These are my favorite types of weeks. I worked from home last Friday, took Monday off, and am working from home today. This means I’m away from the office for six days, until tomorrow. And while tomorrow sucks in that it’s my late day, I at least don’t have to scurry about trying to get my shit together early in the morning, either. Not that I sleep in or anything, but it always seems like time gets compressed right before I need to leave (not that I have to punch a clock, but I have preferred time windows for hitting the road to avoid traffic, dump trucks, and those dreaded school buses – thank goodness there’s only another month or so of them left, though I’d prefer it if they kept going to school while I took the summer off).

Other than not having to go to work, it was a somewhat frustrating weekend. First off, the black flies are now in biting mode. If you’ve never had the pleasure of dealing with the little bastards, they’re typically out early in the spring, when they swarm into your ears, eyes, nose, hair, behind you knees, up your shorts – basically anyplace where can be maximum annoyance. After that comes stage two – they do the same things as stage one, except they bit the shit out of you. And the welts their bites cause are huge, painful, and itchy all at once. Plus those bites are in those heretofore mentioned most annoying of all body parts. These little fickers are like the pirhana fish of the air. Small with huge (if only metaphorical) teeth.

Normally theses little assholes aren’t that bad around here (up in the Adirondacks, they can be downright intolerable this time of year), but whether it’s climate change, wet weather, or just that Jesus has lifted his veil of protection from us, I dunno.

Of course the skeeters are out, too, so it’s a win-win situation. But the mosquitoes at least have the decency of taking a nap or whatever it is they do for most of the day and only come out and torture you at certain times. Goddamn black flies are just insidious. Makes one long for subzero weather again.

Fortunately, the little bastards should be gone in another couple of weeks (and then we can eagerly await the return of Deer Fly season.

Besides being bugged out, I’ve also had to fart around with the tractor. After finally getting the mower on (always fun, as you get to lie across the deck trying to hook up the goddamn PTO), I drove a bit and heard a clunk. Turned out the u-joint on the shaft that connects the tranny to the front transfer case had come off, and the pin that’s supposed to hold it on was sticking out.

So, off came the mower. I tried to pound the pin in, and figured I had it good enough so I was able to put the mower back on and cut the grass. When I was done – clunk. Fell off again. So yesterday I pulled the mower off yet again and found that the pin had sheared off. So I pounded it out and tried to insert a new pin, but I’ll be damned if I could get it in all the way, and I’m afraid it’ll just shear off again (much as I love taking the mower on/off, I’d really rather not have to do it again this season).

So I reckon when I’m in the big city tomorrow, I’ll go get an “official” Kubota part. The pin I was trying to insert is 1/4″, which is like 6.35mm, so I figure the frickin’ thing is like 6mm or something (and they aint got no metric roll pins around these parts – not that I could find, anyway). Pain in the ass (among other places).

So, if you’re interested in why Net Neutrality is important and how US cable Internet providers are screwing up over and trying to blackmail not only content providers but also large Internet backbone providers, I recommend a couple of blog posts over at Level 3 (one of the large backbone providers). They’re both fairly short and not terribly technical in nature. First is “Chicken” | A Game Played as a Child and by some ISPs with the Internet from back in March, and then another one from a week or so to go called “Observations of an Internet Middleman.”

If you don’t feel like reading, here are the main points….

Big providers like Level 3 have thousands of customers – like Amazon, Google – the big boys – who buy Internet access from them. It doesn’t really do these customers much good if they can’t connect to the parts of the Internet not covered by Level 3’s network, so they engage in what’s called “Peering” arrangements. I let your traffic travel across my network, you let mine travel across yours. Where we have to interconnect, we’ll share the cost of the datacenter. Everybody’s happy. Level 3 has 51 “peers” worldwide.

As the Internet grows and traffic shifts, more capacity is required amongst the peers and they all pretty much agree to upgrade their switches, equipment, etc. to provide the best service possible for their customers.

A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.

That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content.

Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers.
[…]
One final point; the companies with the congested peering interconnects also happen to rank dead last in customer satisfaction across all industries in the U.S.[2] Not only dead last, but by a massive statistical margin of almost three standard deviations.

Shouldn’t a broadband consumer network with near monopoly control over their customers be expected, if not obligated, to deliver a better experience than this?

The author declines to name these “peers,” but I think we can guess at at least who a few of them are – Comcast and Time Warner, for sure.

Don’t worry, though, FCC Chariman Tom Wheeler says it’s all gonna be great.