Pissed at your neighbor?

Do you have one of those neighbors that are a pain in the ass? Here is a way that you can tell them every day. The only problem is that you need to either have a bush in the right place, or you need to plant one and it could take a while to get your point, or should I say ass, across!

High Speed Internet My Ass

High Speed Internet my ass. As I sit here at the Marriott Courtyard in Greenville North Carolina, I am waiting for a call back from a tech service person at Golden Tree Communications. I checked in last night and used the internet connection and it seemed to work OK, not super fast, but I was looking at sites in Mexico for some hotel reservations so I assumed that it might have been the hosts that I was going after. This morning the connection was OK in the early morning and around 9:00am or so it went to crap. Ping times were some of the worst that I have seen in a long time:

C:\Documents and Settings>ping my.yahoo.com
Pinging my.yahoo.com [148.87.120.15] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3067ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3241ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3173ms TTL=240
Reply from 148.87.120.15: bytes=32 time=3303ms TTL=240

If I am not getting in the 3000+ ms range it times out. Occasionally I get down in the 600 to 700 range, but it does not last long.

Anyway, back to the reason for the posting. In talking to the technical support person, I asked what kind of connection they had? She indicated that they should have 684kbs which is the equivalent of a $29/month DSL line. How can they call that "high speed internet" for a hotel that has a 100 rooms? One ass downloading an .mpeg of Star Wars will chew that up for hours.

I doubt that they have any type of traffic shaping or any type of filtering for Bit Torrent or any of the other type of traffic hogs.

I guess the lesson is that it's high speed internet until the second guest shows up.

How long for that table?

Last night on the way to the Outter Banks for vacation we stopped over for the night in Greenville North Carolina. Pretty good trip and it was around 6:30pm and we were going to get a bite to eat.

The local magazine called Impressions listed a restaurant called Finelli's Cafe that was Italian and that was what we were hungry for after a 5 hour car ride and no lunch. When we pulled into the parking lot, it was rather full and the place was not that large, so I send in my wife to see how long for a table given that our five year old was getting a little restless after the car ride. The young and as we came to find out, "not that bright" hostess said it would be 20 minutes. This was after a couple minute survey of the tables.

We assumed that she knew her restaurant and had looked to see how many people were finishing up. Not the case. After an hour and 20 minutes we ended up getting seated and they only thing that she was able to muster was that a lot of people came in and they had reservations.

Now I would think that she had that part figured out when she did the survey of tables before telling us 20 minutes. I can see an extra 30 minutes, but missing your estimate by an hour is not acceptable.

They food seemed pretty good although we were not as hungry after five beers in the bar waiting for an hour and a half, but I would try it again with a reservation.