Dish Network through Sprint instead of Dish Network. Whatever. Net, it all costs less, so I’m wondering how anyone’s making any money any more. But what do I care? I’m drinking from the firehose, baby!
Actually, the thing I notice the most at this point is the vastly improved upload speed, which is something on the order of four times faster than it was before, which means all those pictures I’m foisting onto the net upload lickety split, and also I can no longer ever blame net lag for the fact that 15-year-old boys totally pwnzor my 36-year-old ass in Half-Life2 Deathmatch. Damn kids.
SBC called me up recently offering to “downgrade” my account and save me some money. My throughput has doubled since I signed up, although it sounds like it’s still a little more than a half of what you’re getting.
My guess is that they’ve juiced up their DSL in order to spread the bandwidth as far from the switch as is feasible, and that results in an unintentional boost to those of us closer to the switch. So they want to take some of my signal and give it to someone else. I told them to forget it.
With the server bandwidth, sometimes it’s measured at a gb/min ratio, meaning that you can have like 70Gb over the whole month, but it’s divied up into a certain amount per minute, and you can actually peak without going anywhere near the monthly total. I had that happen on my music server a few years ago.
Either that or there’s a ton of porn on this site that I can’t find.
You sure that there isn’t some directory in your sites with mp3s/porn/warez that some other people are downloading?
If no, wow, that’s a lot of bandwidth we visitors are using per month.
I do have mp3s on the site (here), but they don’t get downloaded all that much. The bandwidth has to do with getting 12-15k visitors a day on average, I suspect. It adds up.
also I can no longer ever blame net lag for the fact that 15-year-old boys totally pwnzor my 36-year-old ass in Half-Life2 Deathmatch. Damn kids.
Oh yes you can. It’s a little thing called lying. It doesn’t just work on the “other guy” either. You can lie to anybody (though I wouldn’t suggest Kristy or Athena, they may be too smart for you).
And lying through the internet is a tradition. Don’t think of it as a minor failure of morality, think of it as participating in the broad multi-contextual load of *foul*words* that is internet communication! And remember, if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for you.
Scott writes:
“You can lie to anybody (though I wouldn’t suggest Kristy or Athena, they may be too smart for you).”
No doubt about that. I tried lying to Krissy once. She just laughed at me.
* insert mocking comment involving cheap 100Mb Japanese broadband service here *
The “Tech Geekery” is of interest to me, John. In fact, the folder I use in my Bloglines account to organize geeky blogs is, amazingly, titled “Tech Geekery.” I’m not sure if I read that phrase on your site previously or my brain’s literary description algorithm works very similarly to yours, but I thought that a neat coincidence.
Those are nice DSL speeds. I have Comcast cable and max out at around 3.5 Mbps down and 375 kbps up. I have no excuse for being pwnzored by the Halo 2 kiddies.