note: this is going to get rather technical, so i’m going to use an analogy that i’ve used in teaching in the past about how the internet basically works. To explain how traffic (ie: internet traffic) flows from your computer to the internet, it works like this: You live in San Francisco. You know there is are many routes to get to San Jose. Do you Take 101? Do you take 80? Do you drive the backroads? The point is you have many choices, but which one do you take? Do you take the shortest path? The fastest path? Each packet on the internet makes these kind of decisions based on routing protocols (what they can and cannot do).
Now, lets throw up another scenario. You are looking at renting/purchasing a home. You want to make sure your path to work is less stressful and trouble free. You consult the home owners association, the builders and find out that taking a path down main st is guaranteed to be yours exclusively alone to use. Your family and yourself can drive virtually undisturbed to work without having to deal with overzealous commuters.
But wait!
one day you wake up, drive to work and realize that your comfortable drive has turned to hell. You contact the builders and the HOA and find out that the selling agreement in your property was “limited” due to “increase” in others wanting to experience their own comfort drive. Since the guarantee was verbal and not in the contract, you are basically screwed.
This is, in a nutshell, what paul and i found out about remington apartments this morning.
You see, we are bandwidth whores. After working at UUnet for nearly 2 years and having broadband at home, going back to anything less than cable internet is purely bullshit. Thankfully RoadRunner has upgraded their systems and I can experience damn near t1 speeds at home with fairly little congestion on the network. Now that it is time for paul and i to move, we started looking at apartments and fell in love with remington. Not only were they close to work (five minutes!), they had amenities up the wazoo and kept telling us that they had “t1 speeds wired into every apartment”.
We should have known it was too good to be true.
What tipped us off this was a ruse was when none of us (paul, myself, scott who now lives there, greg and nadia) could get a set date on the install of the circuits to provide said bandwidth. We had started stalking the apartments since last august. By October we were convinced we were going to be living in one of their “luxury” apartments. When Scott moved in, we started pestering him about the t1 speeds. “in a few weeks” he said (as he was told via bbrez, the firm handling the dss and internet connectivity), by january 19th we were told. By February 1st was another verdict. DEFINITELY by the time you move in (march 1st) we were told yet again when we went to go look at the apartments. “If not by the time you move in, they will be in big trouble!” we were told by the apartment manager. So paul and I felt confident that we would have the requisite speeds. So we dropped our deposit off on this past saturday and were excited about the prospect of our new home.
But something wasn’t right within me personally about the whole bandwidth issue. We were not getting a straight answer from anyone in the company (techs, sales, marketing, etc) about what is exactly going on, so i took matters into my own hands.
The latest we had heard from Greg was that there was a t1 being dropped into each apartment building. Each building houses 32 apartments. Lets say 2 people per apartment (since most are 2+ bedrooms) and you are looking at 64 people on that connection. You say that half those apartments have internet-ready computers. And half of those are users. You are looking at 16 people who will be sharing that t1 (being conservative here).
[side bar: a t1 has 24 dso channels. Each dso is capable of 64K (56K + 8bit overhead). You can theoretically get 24 people on a single t1 at 56K modem speeds — which is what ISPs use. Now to make money, ISP’s oversell their connectivity, with the ratio being 5 to 1, which means that for every t1 there is up to 120 people trying to get on it to get the interweb from that t1 ALONE. 5 to 1 is a conservative standard, i’ve seen it as high as 10 to 1 (with the rule that not everyone will be using the interweb at the same time, therefore they are reselling that bandwidth) with the average being 7 to 1.]
So, if bbrez was dropping a single t1 into each building, 16 people would be (conservatively) attempting to use that. Using the above the sidebar as a rule of thumb, we would not be getting split between us nothing more than dialup speed!
