After delaying for far too long, i has new internets and phones.

Now, you all probably already have functional internets and phones, so the shiny joy of such things has probably dissipated long ago for you, or perhaps simply never was noted in the first place, but let me tell you, it is a strange new world for me.

My old verizon copper/DSL shit has just been getting progressively more and more fucked, because the copper corrodes, and Verizon isn't running any new copper, which is what would be required to properly fix anything.

Finally, the connection got so bad that it just sounded 24/7 like there was a bagpiper blowing a low drone note at full volume and i couldn't hear people on the other end of the line unless they shouted properly Alex G. Bell style(which had a certain oldtimey novelty to it for a while, but wore off eventually).














Anyhow, so i finally have swapped the service over to the new fiber optic shit(actually my mom placed the order behind my back, because i think, she was tired of me continually telling her to "JUST SHOUT LOUDER. IT WORKS WELL ENOUGH." when we would talk on the phone ). And it is silly.

My old DSL before it even got really as bad as it was this last month or so:



And what it looked like today after the FiOS tech left:



Shit is straight up bizarrefast, and i haven't even looked at the settings to see if it is optimized properly for my location yet either. I have to say, that i was fairly accustomed to the speed of the DSL, and while not blindingly rapid by most estimations, aside from the fact that it would shit out all of the time because of the copper line, i thought it was okay. But i do say i could get used to the quickness of this technological marvelstuff.

I kind of miss the bagpiper though. My mom probably won't though. I wonder if i could just wire in some 60 cycle hum to the line from a frequency generator box or something...

mirin DL boost.

Science! has provided divine gifts once again.

Hail Science!

And yes, 60hz hum generator.

So awesome. intarwebs fastes speeds

Really i am just flabbergasted by how positively decent properly functioning technology can be. That fucking trashed DSL connection with the unusable voice line was like $30 MORE per month than this shiny beast works out to be.

It is difficult to explain how nice it is to just have something working correctly in this house for a change of pace. A total aberration of swellness.

Also the look that the installer gave me when i attempted to explain why there was blue tape on like 85% of the surfaces in the room and about 15% of the rest of the house, was indescribable, but classic.

If I may ask: why is there blue tape on 85% of the surfaces in the room and 15% of the rest of the house?

*anticipates*

I still have ol' copper in my building as well. No digital connection, no digital cable, no broadband cable internet. I can;t even get FiOS here, so I am stuck with boring old DSL. Though it is a good DSL package, and the internet is by no means slow, it certainly isn't fast. But, it is most definitely expensive as all hell. Basically, I pay twice as much for half the speed of the regular cable company.

So as someone who used to have all the modern tech, then had to go back to copper lines, I feel both your pain and your excitement.

Does yours turn off when it rains? That was the thing this last two years here. Somewhere in their infrastructure, there was a part that must have been able to fill with water any time it rained or snowed. So for about half of the year, the phone was knocked out. The DSL was almost surprisingly resilient, and was a little more solid than the phone line, but if there were two days of rain or melting in a row, we would lose it too.

The problem was, i would call in troubles but the techs would just come in and either rewire the foot or so that went from the outside box to the inside of the house(i.e. essentially: the most new wire they were allowed by the company to run), which did nothing at all because the water problem was nowhere near this house, or they would just go into the big cable on the pole and trial-and-error just find a slightly less buzzy copper pair to swap it to. Over time, there were just no copper pairs left that were not crossed to ground(the corrosion and moisture essentially causes one of the pairs to be electrically connected to the other of them, or to one or more of the hundreds of pairs that are in the junction boxes on the poles or in the manholes).

The result of that, is that for the last two months, my phone has been in a state of ground loop; i have been able to call out, but incoming calls do not ring the phone correctly. It either: does nothing, or blips once for half a second and never again.

