StinkFight.com

I just got a new book deal with O’Reilly (will blog details next week.)

To celebrate, I just ordered an AT&T U-verse fat pipe….a a 10 Mbps fiber optic line.
Yay! With cable TV. From the phone company. 100 bucks a month, no setup fee, no contract commitment, (and it also comes with 100 TV channels). Ten times faster than a DSL line, at three times the price. And it doesn’t slow down when your neighbors go on like with cable modems.

Also ordered a third computer, which I’m gonna use dedicated to nothing but BitTorrenting huge archive zips of our podcast episodes:
LENOVO ThinkCentre A61E 641712U computer,
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883108133

also got two 1-gig sticks of server RAM and got heat-sinks for them.

AT&T U-verse is not available in most of the country yet. Should be in a year or three. It’s available here:

* California: Corona, Los Angeles/Orange County, Riverside, Sacramento/Stockton/Modesto, San Diego, San Francisco/Oakland, and San Jose/Santa Clara
* Connecticut: Hartford, New Haven, New London, Stamford
* Illinois: Chicago
* Indiana: Anderson, Bloomington, Indianapolis, Kokomo, Muncie
* Kansas:Kansas City
* Michigan: Detroit
* Mississippi: Jackson
* Missouri: Kansas City, St. Louis
* Ohio: Akron, Cleveland, Columbus
* Oklahoma: Oklahoma City
* Texas: Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Round Rock, San Antonio
* Wisconsin: Milwaukee, Racine, West Bend

I had DSL in early 1997. I lived in downtown San Fran, and within 1200 feet of the phone company building. Mine was one of the first city blocks in the country that had it.

When I crawled off of dial-up onto DSL I felt like, as my friend Stephen Elliot put it, “It extended my lifespan.” I think Fiber Optic is going to feel like “Beam me up, Scotty” compared to DSL.

I’ll probably get rug burns from it.

I’m literally having trouble sleeping anticipating my 10 MBPS fiber optic line.
I get it Wednesday. Should have my new pooter (the dedicated BitTorrent one) by then too. Until then I have to suffer with this damn DSL. How very last century.

MWD

p/s

I remember a forwarded e-mail in San Fran in 1998 called “You might be a geek if…..”.
One of the things was “You might be a geek if…..Your apartment has more bandwidth than some universities.” With the fiber line, I’m finally there. They use the same size pipe for 200 computers on some university libraries.

…..Another one on that list was “You might be a geek if…..while hanging out at an industrial/heavy metal fetish club, you get in a fist fight with another guy about which flavor of Linux is best.”

Funny, but that was never me. I have always been a Windows guy, and always will be. I don’t like all that wrenching. XP just fucking WORKS. I’m running XP on both laptops and the new server computer has XP. (I actually had to pay a little more to not have Vista. How fucked is that????)

This entry was posted by Michael W. Dean on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 11:26 am and is filed under Gear porn, MWD's Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.