So I called and got the number for the VP of marketing. He gave me the song and dance and I told him “Look, I work for UUNet, do you now who we are? We are the largest tier 1 provider in the world. I do my living turning up t1s, t3s, and OCs. What you are telling me is not computing here as “high speed bandwidth”, it’s a little more than dialup according to your own conversions!” Then he started on the marketing and sales bs. I told him to shove it (i literally did). I was not a fluff head without any technological background, I did this for a *living*. He referred me to the VP of Technical Operations, with whom they called me back and did a conference call on this subject. They kept telling me my idea of “high speed internet” was unrealistic (um, okay) and I kept asking them “Can you guarantee me 384 up/down connection all the time”. No response. This went on for nearly 30 minutes, when they said they would “get back to me” and we hung up.
I got a standing ovation in the cube farm when I stood up to stretch from my co-workers and people asking me to dispute their bills.
And the kicker?
They are not dropping a t1 into each building, they are dropping the t1 into the WHOLE COMPLEX! 13 buildings x 32 apartments =384 units. On a single t1. FUCK THAT! “Well upgrade as needed” i was told. And when are they planning on dropping the local loop? They just got the order into verizon and they have a 45 day FOC date. Oh fucking please. Which means the service won’t even be available on our move on date!
To be a bitch, I called the vp of marketing and said “Can you please let me know whom your peering with and what your plans for aggregate bandwidth is and why you did not plan on dropping a tiered t3 at 3 or 6mbs and therefore could increase bandwidth when demanded instead of installing additional t’s. Call me at work tomorrow at 703.xxx.xxxx. Thanks!”
Doesn’t matter. I compiled a list of seven possible replacements that paul and i did a star system and i will be calling those places tomorrow. I already know that one place has available rentals for our time frame. as a preclude to this all, this wouldn’t be an issue if there were other options in that area, but there isn’t! RoadRunner (our current interweb cable provider) only covers fairfax county, and the new complex is in loudon county. There is aldelphia cable, but that is uni-directional (t1 downloads/modem uploads) which would be okay, but pauls work requires something a tad bit faster than dialup! The area we live in is so convoluted because we have three cable providers (cox (roadrunner), aldelphia and comcast(@home)) and in some areas whom you get is dependent on where you live. you could live five blocks from john doe and have a different cable provider. DSL is not an option since most of the newer apartments are having fibre dropped to the curbs, which rules out true dsl unless someone got off their duff and did PPPoE, like bellsouth.
I’ve already told bbrez and remington that I will be filing with the BBB for false advertising. But my bitching gave me a sense of betterness because this chickie does not take bullshit from anyone, especially when it comes to bandwidth.
x0x0x0x
lisa lisa
Category: The Lisa Chronicles
shining sky
i want to know about my obsession with England.
I want someone to tell me why English accents make me swoon, their music is always so much more appealing and except for them being anal retentive about sex, why their lifestyles seem so much better than living in America.
i don’t remember my obsession begriming but all i knew is that most of the music i started digging in the late 80’s came from the UK: Charlatans UK, Morrissey, The Smiths, The Cure, New Order, Stone Roses, Mission UK, The Pogues, SoHo, The Verve, Simple Minds, Neds Atomic Dustbin, Jesus and Mary Chain, Republica, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Church, Sisters of Mercy, Ruby, et al.
Everything I can find on britpop/dreampop which was fucking alternative before alternative was referring to sexual choice. When wearing black didn’t mean you were Goth but just, deep and pretentious. Where having black hair wasn’t a statement against the man but when it actually looked good on someone.
the closer i get to turning 30, the more reflective I’ve started becoming on my music and life going on. the other night, one of the girls i know off of IRC was having a drunken party at her apartment and was using her cam as the expression of said “art work”. i got angry at all the idiots on IRC who were drooling over her own stupidity. Then I got really angry at myself for realizing it wasn’t too long ago that i had flashed everyone via my webcam. like two years ago. okay it was last year.