Basically if the system worked as it did when it was first installed like five years ago(and when it was $40 a month!) i would not have had a problem. But it has actually been connecting at like 56k speeds(i wish i had run speed test on it more recently than the one above which was from march) this last month, when it has worked at all, and the phone part of the equation eventually just stopped working entirely last week. AND, over the years, the price slowly climbed, from $40/month, to like $110! The fios setup seems to be about a million times better AND $30-40 cheaper. Crrrzzzy.

It has been a slow painful death for that copper wire here.

Mystical Rites.

Actually, i use and think of blue tape like most people would use and think of duct tape. This is a messed up house. My room is hella fucked up because i used to punch holes in the walls when i was sixteen years old.

Basically, i have blue tape patching some holes(and also some BIG holes)...

I have blue tape connecting things to things that need to be temporarily installed(like my old dsl router, which was bluetaped to my desk to keep its somewhat top-heavy form upright, and which prompted the explanation to the installer)...

I have blue tape as the construction vector for multiple items around the house, from light foam doors to keep the cat out of a room, to ersatz enclosures for things that are not worth actual aluminum boxes:



There is essentially nothing that i will not use, or consider using, blue tape for. It is actually a functional longterm-temporary adhesive. Even years later you can pull it off and it doesn't leave glue behind. Duct tape dries out and leaves a grey sludge on the surface taped while the shiny silver plastic just sloughs off sometimes even after only a few weeks. Even the best electrical tape starts to seep its glue out of the seams as soon as you apply it, making everything you attach it to turn into a goopy sticky mess.

Blue tape adhesive is superior in all ways. If they made a version that was an electrical insulator(and they might actually) and/or a type that was waterproof for shipping use, i would never use anything but blue tape for anything.

It is the finest tape choice available. And this is for everything in addition, to its original intended use for painting, and for marking/labeling things like the old(and vastly inferior and prone to adhesive dry-out degradation like duct tape) white masking tape.

BAST TAPE EVAR.

If i ever have a company, its name will have something to do with blue tape. This, i decided years ago. This stuff is essentially currently holding my existence together.

But yeah, i stopped at noting the ultimate superiority of the tape's adhesive, in my conversation with the poor Verizon tech.

I could see in his eyes that he wasn't going to be receptive to joining my secret tape society.

That's awesome.

Last 3 weeks my internets been cutting out throughout the day pretty often. Calling Comcast didn't do anything, they'd tell us they reset our signal and everything should be working fine. Had a technician come out and all he did was replace an ethernet cable and coaxial cable tip. We kept having problems and called for another technician to come out. Turns out the cable splitters outside were corroded and full of water. So they fixed dat shit right up.

Damn, Fios is fast. I think we're using Xfinity.

Yarr, shit is with a quickness that is totally alien to me at this point.

The Steam Summer Sale is going on right now, so i just took the opportunity to grab Portal 2 for $5.

So i went to install it and shazzam, it brought down Fucking Eight Gigabytes In Fucking Twelve Minutes.

That is just insane. I normally would be fully prepared to not expect it to complete until some time tomorrow, like, assuming it didn't rain or anything in that timeframe.

I am afraid that 100 MB a second is just going to spoil me and make me impatient and unreasonably demanding of my technologies. Of course, i don't really have the hard drive space to support such bandwidth anyhow, so maybe that will help reign things in some.

But just... Damn. Knowing it is fast is one thing. But. Actually seeing it do something that you expect to be slow, and to do it this quickly, this causes kind of a strange misalignment of reality and expectation for me. Shit is just not right.

I feel like i should be using this power for evil or something, that is for sure.

well I kinda figured there was a blue tape problem when my awesome fuzz arrived like this

yeah, that box was ridiculous. Normally i would have cut foam to size for the box, but all i had left were odd remnants of foam when i mailed that out. The obvious solution was to strap the little foams together with blue tape to make big foams.

The secondary part of that was that the last time i mailed pedals out with nothing covering the foam, it left little foam texture indents on the clearcoat(that was actually devins pedal pair). So at the very least, there should be something in between the pedal and the foam. The obvious answer here is: Blue Tape.

Obviously.