Speed Matters

So, I’m back from my brief hiatus.

Interestingly, traffic spiked on Friday the 4th when I posted that note. Not entirely sure why, but maybe some of you saw the post title in your readers and thought something noteworthy had happened. Sorry to disappoint.

Part of the reason I took time off was to perform parental IT services and get them on the internets with their brand new Macbook Pro. We had decided on a wireless broadband card for a number of reasons: easy to use, very little to maintain, fewer network security concerns, no electronic boxes around the house.

Of course, the main arguments against the broadband card were speed and bandwidth consumption, but it seemed like a good fit.

Until we got it home and found the network got no more than two bars and was terribly slow and not just in my (spoiled) opinion. Like 280 kbps slow. Not good, and a painful reminder of how much broadband has changed the interwebs, mostly for the better.

Case in point, my mother wanted to watch the gory texting while driving UK PSA (FYI, it’s pretty intense) that caused a stir a few weeks ago. The video would play a couple seconds then stop for 30. Brutal.

So, that idea was scrapped for DSL, which unfortunately won’t arrive until this week, setting me up for a fun evening of phone support.

Otherwise, I spent most of my time hopping between internet cafes, getting massively over-caffeinated while downloading OS X updates on the parental MBP and generally feeling like a bandwidth hog with two laptops.

Again because I was downloading large files, I noticed the differences in speed. Eventually, I found a great coffeehouse with a nice atmosphere and a really fast connection. There’s a common theme here, i.e. speed matters when it comes to internets. So, thank you Beehive.

I also got to meet John Piwowar IRL and captured an ORACLENERD action shot for Chet. The one thing I’m bummed about missing at OOW this year is the meat-life encounters with people I’ve never met in person or only see infrequently, e.g. my own team members.

Anyway, on my way to catch a plane out of town, I saw a bat in the airport. Not a bird, a freaking bad. I know it was a bat because it came within about six feet of my head. Nutty.

So, now I’m catching up on feeds and updating stuff to new releases, specifically iTunes and the iPhone OS. Seems I’m not the only one who noticed that the sync process has degraded. The sync took about an hour, way up from a couple minutes.

My next project is a Snow Leopard upgrade, which should be fun. Anyway, I’ve seen a few noteworthy topics to cover, so maybe the news drought has ended.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.