Month: May 2003

But I finally confirmed that I GOT MY JOB!!!!

It’s like a ten million pound weight has been lifted.

Avril Lavigne song to be made into a movie for chrissakes. Somehow this is worse than the American Idol movie, I’m not sure how.

Computer-controlled foosball player. This is damn cool. You have to look at the videos,

I also got tickets for the badly-namedConcert for Toronto, which is going to be six hours long and frickin’ huge. There are still tickets available. This thing is so hastily organized though… they don’t even have a seating chart for it as they are apparently using a non-standard arrangement in the SkyDome. But the ticket numbers I got correspond to a SkyTent-type configuration… I have NFI what they are going to do or where my seats actually are, beyond the 8th row 🙂 This is all the seating charts they have…

…our phone line is back up! Finally!

Guess what happened last night? For no apparent reason, our phone line died! Zero! Nada! No power! No dial tone! No DSL line sync! I hate you Bell! I hate you!

And can anyone tell me where the demarcation line between my wires and Bell’s wires could be? No, I didn’t think so.

What crappy awful weather today. Pouring rain all day. Have a job interview this afternoon at 3pm, sitting at my current desk for the last time now. Gotta collect my stuff, upload all of my files and crap somewhere to the network, turn in my security pass and SecureID keyfob, grab some lunch, run up to Active Surplus to look at this security camera they have, sit around and play Wario Ware, go to interview, go home. There will probably be a lot of getting wet as well.

The new Guster album, Keep It Together, comes out on June 24th. Guster kicks mega ass. Also, they’ve made six out of the thirteen tracks on the album available for listening (not downloading, sort of) on their website – at the Guster Player.

Super-secret stuff: the tracks are stored as MP3 files embedded into Shockwave Flash files. So if you were to, say, sniff the packets that the Player sends out, and find a url such as http://wbr.bandbuilder.com/guster/amsterdam128.swf then you might be able to save the files and then extract their bubbly goodness. An exercise left up to the reader, but only because I failed. I want to listen to these songs on the subway! Damn you, silly proprietary player! PS: hell yes I will be buying their album, I might even pre-order a signed copy.

This was originally posted to the RBUA forums.

Well, I promised in another thread that once I got my TFNet (Toronto FreeNet) connection setup I’d write a post about it. So, this is that post 🙂 I suppose it’s also sort of a good “what happens when you sign up for DSL” for people who’ve never done it before. Before this connection I had an @Home / Rogers cable connection in Guelph.

TFNet’s URL is http://tfnet.ca/. I signed up for their 3Mb plan (3000/800 advertised), which is $65.00/month with a 45GB/month combined? transfer limit. There’s no setup fee right now, you just have to pay for your first two months up-front. You provide your own modem, otherwise you have yo buy one from them at $175 (it is a combined modem/router/hub box). Also, since TFNet is run by Toronto Freenet, a non-profit organization, you don’t pay PST, only GST.

I moved into my new apartment around Don Mills & Sheppard on May 1. I had called TFNet about two weeks before to place my 3Mb order with them. They couldn’t convince Bell to install the line card when they hooked up my line (grr slow Bell), but placed the order with Bell the day after the phone got hooked up. Excellent. Let the waiting begin.

On May 7, my DSL modem (Alcatel SpeedTouch Home, upgraded to Pro) got line sync, and the following day TFNet sent me my login info. Hey, less than a week to get a line card! Not too shabby. Unfortunately, two things prevented me from getting hooked up until late on May 9.

First of all, I had never set up a DSL modem before. Since I didn’t buy TFNet’s DSL modem (they offer a combined modem/router/hub solution, I can’t remember which brand), I was stuck configuring my own. Some FAQs and instructions I found on the Net led me to believe that I could initiate the PPP connection from the SpeedTouch instead of from one of my PCs. I could never get this to work and ended up just setting the SpeedTouch up as a bridge and doing the PPPoE login using my Linux gateway. I had to reconfigure my Linux gateway of course, but my setup is rather arcane so I won’t go into it 🙂 I use the Roaring Penguin PPPoE client.

Second, TFNet initially sent me the wrong login name: they had truncated it by a character. They corrected it the next day, but still… little things. Overall every time I called or e-mailed TFNet they were very nice. Their office hours are rather restrictive (Wed-Fri 12-6) so don’t expect much phone support.

Since I signed up, I’ve learned that TFNet is reselling Velocet/Wiznet/DSL.ca. Which is strange, because none of those companies seem to provide 3Mb via PPPoE (DSL.ca has 3Mb but via a more direct connection and it is hella expensive.)

So, how is the speed? Well, last night I ran a test on DSLReports using just a WinXP box directly connected to the DSL modem. The test came out to around 1600/700. Upload speed is definately there, but perhaps I have to tweak some things to get that download speed up. I also have no idea where my CO is…

While those were the test results, last night while downloading three TV episodes via BitTorrent I was getting a combined 200K/s. So some more testing is in order.

All in all, I am fairly happy with the connection. Obviously the download speed test is disappointing, but it certainly “feels” much much faster than my old cable connection. If anyone has questions feel free to ask them.