paul and i got into an argument about aging and how it affects the both of us. and I’ve got to say, i need to stop thinking about the past. it hurts more than it helps. i keep reflecting back to things that were never were into things i want to be. and i need to stop obsessing over death. i keep thinking every time i speak to my mother that she only has 20-25 years left to live.
to stop being depressed, go check out skydivers world domination.
i (heart) mandy.
x0x0x0x
summer sky
resolution #7
it dawned on me on the way to work this morning (after reiterating it to paul, of course), that the other resolution i was missing was that i was not going to dye my hair anymore. no, the world has not fallen on it’s knees and no, hell didn’t freeze over. After 15 years of dying my hair (i started young), I’m extremely curious to see what my hair would look like au natural. but of course I’m going to enhance it. heh. i want some caramel highlights to cover up any gray that suddenly appears, but overall, i wonder what my natural hair color is.
the last time i dyed my hair was in November when Ivette was in town and we went on a hair dying spree between the both of us. I’ve got roots nearing two inches long and boy, does it look white trashy. because i have such thick hair, it is becoming to look like a hair helmet and I’m praying i have the strength to not go get it cut or to run out and buy a box of feria.
I’m still hoping for the strength.
stand tall girl
i am tired as fuck, paul has been on a conference call all night with work and Wednesday is driving me crazy. i pounded out a few back entries this evening so if you think you’re getting another one from me, kiss my fat white ass.
some amusing things to note, some asshole decided that it would be cute to put a link to geek-haus.org from stileproject.com. That’s fine by me and paul. We redirected traffic back to stileproject.com and to catholic.org.
the wedding plans are becoming a pain in my ass and I’m getting pissed at how expensive everything is. Since paul got me my visor for Xmas, I’ve been using that like a mofo adding dates and to do items and collecting crap left and right to get the wedding planned. Pauls parents will be up next weekend with an antique ring that we are going to have shaped for me (3 carat total weight in diamonds and in a platinum setting), plus we’ve been looking at places to get married and for the low low price of 8k we could rent our own private island in Key West.
Gah.
I can’t make my mind worth a damn, and to make matters worse our lease is up on our apartment in March and so we’ve been looking for some place new and everything is either asking wayyyyyyyyyyyy too much money (a lovely luxurious apartment for the low low price of 2500) or they won’t take big dogs (for paul’s sister whose moving up here next week) and or something is wrong with them. And you would THINK us living in the new SillyValley that we could get broadband — but no. We can’t. The central offices in the newer places are virtual and cannot do DSL, and if we move out of RoadRunner neighborhood, we can’t get cable. If someone thinks I’m going back to dialup, they are smoking some serious crack.
i finally got T-shirts for sale. I know I know, I promised those on the list shirts for free, and I swear I will get to them at some point. Dunno when, but i will. I’m also featured on a T-shirt from Open Knightly. I’m a CoderBuff girl! Right down to the barrette on the side of my hair.
Kinky.
new years resolutions
new years resolutions are broken promises. we all know this. i can’t think of anyone off hand who had actually gone through and made resolutions and did what they said they were going to do. all the smokers start back smoking on 1/3 and the dieters last a bit longer. So my question is, are these resolutions something we can truly count on or can we really work on them?
i thought about this little ditty this last week as i was eating, puffing and flipping through bridal magazines. i was looking for something i liked and in the meantime my own compulsive habit of buying clothes that do not fit me was going out of control. Paul bought me a Visor Deluxe in blue and said “Plan our life with this!” and which I’ve started doing. I love this thing! But I digress.
I started flipping through bridal magazines, victoria secret magazines and i swore to myself “I am not wearing a size 18 wedding dress!” no way no how, damn skippy! Since we are planning for the wedding to be in key west, i kept telling paul “I’m going to be prancing around wearing a scarlet red thong bikini!”.
- resolution 1: go on a diet.
- resolution 2: paul goes on a diet. shopping for paul has become a bitch as well, you know being 6’6 and built like a line breaker makes it hard for paul to shop for clothes as well.
