Blessed by the Potato

About a year ago, Rogers cut its newsgroup offerings from the high speed internet service, first using the retarded excuse that it was a den of child porn (perhaps trying to shame people into not complaining?). They quickly retracted that explanation from their website, and instead said that usenet is an outdated, arcane corner of the internet, and that by cutting it they could bring us more high quality services such as free Yahoo 360 blogs (which would have been free even if we weren’t Rogers members).

Anyhow, putting the acrimony in the past, us Rogers users were stuck trying to find an alternate newsgroup provider. I looked around for a while and found that most services were expensive. Some offered unlimited downloads at speeds that could max out the cable connection, but rivalled my cable as a monthly expense. Others offered limited downloads, or limited speed (or both) for less. After looking around for a while, I settled on Astraweb. They seemed to have the best value for money at the time, and most suited my needs: I could buy a block of data transfer, and use it until it ran out, no matter how many months that would take me. Their reputation for reliability and retention was fairly middle-of-the-road on the reviews I read, which was good enough for me.

It’s been over 10 months now, and I’m just coming to the end of my first block of data: I bought 90 GB of transfer for $25 (US), which works out to an average of 8.2 GB/month (I’m on track to finish it at around the 11 month mark), at a cost of about $2.30 (US)/month. That’s pretty damned decent if you’ve tried looking at some of the monthly billed “light” plans that have roughly the same transfer: I think the up-front billing saves them some administrative costs.

I’m also now in a good position to comment on the service. In case you couldn’t tell by my tone above, I think it’s been great value-for-money, and when I use up my last few bytes in the next few weeks, I’ll be buying another 90 GB package (they also have a 280 GB package for $100 US, and I was briefly tempted to jump on that and not have to worry about a usenet server for years… until I did the math and saw that buying 4 90 GB packages is beter. That mathematical oddity is due to the fact that the 90 GB package is usually a 65 GB one, but there’s been a “special” on for the last year or so).

However, saying it’s great value-for-money isn’t quite the same as saying it’s fanstastic. The uptime is very good, there was only one big outage I was aware of, and it only lasted for a day or so. The transfer speeds are adequate, but if you’re impatient or a big user then they will probably not work out for you: I average about 50 kB/s, and let most of my downloads do their thing overnight. At peak times the transfer can dip below 20 kB/s, but that could also be a problem on Rogers’ end. Either way, that’s good enough to get a CD-sized chunk of data before morning, and a DVD-sized chunk of data in about a day or two. In addition to the steady-state speed, there’s also a noticeable delay when opening a connection that’s been idle (loggin in?). They advertise their retention as being 25 days, and it appears to be at least that good. There are some issues with missing parts, a bit worse than I remember on Rogers’ Giganews service. It’s never been so bad that a par2 file or two couldn’t patch it up though.

All-in-all, a good service that should be adequate for most people’s needs, but there are some limitations there for really serious users.

Update: I feel kind of dumb for not thinking about it before, but you have the ability to run more than one thread with some nntp software. I just opened two connections to Astraweb, and they’re both running smoothly at 60 kB/s at the moment, so using more connections may be a way to get better speeds out of Astraweb.

The leaves are barely halfway through changing for the fall, and already we’ve got a snowstorm here:

I actually took the photo fairly early on in the snow, when I thought it was a freak thing we’d never see again. Since then, it’s gotten dark, and the snow is accumulating out there.

Yes, after nearly letting the 5-year testing window pass by for a second time, Wayfare finally took the test and got her G license. I want to talk more about the grand adventure, but today is the anniversary of ressurecting my site in blog format, so I was trying to think of something to write about that. However, both were trumped by the fact that I’m crazy sick right now and hopped up on expired Nyquil. As cool as it might be to try to stay up and write more, I’m just going to bed.

I’m not talking about dates as in the stuff that happens before the awkward 5 minute silence as you clumsily try to say goodnight on the doorstep, I’m talking about the day of the month, in numeric form. Many people prefer a date format that looks like DD-MM-YY (or YYYY) since it’s a nice progression from short time periods to longer ones. Still others prefer YYYY-MM-DD for the same reasons, and also because it sorts nicely on a computer (plus if you see a date format that has 4 numbers at the front, it’s very hard to get confused about which standard you’re using). Other people (apparently Americans/Canadians for the most part) prefer a MM-DD standard; I know for a long time that was the standard I used.

This standard, some say, is peculiar. Now, I must admit that it does cause confusion, and there have been a number of rough Aprils spent looking at expiry dates on food and trying to figure out whether it was March 5th or May 3rd… but I don’t think the format is so confusing. It meshes well with the way we format our time (HH:MM), that is from larger to smaller divisions. And since the month is usually the most important thing to look for when going through a set of papers, it makes sense to put it first (typically you can remember the month you did something in but not the exact date, and papers from different years will likely be in different folders). It also follows the way we tend to say the dates: March fifth versus the fifth of March or five March (though those last two forms, particularly the middle one, do appear with some regularity).

Of course, in saying that I find that I’m at a complete loss to explain why ten dollars gets the dollar sign put in front ($10).

Do you ever find yourself caught… trapped somehow in that hazy time period between 2 and 4 am, uselessly pondering things that not only can you not change: but that also don’t matter in the slightest? Yeah, me neither… though I have started to wonder if I had a small stroke or something, because my typing has gone hugely downhill all of a sudden this last week. I thought that maybe something got into my keyboard at work, but tonight I’ve found the same problem at home: tonnes of typos (far above and beyond what is normal for me), particularly with the way my two hands sync together, and the way my thumb syncs with the rest of my typing: my spaces are often coming a character or two too soon or too late. Or maybe I’m just over tired and my hands are clumsy.

My point, and I shall make it shortly so that you can finish this post and go back to not sleeping, is that “The Peculiar Date Standards of Americans” WMAGNFARB.

Oh, and I really need to get a good short story finished in the next few weeks, and I haven’t even had any half decent ideas to write on sticky notes and lose in the last little while…

Via DJ Paradise, comes this article about serving sizes.

Yep, people have trouble determining what a serving size is sometimes. I think it was a really poor choice of words — “serving” — it makes you think of a serving platter at a restaurant or something. Most people automatically make serving = meal in their minds, but really servings are quite small (a total of 20-24 or so servings a day over your ~3 meals + snacks). 2 cookies, a kid’s sippy glass of milk, half a bowl of soup: portions that are much smaller than we tend to have experience with. Unfortunately in this case it’s not the companies, but the government that’s to blame for not only creating the discrepancy between portion size and serving size, but also for giving it the name “serving”. [Though whether we should blame the American or Canadian government is a bit of an open question; if in doubt, blame both]

Also, I highly recommend you all go to YouTube and search for “How it should have ended” — they’re a funny series of clips.