teh TODDtastic webLog-a-majig

I love Hulu.com, but lately it seems they have some capacity problems. I guess it can be taken as a sign of rapid growth, which is good. However, I find myself constantly having to pause and wait a few minutes for the buffer to fill up. I hope they get that fixed soon.

Edit: On second thought here…. It might be that my ISP is throttling things. Time Warner… the sucky service millions are forced to use.

Last night the power went out from approximately 1:30:44 EST until about 5:45 AM. I had to shut down the server since it was due to thunderstorms and I had no idea how long it would take them to repair the lines. Plus, I needed to save the battery power in case it would become useful for other purposes. I did the same with my desktop, but I kept the network UPS running until its batteries depleated. I also have my cell phone charging off of the network UPS, and I had to charge my phone for the next day.

Then I went to school and I didn’t get my server up and running until about 6:30pm. I know, I know. Unacceptable… but it actually spent more time up than it did during my RAID-5 issues of last week.

Also, I would like to use this opportunity to state that the connection this server runs on is now fatter. Previously we had a 7Mbps/512Kbps, now we have 22Mbps/768Kbps. When we upgraded we thought it was supposed to be 2Mbps up… but clearly Time Warner likes to practice false advertising and they refuse to provide that (even though their infrastructure here is definitely capable of providing it, a la download often reaches 30Mbps). Perhaps in the future they will provide such speed. Either way, we have 50% more upload bandwidth, which should help with handling the high volume of traffic my site gets.

There has been some talk about several cable companies thinking about switching to a system where they charge by the byte of data that goes through your connection. I need to say something about this…

NO! That is a terrible idea, period. One article I’ve read is saying they are talking about caps from 5 to 40 GBs. Are they fucking serious?? The web browsing that my mom does in a given month can _easily_ hit 5GB. And she is not downloading big stuff.

In total each month… I estimate usage upwards of 500GB at least. This is spread amongst many computers… somewhere around 7 computers. Additionally, we have VoIP… each month that has a fair amount of traffic as well… I’ve never metered it but I estimate probably around 5GB in a month.

And these numbers are 12 to 100 times higher than their caps of just 5 to 40GB. While details of how they are going to charge are still unknown…. but guestimating from these numbers… I can probably predict that our bills would be pretty high… for the SAME crappy internet connection.

And if they try to make it seem like a better deal by boosting their speeds, then that’ll make it that much easier for us to increase that 500GB/mon usage… And they still can’t guarantee that high speed all of the time.

Charging by the byte is a HUGE step backwards. That is the same as dial-up services charging by the hour which is mostly gone now. It’s like your POTS phone company charging by the call.

If I ever find myself having to limit the internet usage (“Maybe I shouldn’t download the DVD ISO for [linux distribution of choice]“) then I will throw up… on the front lawn of the appropriate ISP.

I urge everyone to make their opinion on this issue known. The only people that can possibly benefit from this are old people just check their e-mail once a week, which isn’t the majority.