Burn & Seed

We have a couple areas of grass that did not make it from last fall to this spring.
Today once all of the family visitors for the weekend left I decided it was time
to deal with the scared grass.

I burned off the dead grass & weeds with a very large yard torch and then put
down another 20lbs of grass seed. I then drove my tractor over the new grass seed
in order to try to make sure that seed is in direct contact with the dirt. We then
ran the sprinkler for about 10-15 minutes to get everything wet without the water
running off (and forcing the seed to float away.)

Slow again (not a big surprise)

Wow... talk about a real bummer. Xtratyme was 3-4x faster earlier in the weekend.
I am now back below the rate that I am paying for. I am starting to wonder if I will
ever see the upgraded bandwidth rolled out to my area. It is getting kind of frustrating
with bandwidth speeds circa the mid 90's.

Rainy Saturday

Saturday May 10th, 2008 produced about an inch of rain in our rain gauge. Spring is
still running quite a bit cooler than normal in our area.

At some point this year I would like to get an automated Weather Station running at
this house. I miss having the data that we used to have at our old house. It is fun
to stuff the state into a database and then run some queries on the data and see the
max variation and the trends.

Yes, I am a weather geek.

Getting Better

I am not sure if my section of the network has been upgraded yet... or if it just
that enough of the users are moved to the new egress that my path is less congested.
Either way... the performance is getting better.

better network speed this AM

I am awaiting the network upgrades in my area. It is rumored that maybe I will be
able to see a 5mb connection once in a while

Chores instead of camping

Since the weather was slated to be poor this weekend we decided to cancel the camping
trip. So instead of camping I sanded my drywall seams and then primed what will eventually
become my new office in the other end of the basement. I got the first coat of primer
applied early this evening. With some luck maybe I can get another coat applied tomorrow
afternoon. I have to say that room is really starting to look pretty nice now
that it has an even color on the walls.

I went out Thursday night and caught two nice lightning photos. I am trying to feed
my photoblog again. Tomorrow morning the plan is to get up early and drive to metro
to pick up my friend Carlos. We will tool around the Twin Cities Sunday morning trying
to capture some new photos. (I need to keep the photoblog fed.)

Shorted lived burst of speed

Run: 2008-05-01 09:30:42 EST

Download: 592 (Kbps)

Upload: 174 (Kbps)

Argghhh... back to the bottle neck speeds. Please upgrade my tower!

Compression????

The 3 tests (above) that I just ran were using a Flash
based test tool. The flash content is compressible and I am getting intermittent
messages that the content in test is get compressed to provide the perception of more
bandwidth.

My original test in my last post was
using a Java based test
tool. The Java tool is nice because it's payload is hard to compress so it presents
a good view of the performance.

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Scotty... I need more speed

My ISP performance is still not very consistent. I am thinking nice thoughts and crossing
my fingers trying to patiently wait for them to upgrade the towers in my area. Hopefully
in the next week or two.

Download: 862 (Kbps)

Upload: 425 (Kbps)

Download: 784 (Kbps)

Upload: 480 (Kbps)

Download: 1123 (Kbps)

Upload: 1203 (Kbps)

What is a sign that you don't have broadband?

I thought things were slow... but not quite this bad.

(Green is my download speed... red
is my upload speed as goofy as the result look.)




My ISP is working on upgrading the network... but has not gotten to my portion of
the network yet. Crossing fingers and trying to think positive thoughts.