It's been quite some time.
I'm still not prepared to start writing again; I have simply grown tired of reading my own words. But it's nearly 3am and I have nothing else to do.
Although I haven't made posts in a while, I have somehow aquired a small bunch of new readers who really don't know me that well. I'm still mulling over whether this is a concern or not. On the one hand, there's people out there who don't know me that well, people who will build on their first impressions of me by reading this site, profanity, raunch, fury, inebriation, and mope included. On the other hand, why should I give a shit? For a few reasons, rawness is not a bad thing.
There's a balance, a fine line to walk. I'll just try to trace it as closely as I can.
So like I said, it's nearly 3am. Having digested the evening's offering of pornography, I have nothing else to do. I tried to amplify a burp just now and threw up in my mouth. I think they call that "vom."
My school's network administration makes me want to hurt infants. Their policies and practices exemplify new levels of asinine, to the point where at times, it almost seems like they're trying to suck. For starters, there's the "Penalty Box." This clever little euphamism is their answer to question of network management, an umbrella policy, ostensibly designed to keep traffic at a manageable level and to discourage filesharing.
The way it works is, if traffic through the network jack in your room exceeds 2GB in 72 hours, you are in the Penalty Box; your bandwidth is reduced to that of a faulty 56K modem--faulty in that to achieve such a deplorable level of performance, the modem would have to spend 6 months in a gorilla cage being tossed around, chewed up, and defecated upon.
It's going to take some breath for me to adequately explain the depths to which the stupidity goes. And let me tell you, it is impressive.
The Penalty Box traffic limit is 2 Gigabytes of traffic in and out to the Internet or Internet2 over a 72 hour (3 day) period. This is a lot of traffic. 'Normal' Internet use will never generate this amount of traffic. Most likely you are running one of the file-sharing programs such as Kazaa or Morpheus. These applications are sneaky because sometimes they are actually running in the background and you are not aware of what they are doing. If you don't like being in the Penalty Box, remove such software from your PC's, or carefully monitor its activities. -- Lehigh
As someone who uses the internet for a lot of things, reading this almost feels like persecution. Who are they to tell me what "a lot of traffic" is? Who are these "normal internet users," anyway? Normal apparenly means you have no interest in downloading game demos (which can exceed 500MB); you certainly don't have interest in aquiring live music, distributed as FLAC (normally 700MB or so) through BitTorrent (which also means that 700MB grows to 1GB+ due to upload requirements); and who could possibly be interested in downloading albums worth of music through iTunes?
"Most likely you are running one of the file-sharing programs such as Kazaa or Morpheus." Well, as it turns out, I'm not. I am just one of many who have to wrangle with a short-sighted policy based on complete fallacy.
And it goes further. Recently, I got word that Lehigh dropped it's 50MB FastNet connection for a 100MB PPL Telecom connection. No such news was advertised to the student body, I only found out because I subscribe to a mailing list for the computing consultants. At the bottom, we were kindly reminded that "the Penalty Box limits and restrictions will remain unchanged." They are just so tickled by this revolutionary new approach to network management, aren't they?
What it comes down to is that if someone gets themselves limited by the penalty, they have a nearly unusable network connection. Webpages load a shattered fraction of their interfaces; a sustained connection to anything is unheard of; any legitimate use of the network is completely out of the question. All this, because the network administration insists that short-sightedness and uninventiveness is the best way to run a network at $45K/yr Lehigh University.
That certainly turned into a diatribe. On another day, I'll go into what they could do to not suck, but this entry has been uninteresting enough already.
This is why I don't want to write anymore, I don't have anything interesting to say.
Posted by Alchemae at January 30, 2005 02:38 AM