Katherine Kersten hates all of you.

so i pretty much rip van winkled thru the weekend, starting on thursday afternoon through sunday afternoon. i finally started to feel better saturday night, i'm sure thanks in no small part to the timely delivery, by dear, sweet, amy, of the most awesome beef & mushroom soup from bewiched saturday afternoon. even after that soup, i went back to sleep for about five more hours in order for the deliciousness to take effect. coupled with another 12 hour sleep marathon saturday night/sunday morning i was feeling much better sunday afternoon.

too good it seems. i got about 10 minutes of sleep 'last night'. so i came to work early this morning, loaded up on a venti white mocha (my first in about five weeks) with four shots of espresso. my drive to work this morning was wired - to say the least. anyone want to take a guess as to when i'm gonna crash today?

and to all the other freaks out on the highways at 6:15 this morning.... holy crap. i thought people were terrible drivers at normal hours - but you kiddies are CRAZY at wrong o'clock. this is precisely why i come in late and stay late.

i hate being sick and unfortunately, for the last two days, i've been sick. i went in for half a day yesterday, but today was in no shape to go anywhere. it always starts out the same for me, sore throat in the first 24 hours, then head and chest congestion for a day or two before i start to feel better. the worst part is this typically happens 3 or 4 times a year.

it also doesn't seem to be leaving anytime soon. i just took my temperature and it's a not-so-good 99.9 degrees. typically, i don't get fevers along with all the other symptoms, so hopefully my body is finally starting to fight this off. i used to take nyquil so i could get to sleep, but i have found that the tylenol day and tylenol night cold medicines have been better in getting me back on my feet, recently.

in between being sacked out on the couch and bed, i've managed to get a few movies in. earlier tonight i was thinking how i was "sick to death" of being sick - which made me think of watching pump up the volume, for the melodramatic and terrible acting, and because one of the angst-ridden teenagers delivers that line just before she goes 'crazy'. good tunes in that flick, though.

like most americans, i'm trying to figure out ways to save money every month, since our economy is mired in its own armageddon. one of the ways i've decided to do that is by giving the finger to comcast and their $50/month internet service.

minneapolis partnered with USI wireless last year to bring a city-wide wi-fi cloud to the masses. i checked on service availability over the winter, and they were still working out the details in my neighborhood, but those issues appear to be resolved now. the company does not allow online ordering for residences that are above the 4th floor, so i had to call their customer service department to order service. given that i can see one of the wireless nodes outside my window, i was pretty sure that i would not have an issue with the service.

i did not find ordering from a customer service representative to be very helpful. the company does not have a store front, so i had to have the equipment shipped to my home. i missed the delivery on saturday, so i had to go to the post office and pick up the parcel this morning. they also started my service at the point when i ordered. when i suggested to the customer service rep that this might not be the best practice, she agreed to comp me for a week of service. given that i didn't install the modem for 8 days after i ordered - the package wasn't even delivered until friday, after ordering on monday, USI really needs to consider changing their terms so that service starts when the modem is connected.

i took the plunge and decided to pay for a year of their 1Mbps service up-front ($15/month), and pay for the modem instead of renting it. i'm assured that if i am not satisfied with the service that i can return the equipment and get a full refund within a couple weeks time period.

the equipment is a ruckus metroflex wireless modem (not the NG model though, the EXT model) and a 7dbi omni wi-fi antenna (very generic) that's about 12" long. setup took all of about 1 minute, and i had to clear the DNS from my Airport basestation, but after that - everything switched over just fine.


so now that i have it setup, how does it do? i ran a couple of tests to try it out. i use a MacBook Pro with 802.11n at home, and i brought home my work laptop, a Lenovo ThinkPad with 802.11g. I have an Airport Extreme basestation, so the Mac connects to the wireless network much faster than this model of ThinkPad. I used this service from Frontiernet to measure download/upload speeds on both computers using comcast's modem and then the USI modem.


as you can see, the speed is considerably slower. so much so, that on my Mac, i am not maxing out the bandwith of the 802.11n radio on download and the upload speed was only slightly less. i'm not quite sure why the switch on the Thinkpad resulted in such a large difference in performance of 802.11g. I would have expected the download speed to be similarly near the throttled speed of 1Mbps - well within the threshold of 802.11g.

I'm going to try this out for a week and see how it goes. Everything else in my home is connected via ethernet - so i expect they will perform at or near the capped limit. I'm a bit concerned that downloading a movie to the appleTV might result in some buffering issues if i were to start watching it right away after it is available, instead of waiting for the full download. I might also have some issues with the slingbox, but i'm thinking about getting rid of it since i don't use it nearly as much as i thought i would. And the tivo downloads in the middle of the night, so that's a non-issue.

if i do feel like things are too slow, I can always upgrade to the 3mbps for less than $5/month more. That still is going to keep this service well below 50% of what i've been paying through Comcast!

last thursday, I attended the r.e.m. show at the X with erin, spirophita, and mike - who doesn't blog at all. being the consummate lazybones, i'm only now finally getting around to posting about it. the show was, as to be expected, quite awesome. probably the best of the three r.e.m. shows i've seen in the twin cities. still doesn't beat denver in '04 or kansas city in '95 - i mean, who can forget their 'first time', right? the X had quite a few more attendees than the show there five years ago, and given the vibe of the new album - this show just rocked a lot more.

there was a good mix of old stuff with the new album, and except for walk unafraid & final straw, they avoided the last three albums altogether. during final straw, they had a camera pointed at a lyric sheet that panned with the lyrics as stipe sang, but was not always good at keeping up. the stage had a great setup of video monitors, as captured by erin in these pictures (click either of them to go to a set of pictures from the show including a couple of modest mouse, and an oddly out-of-place shot at valleyfair).



they've been posting the setlists to each show at remhq the next day, and here's the one for the X. i'm not surprised that they saved LmR & MotM for the encore - looks like they've been doing that a lot this year. though it did not lead to any wow moments in the encore, other than welcome to the occupation. Perhaps if they'd moved LmR up and put Ignoreland in the encore, it would have been more interesting.

Oh... and I'm Gonna DJ IS so much better live.

you know... i think i finally get why christians make such a big deal out of the resurrection. it's not like jesus wasn't cool enough when he was alive, but then he just had to top himself by rising from the dead.

well, even jesus gets shown up sometimes.