bloggenspiel

Companies like Comcast have been in the news quite a bit lately, admitting to tampering with peer to peer transfers that cross their network. If I can dig up the reference, I seem to remember reading that one major ISP was drastically wrong about how much p2p transferring was actually happening on their network. The father of packet data networks is now selling a device designed to detect and throttle peer to peer "flows".

This all seems to be a bit of an arms race. If one or more ISPs are throttling connections behind the scenes, just making more connections seems like it would be a decent solution. If bittorrent clients (for example) were to start making active connections with an order of magnitude more peers (very little more work at a peer level), I could easily imagine overwhelming the ability of a given piece of throttling hardware to track the connections. Or, if people were really serious about disliking their ISP capriciously throttling their traffic, it would not be terribly difficult to create a torrent-like client that just transferred hundreds of small junk files, expressly to overwhelm the throttling hardware.

I don't really have a point, here. I'm mostly just thinking out loud.

In the morning, a workman is coming to install new carpet in one room (we call it the blue room, because the old carpet was blue. The new carpet is beige.) and in the hallway of our house. I just finished cleaning up the floor (removing staples that held down the pad on the old carpet), so now it's ready to receive new carpeting.

It's very exciting. We've never had new carpet in a place we've lived before. I'm a bit afraid that the odor it gives off will give me headaches, but I'm still excited to be rid of the ratty, stinky carpet that was there before. Hopefully it will help the house sell more quickly.

Today was game six of summer league. We won! This year we're playing three games to seven points. My team actually won the first two games. This is our first win. We were quite happy.

In addition, I've been carpooling to get to and from the frisbee games. Since the games are at Eagle's Crest (part of Eagle Creek Park), it's quite a haul from where I work. Riding with Carl and Nolan will end up saving me a bit over a hundred dollars, so I'm pleased. (:

Melissa and I currently have our house up for sale. It's been interesting. We've had to do many repairs (lots of little things, mostly) to the house. We've been meaning to do them forever, but not gotten around to it. Putting the house up for sale has been an excellent impetus to actually accomplish those things.

The biggest help in getting them done has been help from family. My parents and siblings have come down on several occasions and worked quite hard to get things accomplished. Thanks guys!

Tomorrow, we get new carpet. Quite exciting! (:

Last weekend was gamefest. A good time was had by all. Well, that's not strictly true, but we'll be brainstorming over the coming year about how to address the concerns that some had over the weekend.

We played Team Fortress 2 almost exclusively. I got to visit with several out of town friends, and I got to meet Kotu, a friend from World of Warcraft.

A picture of the WoW players from gamefest



Mikey, Ty, Melissa, Dave, Emma

I'm still wrestling with MT 4.1. It's still generating Error 500s in abundance. I've made fairly complete backups of everything. If I don't get it all repaired soon, I'm switching to Wordpress.