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Five, count ’em, FIVE megabits per second

Well, Cable Guy showed up precisely between the hours of 5:00 and 9:00 the other day and swapped out the old cable modem for a new Motorola cable modem. It wasn’t as simple as that, however. Because Cable Guy didn’t really know how to use a computer, I had to help him test to see if it worked. He was grizzled-looking guy, and I could tell he was a Newfoundlander by his accent and the fact that he called everyone “my friend”. As in, “Hello, my friend, I’m here to work on your cable modem.”

Cable Guy had to wait twenty minutes on hold while phoning the technicians at Shaw. Apparently they keep their own employees on hold too. When he finally got through (“Sacred Heart, my friend, where is everyone?!”) he got me a new IP and a roaring fast 5 Mbps account. The wait was worth it. Downloads are zippy.

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It feels good™

On my drive to work today, I saw an ad on the back of a bus. It was for “JugoJuice”, a chain of juice bars, and it showed a woman with a delicious-looking cup of orange juice with the caption in giant bold print: “It feels good.™”.

Although I’m sure that the cup of juice does feel good (unless you’ve misundesrtood how it’s supposed to be used), how can a company trademark the words “It feels good”? Lots of things feel good, and among them a good many of those things are products. Are they implying that people can no longer sell a product by saying whether it feels good? Do they really expect this to hold up in court?

I’m getting tired of seeing the ™ show up in everything. I’m waiting for someone to trademark the letters “TM”, and sue anyone who uses the ™ symbol on any trademarked words.

(Trademark notice: “the” is now a trademark of CubeyTerra.com. Any use of this word for commercial purposes is prohibited.)

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What is it? I dunno.

Coming soon… something pod-shaped. I think.

A pod-shaped thing. What will it become?

So many of my vehicles start as just an interesting shape before I know what it’s for.

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Cable guy

Today I will recieve an honoured guest into my home. Today, between 5:00 and 9:00 PM on-the-dot, the cable guy will visit and fix my net connection. Well, he’ll look at it, to be accurate, and see if it can be fixed. I’ll hope for the best.

For the last few weeks, I’ve had a packet loss problem. 75% to 100% packet loss is not a good thing, as it basically cripples any network connection. I don’t know where these packets are going, exactly, but this kind of packet loss is only exceeded by the folks at Canada Post.

Where are these packets going? I can only imagine. Maybe there’s some guy in Sweden, sitting at his BØRK pine-laminate computer desk when up pops a bunch of my stray packets.

“Hey Ingemar, did yøu write sømething abøut de cubicles?”

“Nø. Wøuld yøu like anøther meatball?”

No worries. The Cable Guy will fix it for me.

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Aerodrome news: we’re number 1! … Wait… no we’re not

Lately I’ve been keeping an eye on Second Life’s “Popular Places” list (press CTRL + F) and the perilous ascent of Abbotts Aerodrome to dizzying new heights of popularity. Why just yesterday, I looked at the list and there it was in the number-one spot: “Abbotts Aerodrome”.

Wow! In my enthusiasm, I sent out the message to everyone in the Aerodrome group: “Congratulations! We’re now the most popular spot in Second Life!” This drew cheers and w00ts, until Apotheus pointed out that it was the most popular, not including the “mature” spots.

Um… I looked at the list again. “Include places in Mature sims” said the checkbox. I checked it, and we dropped to seventh place behind several strip clubs. We’re only the most popular “PG” spot in Second Life.

Doh!!

So what do we have to do to bring in more people? Nude skydiving? Aircraft made in suggestive shapes?