Yesterday was a big day here. My Internet has been kinda crappy lately, so I finally gave the good folks at Time Warner a call, and darned if they weren’t able to get somebody out here right away. A couple of very nice fellas, who ran some new cable from where it enters the house to where it connects to the cable modem (upon further review, I hadn’t noticed, but it appeared that some varmint of other had partially chewed through one piece of cable), and then swapped out my old DOCSIS 2.0 made in China modem with a newer (if not actually new) DOCSIS 3.0 made in Vietnam modem. It also has much prettier lights (green and blue and very bright – they look quite Christmassy).

So now I’ve gone from a single-channel modem to a multi-channel one, and am ready for when Comcast takes over and offers (so they told me) a 500 Mpbs Internet package (not that that will do me any good unless all the websites and content providers I patronize pay the Comcast ransom that our Preznit’s cable industry lobbyist FCC Chairman is pushing to continue to allow). No doubt they’ll also have a cap of 250 GB per month or so, so that 500 Mb per second (which is 62.5 MB) would last, oh, about an hour and eight minutes if I were to actually use it all (which doesn’t seem all that likely today, but they start offering streaming 4K video and who know what else, it may not seem to crazy).

Of course, Comcast has their own video service call Xfinity, and guess what? That doesn’t count against your data cap. So you can either use what they tell you to, use the crippled providers who refuse to pay for the “fast lane” (more like they refuse to pay the toll to use the highway, so they’re stuck on the old country roads with potholes and trees down that take the long way to get from one place to the other), or use the folks who are willing to pay the fee for access (who will of course pass that cost along to you – which which may or may not be OK until you go over your data cap).

But anyway, right now my Internet is good, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.

I also put together and briefly played with my new power washer (which is Generac that I may or may not have purchased simply because it’s orange – though it does go well with the tractor). There’s an on/off switch for the motor, which is cool because it actually has two positions labeled “on” and “off” and there’s a slidey switch to turn the gas valve on, which doesn’t actually have words, but it’s got a picture of a gas pump with an arrow. So that’s OK, but then there’s a slidey switch for the choke right above the fuel switch and it has an arrow, too. But it doesn’t tell me if the the arrow points to on or off (or full choke, no choke) and the arrow points in the opposite direction of the goddamn fuel switch. So it’s a little confusing.

I should probably read the manual, but I hate to resort to that.

Anyhow, that sucker blasts out pretty good and would probably rip the mirrors off my car if I got close enough to it. So I think I’ll try washing the cats with it later on.

I thought it was a little chilly when I got up at 5:00 this morning, and when I went to the lo-cal teevee station website to check the weather, I saw why.
Chilly

Damn, that’s gotta be some kind of record.