Yet again, the hypothesis by Dave is correct. Verizon blames other factors for their freakin’ inferior DSL service.

Go to the Verizon Troubleshooting Page for Slow Internet Connection. Here is the translation from “Excuse-speak” to “English” (sorry, international readers of the blog)

ES:

“If your DSL speed seems unusually slow, step through the checklist below to diagnose the problem.”

English:

“If your DSL speed seems to be running at a normal speed (about 205KBits/sec), go ahead and waste your time reading this checklist.”

1. Turn your modem off and then back on. This actually works sometimes. Not much to say for this common DSL problem, as well as a wired/wireless router problem.
2. Find and remove viruses. You expect us to find and remove every single virus on our system? Yeah right. If there was a virus, there probably will be no connection at all.
3. Find and remove spyware. You expect us to find and remove every single piece of spyware on our system? Sure. If there were pieces of spyware, there probably will be no connection at all.
4. Free up space on your hard drive. It might affect the performance of the system, but what does this have to do with the internet speed?
5. Make sure DSL filters are installed. And you give us like 4 filters for all the phones in the house.

Again, Verizon sucks. I don’t suggest buying DSL service from them (but I haven’t tried FiOS), so … don’t.

3/3 people agree. Verizon sucks. Those three people are Dave, Paul, and me.

Steven’s Johns Hopkins Scheduling 2006

You will all not miss me when I am going to Johns Hopkins from June 25 to July 16. Here I have listed a few methods of communication. I am not allowed to check email or (gasp…) use the computer at all to do stuff, like speaking with some potential clients.

Stuff like that. What the document says in a nutshell is that you can Cell or Call my CTY number, or leave a voicemail, or send envelope mail stuff. And of course, it gives you the information you need.

If you really need to contact me, the check this out. If you don’t, you can read some information and stuff there.

For more info, check the Calendar.

EDIT: I could do moblogging on my cell, but then my inferior cellular service plan will get charged on the bill, and then my parents get freakin’ pissed.

US threatens trade sanctions against Sweden because of thepiratebay
So, yet again, the US is being stupid and they try to force other countries to do stuff. Like for Sweden to shut down ThePirateBay.

ThePirateBay is a BitTorrent tracker that was attacked by a raid on May 31. Yet another civil rights violation by idiots.

Then, the US is basically forcing Sweden to shut down ThePirateBay.

How stupid.

Can we just leave Sweden alone? It’s not like their leaders are idiots or something. Well, let me rephrase that. Can we just leave ThePirateBay alone!? Maybe they can move to Canada or Denmark or something.

Jeez.

And as a sidebar, I invite you to read the Legal Threats page on ThePirateBay. Absolutely hilarious.

I just checked out Last.fm, thinking it was an inconvenient site in which you had this Flash player and you picked tracks to play and you had this thing you could show on your site to show which songs you played. I thought that was pretty stupid.

Until I checked it out.

Well, it’s not the same thing. Last.fm is, at best definition, an aggregator for the tracks you play on your iTunes or Windows Media Player (which is not cool.) Using data from the tracks you play from iTunes, it somehow figures out (using math, probably) which songs you might want to encounter on Last.fm radio.

So yeah, Last.fm is pretty much a radio station, but you can customize stuff. I use it most for a thing that automatically gets what I play on iTunes when I’m on my computer and shows it.

Good stuff. Check it out. Last.fm.

Verizon DSL: May be the suckiest internet on earth (other than dialup.)

Just as a quick sidebar, I was trying to do some finishing up with some WordPress stuff and then StevenBao.com (this site) and FuryLIVE hosted sites just timed out on me. Nobody else had this problem, so I checked my modem stuff and recreated my connection parameters. It worked afterwards.

Nothing to say but to blame Verizon.