- resolution 3: get my health in order. Then there is the whole anxiety crap. I’m chugging down vitamins and meds left and right. His family thinks it’s funny that i keep quipping that i deal with paul “because of all the crack I’m on” when the truth is, it’s more for me than for him.
- resolution 4: quit smoking.
- resolution 5: get things ready for school to start in January 2002. then there is school. i swore to myself i would die if i didn’t get my undergrad degree by the time i am 30. I will be 29 this year. No freaking way can i get it all done in a space of less than two years (especially with expenses up the yazhoo coming up). but there is hope! my fathers trust will pay for schooling and appropriate bills as long as i do a business plan to show where the money is going.
- resolution 6: start writing more and start looking at branches i can use to sell my work. my writing has taken a nose-dive in the last few months and i keep using the excuse “I’m busy.” for not writing. and i know it’s more that I’m afraid of what I’m going to say than what i will say on paper. i miss what I’m doing and so…
there are tons and tons of other things that keep bubbling up to the top that i feel i must include in this little list of what i want to do this year. plan a wedding, plan our move. plan for school. get both paul and myself to the doctors for complete checkups. dentist appointments and eye doctor appointments. get Wednesday fixed, plan vacations. see my mom and pauls family.
there is not enough time in the world for me to do this all in. but i hope to get it done and make my mark on the world as we know it.
x0x0x0x
lisa
year in review: 2000
January: paul and i started off the new year by me not remembering what had happened the night before. The alcohol consumed by myself was enough to force a blackout. something mumbled about blowjobs, bathrooms, and me being the life of the party all night.
February: paul and i head to NYC for LWE:NYC to meet with friends from #userfriendly and for his work purposes. We drove. Never ever will I drive anywhere farther than a few hours again. When I got to the hotel, I cried like a little girl because the NYC drivers *are* as bad as they say they are. i partied with geeks, saw times square, and paul and i got lost on the way into DC on the way home. We ended driving up the wrong side of 495 and had to cut through DC in the middle of the night.
march: my lovely brother came and stay with us for a week for spring break. oh joy!
April: my father passed away on April 24, 2000.
may: spent a week in Toronto for the funeral. paul turned 20. love and birth in one month. my fathers 73rd birthday would have been this month.
June: my 28th birthday.
July: Brian (pauls brother) comes and stays with us for nearly 2 months. I love his little brother 🙂 Wednesday is born.
august: i meet pauls parents and his Spanish grandmother. Brian goes back to Miami. school starts and i miss another semester.
September: We add Wednesday into our household. At 8 weeks and 3lbs she is adorable.
October: paul and i celebrate our one year anniversary by going to Morton’s steak house.
November: paul’s sister Ivette comes and stays with us for thanksgiving weekend and paul cooks up a storm. i nearly kill him in his over Martha Stewart process of making everything perfect. We roast a 26lb turkey for friends and family and there is no leftovers.
December: i plan a weekend trip to Michigan to see my mother, and paul and I fly to Miami for 9 days of fun in the sun. While we are gone, Wednesday gets bit by his aunt’s German shepard and paul and i freak out over our “child”. nadia and greg get married and we formally announce our engagement to the sullivan family.
memory lane
October was a freaky month.
>my mother was on suicide watch, i didn’t see the shrink, i got promoted, my brother racked up a few bills, paul started a new job at AOL, Wednesday got bigger, an uncle died, I went to a spa, kethcame to visit.
