Them Bandwidth Blues

The photos from the trip to Qufu, Confucius’ home city, finished uploading to Flickr hours before I left for my Indochina vacation so I didn’t have a chance to write anything about them.  It was a nice time generally, worth visiting if you have a free weekend in China.  The nicest thing by far was the Kong Family Cemetery, which we didn’t have nearly enough time to wander around in.  Photos from that trip can be found here.

Once the photos from Bangkok, Laos, and Cambodia are loaded onto Flickr (all 1 GB of them) I will write about that wonderful trip with my girlfriend, the first time I got to see her in six months.

It takes a terribly long time to load anything to Flickr from within China, VPN or no, so my solution for getting these photos loaded is to send them to Kelsey where she can then download them and upload them to my Flickr account much faster and more reliably than if they were just uploaded by me.  My webspace FTP is just as slow and unreliable from here as Flickr is and YouSendIt requires you to break the files into 100MB chunks, which would be too cumbersome in terms of each unreliable upload to send 10 different zip files.  Ever to the rescue, Ubuntu offers a cloud storage service called Ubuntu One with up to 2 GB free storage.  I was able to upload all the files to a shared folder in the space of a few hours, which can now be easily downloaded on the other side of the globe.

I have been watching Caprica as it comes out on the Internet.  It’s a painful process however, as Hulu knows I am connecting through a VPN and therefore won’t let me watch it there.  Thus it is up to very cheap and very slow substitutes like Megavideo to pick up the slack.  Megavideo takes about five times as long to load as the length of the video itself.  The pilot was good, then there were some less-than-stellar episodes but the most recent one, “There Is Another Sky,” was on par with the intrigue and quality of the parent show, Battlestar Galactica.  I am looking forward to the development of Tamara Adama especially, as she brings an unforeseen wildcard into the plotline.

Finally: Tomorrow, March 1, marks one year since Kelsey and I began our relationship.  For that, I blow a party noisemaker, alone in my room.

By Preston

Agent of Change, Former of Entropy, Seeker of a Stateless World.

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