Crumpled Thoughts

A couple of months ago I started having some serious issues with my cable modem. The modem would randomly disconnect and reconnect throughout the day. I called my ISP, and they would tell me everything seemed fine. Then sent a guy to the house who redid some of the connectors on the outside of the house, but it did not help at all.

In a fit of frustration, after it had done this ten times in a 30 minute period, I ran off to Walmart and bought a new modem. Things seemed to be better for a couple weeks, then it started again. When the cable company was of little help, I found that Motorola modems provide some data through a web interface at http://192.168.100.1. I started plotting graphs of Power Level, and Signal/Noise ratio using rrdtool. I was hoping to find a correlation between the disconnects and these values. Today I was looking at the graphs and noticed a strange boost in the upstream power level:

I’m not sure what these values mean, but I would think that higher is better. I didn’t notice any disconnects during the period of improved upstream power level. Anyone know what these values mean?

Just over here slacking. Seriously, I have all of these things to post about in my head– but between work, family, and chores I’m having a hard time finding the time to sit down and post. I’m hoping to get some pictures up from Kairi’s 2nd birthday party, as well as Haloween tomorrow. She’s going to be the cutest witch in the neighborhood.

I’ve got a few new Mac OS X tips, as well as some other things rolling around in my noggin that I’ve been itching to write about. My impressions of IE 7 and Mozilla Firefox 2.0. My thoughts on Microsoft Vista– having been testing it over the past several months.

Stay tuned. I’m not dead, just busy .

-Chris