That is stuff I can remember.
i should have been recording this, i should have been writing this done, but i wasn’t and i didn’t. but it’s a free country and i was getting sick of people emailing me and calling me asking me if i were alive or not, and i am; so i finally sat down and finished this damn thing.
one note on the design, if it looks even vaguely familiar, it was one of the first “professional” designs i had done by a friend of mine nearly two years ago. i realized it looked much better than anything i had done recently and so i modified it and threw it up. tada. aren’t you glad you waited? i also gave up on blogger. it was pissing me off.
rituals
every Friday night, paul, moe and I head to Logan’s Steakhouse. It has become such a ritual, that we even have our regular waitress, whom knows all of our orders and doesn’t bother bringing us menus anymore. We adore her so much, for her birthday, we tipped her 150 bucks. This is how loyal we are to this joint.
Moe ditched us last night and went out to see Circque de Sole with another friend so we got a few other people to come hang out with us. We should have known it was bad when our waitress wasn’t working, the soccer moms had taken over and the wait was nearly 1.5 hours to grab a table. Since we were all planning on seeing Bedazzled after dinner, we decided to take a stroll over to Barnes and Noble to look around.
I knew Moe should have come with us.
As soon as we walked in, I did a double take to to my right and saw someone who looked suspiciously like my ex, Alan. If you would have told me that nearly 10 years after we had started dating I would be having panic attacks about seeing him still and convincing myself he was still the one, in every day reality i would be laughing in your face. When the truth hits the fan, I was hiding behind the audio books watching this guy like some stalker, peering over the racks looking to see if it was him or not.
What was it that caught me off guard? The way he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket.
I’m not kidding.
I wish it were something that would have been more pronounced, like actually looking like him or something else other than flipping this wallet out of his back pocket, but it wasn’t.
That disturbs me.
What is even more disturbing is that I’ve been having slideshows in my head of previous exes in the last decade since I met Alan before this encounter last night. I had a dream last weekend that one of my best friends Josh ended up with me and cheated on me with some girl I knew back from when I was working in San Fran. I’ve been having quick flashes at the weirdest times of guys I’ve dated seriously (and not so seriously) of smells, instances, little things that are reminders of my time with them.
You would think, wouldn’t you, that after all this time I would be over Alan? Why does he keep holding a strange hold over my life.
I’ve been down this route before. i talked about it a couple of years ago when I had thought i had seen Alan at a restaurant Michael and i had gone to.
so realistically, the chances of Alan moving from mi->ca->va the same times i have are very slim to none.
i know this.
but that doesn’t stop the heart beating wildly and the thoughts going crazy in my head when i thought i saw him.
I’m going home to Michigan in December to see my mom and touch base. paul thinks I’m crazy for feeling like i do because this is the here and now — but the really scary part is, i used to think the last 10 years of my life meant something — and i wonder if all this time if i kept myself in some sort of blanket and protection about Alan and i’s breakup — if it was all just one delusion set upon by me?
wouldn’t that be a fucking bitch.
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lisa
music non-stop
i got obsessed recently with getting our cds in order. I knew for a long time paul and I had duplicates of the same cds, but thankfully it wasn’t that many. We found a 500 cd holder at freaking tower for under a 100 bucks, so we bought home and let my compulsive/obsessive nature shine through.
May I present you with the complete cd collection of lisa and paul.
Since Paul keeps asking me what CDs we own and he was bitching that i was not incorporating his CDs in with mine, i finally gave up and did this little project.
The case, despite being absurdly cheap, is actually pretty nice looking. We were using those standard 300 cd cases that you can buy at walmart for like 20 bucks, but every time you touched it, it almost fell over. Some of the 500 and 1000 cases I’ve been looking at were pricing at several hundred bucks. Who knew Tower would have something I needed? I usually despise that store for being so overpriced and full of wanna be trendoids. Majority of the time when I do buy cds, i buy them online now a days, but then again, who doesn’t buy shit online?
I’ve gotten hooked on yahoo — in more ways than one. I found out you can add all your checking, savings and credit card accounts on one page without having to look them up separately.
I’m so excited i could have cream my panties.
