Video of the Day

I really have an obsession with clean, punchy, precise, progressive metal. The band is Porcupine Tree - one of my wow guildies turned me onto it. They've got some tremendous skills. The lyrics from the songs I've heard so far are very angsty and non-conformist. There's a a fine line between being overly obvious and sufficiently cryptic in song lyrics. Sometimes it's better to be non-sensical in a curious and fitting way then it is to sound awkward.

This band reminds me of a mix of Blind Melon, The Smashing Pumpkins, Tool, and Opeth. I know... super weird combination, but somehow it works for them.

Your mouth should be boarded up.

On the internet connection front, it appears to be fixed. Yesterday morning it went down for an hour and came up working perfectly. I called them to cancel the tech, but they suggested having him check it out anyway. The guy came in, took some signal readings, thought they were low and went off to check the readings at different points of the house and outside.

He asked me how I manage to go without teevee... and I thought.. "oh shit, I forgot to pull the splitter off." See, a non-widely known pearl of wisdom is that you can put a cable splitter in before the cable connects to your cable modem - and viola, basic cable! I have a tv tuner in my computer, so I'm never really without tv even though I don't watch more than The Daily Show and The Colbert Repor during the week. The rest gets recorded and watched on John's uber tv during the weekend.

Anyway.. while the guy was outside, I pulled the splitter off and tossed it into the closet. He was quite pleased with himself that he "improved" the signal strength by 4. I wasn't going to tell him how that suddenly improved. After he left, I put the splitter back on and it's still running very well.

He also said he's going to put my modem on a "monitor list", where they basically keep a running tab of the modems performance. It would have been nice if they had done that last week. I think, in the end, that it getting fixed had nothing ot do with me. One of their "real" techs must have figured out there was a problem in the network and fixed it by replacing a router or something. The cable company doesn't seem to have very good internal communication and one group of techs has no idea if another group of techs are working on a related issue. It's weird.

/update

Oh for fucks sake. I think the DNS servers have gone down. I have connectivity, but it's not resolving addresses. I'm updating this via my laptop VPN to work.

Somebody.. make it stop.. or start.. whatever..

One of Porcupine Tree's - Blind Melon sounding songs..