AT&T is really annoying me

Several times a month my internet goes out. Sometimes it's out for 20-30 minutes other times it will be up and down for HOURS. Today is one of those days. I go to get on my computer and whoops not internet. I turn around and look at the modem and the router and the DSL light on the modem is FLASHING RED.

It will stay flashing, then go to FLASHING GREEN then solid GREEN for about 2-3 minutes then BACK to FLASHING RED.

If I am lucky I will have full internet access about 75-80% of the time.

And for this I pay $50.00 a month.

I can't get Cable internet because Charter and Time Warner don't want to run lines out where I live, and Wireless Broadband is $75.00 a month with a 100 GB cap.

I have kids, boys and girls, but the boys and their X-box run up our bandwidth to almost the 250 GB cap we get from AT&T every month.

Right now as I type this up. I started out with a SOLID GREEN on the modem, it's now flashing RED. And now it's back to flashing green.

This gets really old, ohhh, now it's back to solid green.

I have re-booted the modem, I've rebooted the router. I've checked all the wires from the junction box outside all the way into the house. Two years ago I replaced the wires from the junction into the house with all new wires and a terminal in the house.

And STILL this still happens.

I called several of my friends who live in town and THEIR DSL is up and down also. And while I have been typing all of this up the DSL has gone down and come back up over 5 times.

I spent several calls last year talking to AT&T Support and I was told, that the problem in my area is the lines are so old because we DIDN'T get hit by a hurricane. Up north and down south, they have all new Fiber Optic lines with new switch junctions. BECAUSE they had so much infrastructure damage from several hurricanes. In my area? Well it's not broke so don't fix it or upgrade it.

Aaaaaannnnddd I just lost DSL again.

I'm hoping when it comes back up, I will be able to post this.

Walther Volkspistole - Forgotten Weapons

When this video came out over at Full30 a few days ago, I couldn't wait for Ian to upload it to YouTube.

First because Full30 is a BANDWIDTH HOG, for someone who lives in the sticks, and has slow DSL which is the fastest available unless I want to spend 3 times what I already pay, a month.  Uhhh Sorry, I have kids, so I cannot do that.  And AT&T isn't going to run out the good fiber optic this way until 2035 according to the person I spoke to with their service scheduling company.  They have an outside company schedule things like routine maintenance upgrades.  I was also told that I should wish for a hurricane to come through.  The person I spoke to said it would take a major natural disaster to wipe out enough infrastructure, before AT&T would even CONSIDER upgrading the mish mash of copper-fiber-copper-lead-etc lines that run in the area I live in.  South an North of where I live, they had their hurricanes, so they got upgraded.  A hurricane hasn't t hit this area since the 1970 Hurricane Celia,and some of the wiring we have dates from it's replacement in the 70's.  And yes I DID say lead.  There is according to one engineer at least 3 old lead-copper main lines, where several hundreds of copper lines run through lead and paper sheathed cables and underground.

But enough about me complaining about AT&T, although that particular rant was directed at the jerkweed who told me I should just "Upgrade" my internet.  And Yes, they live at home with their parents, AFTER graduating with a MA. 

Back to the video.

I seriously would like to see what a modern manufacturer could do with the idea of a stamped metal semi-automatic pistol.  And as you heard Ian say there were even experiments for a stamped steel revolver.  I would like to see what could be done today by a current manufacturer, given the changes we have had in technology and metallurgy.

I also would like to see a modern take on the rotating barrel pistol.

Our Infrastructure Data Integrity is safe - NOT!

"A hacker compromised a U.S. Army database that holds sensitive information about vulnerabilities in U.S. dams, according to a news report.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams contains information about 79,000 dams throughout the country and tracks such information as the number of estimated deaths that could occur if a specific dam failed. It’s accessible to government employees who have accounts. Non-government users can query the database but cannot download data from it.

The breach began in January and was only uncovered in early April, according to the Free Beacon, a nonprofit online publication, which first published the news." 

So the C.O.E. had a data breach.  On something that actually quite terrifies me.  Have you ever lived underneath or down stream of a Dam?  I have.  I used to live just down stream of the Dams at Clearwater Lake and Lake Wappapello, back in the late 90's.  I remember driving home to Piedmont from my job in St. Louis 140 miles away and crossing the bridge over the St. Francois River on 34 literally 10 minutes before the state closed the road, and I had to run 80 miles out of my way to get back to St. Louis.  However the county was testing the sirens and emergency evac plan in case Clearwater Dam breached, and Wappapello Dam was in divert mode because the Black River was at near record levels.  A dam failing is what is known as a "Bad" thing.

Here is a vid and links to info about the Teton Dam failure that took 14 lives and caused almost 1 Billion dollars in damage.



Teton Dam Failure (University of California Santa Barbara Link)

Teton Dam (Wikipedia)

Dam Failure (Wikipedia entry with list of Dam Failures)

Just check out some of those links and there attendant sub links.  You can see why the thought of a Dam Failure terrifies me.  And there was just a security failure where information about all of the Dams in the United States is located.  That scares me even more than the idea of being under a failing Dam.  Because now we don't know if the person who accessed the information is just someone who really likes Dam's (And those people exist, many years ago I met a man and his wife both retired engineers who spent their retirement driving their RV around to all the Dams in the US and taking pictures of them and the wildlife around them) or if it is someone with ill intentions.  And if you have ever seen Force 10 from Navarone, or if you were in the Armed Forces, you realize just how fragile our Dams actually are.  So the idea that any detailed info on them is now out in the wild so to speak is one more thing to add to the little box of fears I think everyone has.

Some people will read this and scoff at the idea that I'm blowing this out of proportion.  Can you honestly look around you with everything that is happening in our world today and say that the possibility of some type of attack on our various infrastructure such as Dams is 100% TOTALLY impossible?

Can you?