Crumpled Thoughts

I’ve used a lot of different broadband Internet service since 2000. In 2000 I got DSL from Micron.net at an apartment. I got Qwest DSL in 2000 when I bought my house. Switched to cable in 2004 when it became available at my house. Switched back to Qwest DSL in 2008. I’ve also supported Clearwire wireless, Satellite ISPs, and data T1s from numerous providers for local businesses.

Qwest DSL is the best option right now for a residential ISP, for the following reasons:

Price: 

If you can get Qwest’s fiber service, you can get 12M down, 896k up for $55/month. Qwest offers 7M down, 896k up for $38/month. CableOne charges $49 for 5M down, 500K up, or $59/month for 10M down, 1M up. I know it doesn’t seem like a big difference on the higher plans, but what CableOne doesn’t make obvious is how they throttle bandwidth. It’s the thing that made me move back to Qwest. After you download a couple of gigabytes in a day, CableOne will drop your speed significantly. It will stay slow until midnight, then go back up. Say a new Linux distro comes out that you want to download, and you’re on the 5M plan. After you download 3GB CableOne will drop you from 5M download to about 1.5M. Keep downloading, it keeps falling. At Midnight it goes back up. Even on the 10M plan, they drop your speed after downloading 5GB. At 10M you can download 5GB in about an hour. Say hello to slow until midnight. With Qwest, you get your 1.5M, 7M, 12M, or 20M all day, every day as long as you have service. I’ve downloaded over 40GB in a day and not slowed down.

Uptime:

In the past 10 months of having Qwest fiber 12M service, I have had zero downtime. DSL is typically more stable than cable. With CableOne at least every 2—3 months I would have an outage. I have actually had better uptime with my DSL than we have had with our 3 data T1s at the office (thunderstorm took out a repeater and we had 2 circuits go down). Cable is more finicky.

Network tampering/management:

CableOne tampers with your internet access. They won’t let you connect to TCP port 25 on any mail server but theirs. If they think your bandwidth is being used for BitTorrents, or newsgroups they will restrict your speed. They decide what traffic gets priority. Qwest doesn’t do that. If you pay for your service, they’ll provide it. I think CableOne has a right to do that, it is in their Terms of Service. I, as a customer, have a right to think it sucks and go to another provider.

Acceptable Use:

If someone complains to CableOne about how you’re using the Internet, they will shut you off before asking you about it. It can take from several hours, to several days to get service back. I had just travelled to Portland to set up a remote office for a client when CableOne shut off my Internet connection at home. Someone had hacked a Linux box on my home network and was using it for bad things. I called from my hotel in Portland, but couldn’t do anything about it because they shut the connection down. I was going to be there for 3 days before returning home. It really pissed me off. If they had at least emailed me before shutting down the connection I could have remotely powered down the box and still had internet at the house. Their policy of terminate first, ask questions later bothers me.

I’ve been very happy with Qwest DSL since switching back. It is the only Qwest service I use, even though my girlfriend works there. I run Asterisk at home for phone service and pay $1.50/month plus 1 penny per minute for my calls. It’s usually about $4 per month.

That is my opinion. Feel free to leave a comment if you think I’m wrong

I was looking online to get some advice on methods to clean carboys and came across this. I built one using about $10 worth of parts and it worked great.

I recently took a bunch of photos for an event that Paula’s office put on, and needed to find a good script to display them on the web. I came across a really nice Javascript/CSS based script works really well. Check it out: Galleria. I did make one small javascript tweak to allow me to put a link to the hi-res photo in the image comment.

You can see my album here.

Well, the 2008 election is coming to a close, and I feel really good. Though the electoral college was a landslide (more so than I predicted) - the popular vote appears to be Obama 52%, McCain 47%.

I have been a lifelong Republican. I still believe in small government, low taxes, fiscal responsibility, individual freedoms, and state’s rights. I supported John McCain in his 2000 bid for the Republican nomination for president. In 2000 I voted for Ralph Nader, in 2004 John Kerry. These days I consider myself independent. This year I voted for Barack Obama.

I feel that the last eight years have been disastrous for America. The national debt has gone from $5 trillion to $10 trillion under Republican leadership. The new Republican mode of operation seems to be “Tax Less—Spend More”. I have also been disgusted by the Bush administration’s “If we want to do something unpopular, scare the hell out of the American people.”

The 2008 presidential race has been fascinating to watch. We got to see Obama try to inspire his supporters, while McCain tried to scare his supporters. This was not the John McCain I saw in 2000.

I truly respect everyone’s political opinions. I won’t say I’m right and you’re wrong. I will say that my opinion, and my vote is as valid as yours—and yours as valid as mine.  I think the Republican’s have passed some pretty crappy legislation (Patriot Act), and so have the Democrats (NAFTA comes to mind). But as far as who I trust more right now, to lead us out of the terrible shape we are in as a country right now, it is Barack Obama.

