OT: Facial Hair

[Fairlight]

Only Bob Stockler would say something like:
> 
> PS - Mark Luljak may disagree, but he missed his chance by
>      not coming to my house Derby Day a year ago (when Esak
>      was here), so I've never met him in person - though he
>      has been a great help to me and has access to my system.

I avoid mirrors, any photos of me must be burned, and all SmartMedia cards
with my photos on them must be purged.  :)  Actually, there are a few
photos of me online.

And we'll get together one of these days.  For now, I'll resort to one of
my favourite lines from a list of excuses for not going in to work "today":

"I prefer to remain an enigma."

However, you've met my wife so you know I exist. :) I'm married, therefore
I am?  That a workable axiom?

I'll say one thing (well, one MORE thing)...  It's too bloody hot out for
beards.  I haven't given up yet, but damn this weather is -killing- me,
even with A/C and 3 fans.  True Kentucky weather, this...  Kentucky:  Land
of beautiful horses, fast women, and weather imported direct from Hades.

mark->

PS - And as proof that DSL just does not measure up to a T1 for stability,
today was a gem.  No storms, no nothing.  I suddenly went to 76% packet
loss, +15ms additional latency (25ms avg instead of 15ms), and pretty much
an unusable net.  I called IgLou, and while I'm talking to the guy, my
phone starts acting like it's a bad cell phone connection with intermittant
to no signal.  I figured I'd have to call BellSouth.  About 5min later I'm
still checking things out and I see pings go up to 700ms, then 1600ms, then
drop back down to 300ms and finally down to 15ms like normal.  I call the
same guy back and he said that it wasn't just me, two other people called
in with problems right after me, and he spoke with one directly--and they
had the same voice line problems I did.  Mine and theirs cleared up at the
same time.

Now if that'd been a business-critical uplink in terms of -needing- a
presence there 24/7, there'd be problems, especially had the weirdness
lasted longer than the 20min it did.  I maintain:  Anyone dropping their
leased lines for DSL and dropping their LD or even phone for VOIP is asking
for problems.  That's about the closest I've seen to my phone service going
dead, and at least it was marginal (-real- marginal) for usability.  The
net was shot though.  At best, a bursty 5KB/sec at one point during the
spurts it worked, acting like it had intermittent sync (it didn't lose sync
though).

Sure, it was fixed in 20min.  And had it not been, and had I hopped on the
Vonage bandwagon like so many have?  S.O.L.  (Not counting my cell phone.)
At least I could more or less talk to support yet on voice.  There's no
way VOIP would have worked at all--I couldn't even use ssh more than a few
dozen characters every 20 seconds in bursts.

And that's several days after the storm system that took sync away for
about 1.5 hours straight here the other night.

I'd again advise anyone thinking about switching to rethink things.