Entries with tag "internet"

When I first moved here, I discovered that the internet connection offered by the apartment complex is really slow and unreliable, but other providers aren't allowed to offer service here so there aren't any real alternatives. I was considering starting a petition to convince them to allow outside service, but I didn't ever get around to it. Today I learned that the apartment complex is being sold, and as of next month we will be allowed to have whatever cable, phone, internet, etc. service we want. Awesome. The lesson to be learned is: If you want something to change in your life, just sit back and wait for it to happen on its own.

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Moving in is going well. There's great things and not-so-great things about this place. I love the apartment itself — very spacious, nice carpets, etc. And the location is awesome — about half a mile down the road I have a Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Circuit City, Books-A-Million, Sav-A-Center grocery store, Waffle House, IHOP, and a bunch of other stuff. About five miles away there's another large collection of useful stores including Best Buy. And of course, being a two-minute walk from Bryan and Cat is great — quite a step up from having a four-hour plane ride separating me from my nearest friends.

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On the first of every month, BinRock's web server logs are automatically analyzed and I get a report. My favorite part of that monthly report is always the list of search terms that brought people to my site. For the last year or so, I've been making a monthly friends-only post on BinRock listing the most amusing of these search terms for the previous month. The only reason they aren't publically accessible is because I fear it would only serve to further convince google that my site is a good place to find pictures of naked frat boys. So for those of you who don't have accounts on BinRock, I've gone ahead and cross-posted all of those entries to LiveJournal. You can see them all here.

While reviewing this month's web server logs, I noticed that someone arrived at my site via a Google search for "ass munching crap bat". Intrigued, I performed the search myself. It turns out I'm on the tenth page of search results. I can only imagine the passion that burns in that tragic shell of a man for scatological chiropterans.

Prof. Naomi S. Baron will soon publish an article titled See You Online: Gender Issues in College Student Use of Instant Messaging. A highlight:

For example, women tend to use more affective markers (e.g., “I know how you feel”), more diminutives (e.g., “little bitty insect”), more hedge words (e.g., perhaps, sort of), more politeness markers (e.g., “I hate to bother you”), and more tag questions (e.g., “We’re leaving at 8:00 pm, aren’t we?”) than do men. Men, on the other hand, are likely to use more referential language (e.g., “The stock market took a nosedive today”), more profanity, and fewer first person pronouns than are women.

The description of female writing style sounds very familiar to me. I don’t say “little bitty insect” (thank god), but the “affective markers,” hedge words, excessive use of first person pronouns, and relative politeness are right on the money. Maybe that explains why twice now I've had online gay friends profess their interest in me.

What is a namber? A namber is a word that acts as a mnemonic for a number. For example, 65 is drum, and 181 is push.

A namber address uses an arbitrarily-chosen list of nambers to represent each of the numbers from 0 to 255 in order to assemble four words to represent any IP address. BinRock.net's namber is ear.north.fork.stick, and mysteryrobot.com conveniently provides translation and forwarding to the real IP address.

It's not as if we don't have an existing system in place to translate easy-to-remember strings into IP addresses, but I suppose the point is that if this list of nambers were accepted as standard, the translation could be done locally without needing to query a remote DNS server. Still, pretty useless as a whole :)

well, that's good. today my internet went down, as it does from time to time. it is usually back up within a few minutes, so i waited. after an hour it wasn't back, so i called innova.net to ask how long till it came back up. they said actually, they were discontinuing their DSL service. they had asked bellsouth for 5 days so they could notify their customers, but apparently bellsouth went ahead and cut them off now. so what he recommended was i switch providers. i explained that i'm leaving in a few weeks and it wasn't worth signing up for a new provider right now, and he said all i could do was use their dialup service. so now i'm stuck on dialup, and it disconnects every few minutes so i've been trying to send a 1mb email to a friend for a while now and it keeps getting cut off before it's done sending. this is fun.

Originally posted on LiveJournal. Original post