It surprises me to see that some people still think that he is Muslim, or that he “pals around with terrorists”, but they are free to think what they will. I think that the McCain/Palin scare machine kicked in to high gear to try to pull this thing off. I’m glad that at least 52% of the population saw through it.

The thing is, that we all want what is best for America. We sometimes disagree on what that is. I hope that we can all move forward with that in mind. Let’s turn off Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Kieth Olberman and Rachael Maddow and try to have honest, open discussions about issues… that don’t include William Ayers or the Alaskan Independence Party.

God bless America.

At my office we use a Microsoft ISA server for our firewall/VPN server. We have three discreet IP subnets within our private network. 192.168.5.0/24, 192.168.6.0/24, and 192.168.7/24. When I establish a VPN connection from the external network I get an IP address on the 192.168.6.0/24 network.

I have my VPN connection set up to not use the default gateway on the remote network. This prevents all of my internet traffic from being routed over the VPN while I am connected to it… the problem is that if I need to access a resource on the 192.168.5.0/24 or 192.168.7.0/24 networks, I have to manually add routes to them across the VPN.

The process was:

• Find out what IP I was assigned on the VPN
• Add an IP route to 192.168.5.0/24
• Add an IP route to 192.168.7.0/24

If I was always assigned the same IP address on the VPN, I could have just put the commands in a batch file, but the IP address is dynamically assigned from a DHCP server and is always different than it was the last time. So this is what I used to do:

That is a lot of typing! I’d been meaning to play around with Windows PowerShell anyhow, and decided to write a script to automate this task in PowerShell. This is what I came up with:

# vpn.ps1
#
# Add IP routes across a VPN via a DHCP assigned IP address
#
# Get the IP address of the VPN connection
$vpnip = ipconfig | findstr "192.168.6."
# If we don't have an IP address on the VPN, error and quit
if (!$vpnip) {
"You do not have an IP address on the VPN"
exit
}
# Trim any leading/trailing whitespace
$vpnip = $vpnip.Trim()
# Split the contents of $vpnip in to an array
$vpnip = $vpnip.Split(" ")
# Find out the depth of our IP address in the array
$bit = $vpnip.Length - 1
# Get out just our IP address on the VPN
$vpnip = $vpnip[$bit]
# Add whatever routes we need
route add 192.168.5.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 $vpnip
route add 192.168.7.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 $vpnip

I save the script as vpn.ps1 and put it in my “scripts” directory in my profile directory. Then I just put a shortcut on my desktop to powershell.exe C:\Users\chillman\scripts\vpn.ps1. Now I just connect to the vpn, launch my shortcut and I’m ready to go. Hopefully this will be useful to someone.

I thought I’d make a prediction on how this race will end up, mostly to see how close I call it on November 5th.  I really think it’s shaping up to be a landslide.  The Obama campaign has been incredibly well organized and gaining ground in many swing states.  I gave Obama Florida because I think the Real Estate market (or crisis) there is giving him an edge over McCain.  I also gave Obama Colorado because I think there is a large group of people not being represented in the polls which tend to be more likely to support Obama (the younger voters).

Here’s my prediction.  Obama 320, McCain 218

This is how it breaks down:

Of course, there is a real possibility I’m completely wrong.  History will be the judge of that.

Make your own prediction with the CNN Electoral Map Calculator

Dear CNN,

I watched the 2nd presidential debate on your network last night. I found the following graph to be distracting and annoying. It really added nothing to the debate, except to make me wonder how people were going from ‘committed’ to ‘uncommitted’ so rapidly.

Please don’t use this in the coverage of the final debate, or I may be forced to watch it elsewhere.

I am determined to start posting again soon. I took this picture yesterday when I picked Kairi up from daycare. She just looked especially sweet.

Normally I’m an early adopter of new Windows operating systems, but with Vista I’ve been slow to take the plunge. After running various beta releases and release candidates I was hesitant to use it on my ‘production’ computers. Well, I finally took the plunge last weekend and my work laptop is now running Vista business edition.

I’ve been getting really annoyed at how slow the Vista start menu is, navigating “All Programs”. I discovered a way to speed it up drastically. Customize the start menu and un-check “Highlight newly installed programs”.

The navigation will get much faster. Now if I can just figure out how to get the program folders to expand outside of the start menu, like Windows XP did by default.

It’s that time of year again. Spending a week up in McCall with the family. We come up here the same week each year and frolic in the woods.

Last year (I think) I posted about how hooked I am to the internet. Two years ago, we came up and I discovered high-speed wireless in the condo (for a small fee). I was totally stoked. Then, last year I couldn’t connect to it. Thought it was maybe a temporary issue with hardware or something. This year, I can’t connect at the condo again. It pisses me off.

So, here I am at Moxie Java, having a coffee & getting my fix. I don’t know how I’ll get through the week.