Btw, I’m looking for a new spades partner to play on pogo.com. come help a sistah out.
i have cramps.
x0x0x
lisa
autumn in virginia
fall has officially fallen upon us.
i can see a joke somewhere in there but I’m too tired to really think about it right now.
i love fall. when i see girls in sweaters and jeans i want to rush home and put on sweaters and jeans too. i love the way the air is crisp and how surreal the world looks against everything. i love the feeling of the wind against my cheeks and how my hands tingle when they get cold. i love the cravings i get for soup, hot cocoa and for chili.
tomorrow i go back to the shrink to start my therapy.
for the last few days I’ve been trying to reconcile things inside me i have not liked nor wanted to admit. many of them too personal for me to even begin to discuss to anyone let alone a public journal. perhaps i am afraid of the outcome, i do not know. i do know that i had gotten myself all riled up on the way home from work today that I sat on the toilet and cried while Paul looked concerned from the shower (naked and wet pauly, mmm).
My life, as we all know it in these last few years, has gone topsy turvy. i keep thinking back to the fall of 1994 when I was entering college for the second time — this time as a full time student. When I made the commitment to myself that this was something I was willing to do, I found that i loved what I was doing. I took the step and joined the paper, I excelled in school and I had friends all over the place. Then things change. And they kept changing.
Does anyone realize how hard being open and honest is. That choices need to be made to make you happy and that you need to make those choices to make yourself happy. But you don’t feel like you are being human, what choices do you have to begin with. Sometimes life is like a shell to me. You go through these emotions day in and day out — but they are not even really emotions, they are just motions. Putting on a brave face pretending to be something you aren’t. Why do people feel like they are so unhappy? Sometimes I wish I knew.
Sometimes I think I watch too much Felicity.
love,
Decadence Tackycake
this is my story and i’m sticking to it
paul got fired.
from his job.
apparently what had happened, was that VA Linux (after the merger with Andover) went through and fired 30 of the 100 employees — who were all top management/CXX something or another. While paul was technically a senior programmer, he was listed as director of e- commerce (at 20! go beat that!).
Pauls in better spirits than I am. i hate rejection. I hate not knowing what’s going to happen (on the flip side, every time I’ve gotten fired, I’ve always known I’d get another job).
Paul is the exact same way. Since he found out yesterday afternoon, he has been on the phone scheduling interviews and sending out his resume. He’s fast asleep snoring right now from doing more work in the last two days looking for a damn job than he has in a long time (so I feel). 😉
I’m teasing, of course.
Vandover was gracious enough to give him a months severance plus his two week vacation time PLUS he still has one month on his health insurance (unlike me when I was frog marched out of Slip.Net).
The silver lining is that I got a bonus and a raise and can call myself a “Senior” systems engineer at UUnet. whoopee.
Or something.
Plus I got a new boss — so I’m mucho happy. I like my new boss. She’s nifty.
I’m not handling pauls firing as well as he is. I’ve gone through more chocolate and eating binges than you can shake a stick at. Paul’s happy because basically with his mad skillz he knows that he can find another job fairly quickly and the extra money is just that — extra money. But technically, I’m the breadwinner in the household, and I’m scared. because what if he DOESN’T find another job (unlikely) and then the obsession starts again.
I’ve repeated myself here haven’t i?
blame ciannait for starting on the obsession.
no really.
Another obsession I’ve found is the tv show “angel”. okay you can stop laughing now. I’m being serious.
I was BORED BORED BORED tonight (paul was redoing his resume –again to make it perfect) and i was tired from having gone to the chiropractor earlier in the morning to be aligned. all i wanted to do was rest and watch teevee.
we have 145 channels and NOTHING IS EVER ON. finally i realize the only thing that is on worth watching is “Buffy” and “Angel” afterwards. Buffy, was at best, okay. Angel was much better and I enjoyed wasting 60 minutes on fluff. Plus Angel is a damn hottie. So now that I’ve gotten this new obsession, I’ve been combing the web looking for information about the previous season. This whole fanfic thing scares me. People are damn crazy.