Crome mentioned to me that my upload and download speeds seemed lousy, and it occurred to me that maybe the problem was that I’d hit a server that couldn’t give me much more than 70 KB/s sustained upstream. Today, I tried DSL Reports’ speed test, not so much because I think it’s super accurate, but because I knew it would be easy, and would be able to give me a better estimate than scping from a random host.

Sprint PCS was my very first cell phone provider. Shortly after we moved back to Pennsylvania, though, I got rid of them and switched to VoiceStream. With some brief outages (while using awful Nextel phones at IQE), I’ve been with VoiceStream (now T-Mobile) since then.

Here are my examples of hateful web interface from today. I have been looking at getting an EVDO device to replace using my RAZR as a modem. This led me to poking around on the websites of both Sprint-Nextel and Verizon.

Every time I blindly click a “Contact Us” link and see Mail.app launching, my teeth itch. It takes too long, it complains about certs, and I don’t want to freaking send any mail with Mail.app anyway! Why can’t I use mutt?

Converting to git has been fun, educational, and annoying, at various times. Here are some notes (mostly to myself) on the fun, educational, and annoying bits that I solved today.

I’ve implemented a very, very crude Vim colorscheme parser. It’s a terrible implementation, but it probably works against most color schemes. Most importantly, it works against mine. Patches welcome.

Normally, I take the 17:15 bus from Philadelphia, and it gets me to Bethlehem around 19:10. On Fridays, traffic is worse, and its arrival is closer to 19:30. I’m writing this at 18:50, and we’ve just now gotten off the streets of downtown Philadelphia. We spent about ninety minutes sitting on Walnut Street, doing nothing. A cab driver insisted that the bus hit him, but couldn’t show much or any damage. Despite this, and despite exchanging insurance information, he was not going to let us go. He demanded that we wait for his insurance agent. The bus driver was livid and the other passengers exasperated. I was just disappointed that I’d be getting home in time for nearly no time with Martha before she starts heading to bed.

I had really wanted to use the Kate syntax stuff, because it’s pure Perl, but after I had it working, I decided that its Perl syntax highlighting wasn’t good enough, and I wanted Vim’s. So, I did what I had wanted to avoid and used Text::VimColor. I worked out some bugs, learned a lot about RTF, and added nice little things like proper option parsing.

I was pretty sure I was going to buy iWork ‘08 before it was announced. Every version of Keynote has had a few improvements that made it worth having, even though I only produce two or three slideshows a year. Keynote 4 adds a feature I’ve often wanted: the ability to make an object on a slide move around. I’ve wanted to use this for code samples: I’d create a text box with code in it, then put a rectangle on top of it, translucent and one line high, and have that move from one important line to the next.

First, let me say up front that I have not finished Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I did what I have done many times before: I got to the last boss. I fought the last boss to the last phase, came very close to winning, and died. Then I was too frustrated to continue and turned off the game system, meaning that it’ll take me at least twenty minutes to make another attempt – you can’t save once you’re in the final section, you see.