Ratza Fratzin Hotel Internet

[filkertom]

Les and I been travelling for a couple of weeks now, and the internet has been pretty much El Sucko at almost every point. Today is particularly noxious, unbelievably slow when it's connected at all, so I'm going to say Goodbye From CapriCon and post another update tomorrow.

Oh, and, there's freezing rain turning to snow on the road ahead. Note my joy.

How's your weekend?

Comments

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I am having a BLAST at a contradance weekend. I haven't done this much dancing in this short a time in several years, and man, does it ever feel good!

[alicebentley]

I am, of course, wishing I could have joined y'all at the convention. Or at Boskone. Or even at RadCon.

However, staying home, sleeping in, and getting lots of files cleared away does have its own rewards.

So, the internet was sucky, the trip home looks tense - but how was the con?!?

[peachtales.livejournal.com]

Not doing much aside from laundry and (hopefully) cleaning. I still have a large amount of clothes and other stuff to go through and get rid of.
I made some new recipes early in the weekend, and I am set for good food :)

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Not too surprising - hotels often don't have a clue how to manage their internet connections. A cheap PC, static internal IP addresses, and some $45 software would allow them to manage their bandwidth so that it all worked efficiently and wasn't able to be hogged by one user. (Which is pretty common.)

And that Sheraton has never been 100% spot-on for services.

As for me and mine this weekend - we have the plague and we're packing to move. The plague prevented me from ghosting Capricon, (which is right around the corner from where I work), and even entering a filk room to listen. :-(

The last thing I want to be responsible for is silencing some wonderful voices with the plague.

[berimon.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a hotel employee, we don't get any say in the Internet service we provide. The Hilton chain of hotels (which covers a lot of brands) has their own IT service, but they simply won't supervise our server, nor will they allow us to do it.

I do have access to the physical hardware, and when someone starts hogging bandwidth on my shift, I just unplug them. Technically, I'm not supposed to do that, but I figure if they wanna download the movie of the week, they can go home to do it.

Me, I just wanna play WoW while I'm here.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

I wasn't trying to single anybody out and I'm sorry if it came across that way.

I know that there is little to no IT support for anything but total failures in several business environments and in hotels especially - after all the Internet is not a "right".

I was merely pointing out that it would be blindingly easy and cheap to put in a management system that keeps people from hogging bandwidth and needs little to no maintenance.

Doing so would make a lot of customers happy and in a service oriented business that _should_ be high on the priority list. (Though in the US it seems that profits eclipse all of late.)

[berimon.livejournal.com]

Oh, no doubt, I'd love to be able to provide a good service, but I simply can't do it. Your idea would be both simple and effective, which is why, presumably, corporate doesn't like it.

You are not wrong about anything, I just wanted to let people know that the "peons" don't have any say in it.

Complaining to corporate level might do some good, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Oh and just FYI - 3D engineering models can be hundreds of megs in size and can easily peg a connection for a certain amount of time. (Hell I've got one guy here who has his guys open and enter data in a bloated spreadsheet taking up at least half a gig in size if not more. He's the reason we got gigabit ethernet even though most people here don't need it.)

That's why I never consider unplugging someone without a good reason or without talking to them first. I realize you don't have that option but I wanted to point out they might not be just downloading the movie of the week.

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

Nursing a muscle in my chest that I managed to strain while coughing. Since my job entails lifting heavy objects, this has made life fun.

I'm going to spend today working on a setting for my next game.

[maiac.livejournal.com]

I've been sitting at home while a coupla guys finish the work to replace the living room ceiling. I'd probably be sitting at home even if I didn't have a coupla guys working in the living room, but not having an option makes it tedious.

Be careful driving!

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

Y'know, as someone who travels a lot, you can probably confirm what I have learned in my relatively few outings; hotel internet is a ripoff.

Not only are the connections slow and shaky, they don't allow different people in the same room to share it, and on convention weekends, it's very, very slow for a specific reason. When people go to a convention, why can't they let their damn Warcraft and Evercrack characters take a weekend off? They play their characters when they aren't partying or drinking.

The thought of people who have never seen each other in the flesh, playing their characters together at a con in their separate rooms, when they could actually talk to them face to face, is pretty sad to me. It's like what Groucho Marx said; when I have dinner with a woman, I want her to see my face. It's the price she has to pay. Same thing for a con.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

I have taken to connecting from the hotel, VNC'ing into my PC at home, and doing all my internet stuff from there. The worse that happens is I loose my VNC connection but not what I am doing online. I also hate hotels that don't tell you all the necessary steps to get online there, like when they just assume everyone runs ony IE, so after you "go online" you can not actually connect until you first browse to someplace with IE and only then can agree to their stuff to actually get online.

[ericcoleman]

When I ran gaming at a con, there was this guy who would bring in his TV and his console, and sit in the corner and play video games all weekend ... by himself ... that one still weirds me out

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

We had a guy like that at Timecon/Baycon. Friday he would wander into gaming, sit in the corner, and read gaming books. They'd throw him out three days later. In over ten years I never saw him actually play anything, or attend any con events. Why pay for the badge (and hotel food and presumably crash space) if all you're going to do is something you could do at home for free?

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

I have known people that timid. Hell, I used to be such a person. I never even got up the nerve to go to a con, until a friend dragged me to a local "autograph-con" where Jonathan Frakes was appearing. Do you know I bought a D&D handbook and read its teeny type by myself, but couldn't find anyone to play with and didn't know how to find one?

Now that I've overcome some of my own shyness, I try to help the ones who are even more shy. It doesn't always work, but I gotta do something...

[gridlore.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if timid is the right word for this guy. Extremely anti-social to the point of possible mental illness was more what we thought. Add in that he thought showers and laundry were things other people did, and you had an extremely unpleasant presence. But since he never violated any con rules, nobody could really do anything about him.

And when I saw read gaming books, I mean he'd come in with a huge backpack stuffed with AD&D books. People in the local gaming community sort of knew him, but no one could ever recall gaming with him.

Guy just vanished a few years ago.

[moquif.livejournal.com]

You're kidding. He's at a convention and he's playing games by himself? At the least I would think he'd invite/allow other people to play with him. What's the point of going otherwise? Must be a vendor or related to a vendor and drafted to help.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

Another weekend home alone, didn't even get any cleaning done (this place really is overdue for a mega-cleaning at this point). I am giving up on trying to grow my hair out (all I am getting is an unmanagable mad scientist look, not what I want) so I am getting my first haircut in I think six months. I am enjoying listening in to Radio Capricon all weekend. And also on the good side, I got my Linux sysadmin homework done, which means I now have working IRC software on that PC (the homework was to download and install something, so I chose Xchat. Nothing in the assignment said it had to be something work-related :-) Next weekend I prepare for MarsCon so that will be a busy weekend even if it is also spent only at home.

[bosswriter.livejournal.com]

First, Capricon. Enjoyed your concert and the digital media panel. As always Tom, you rock and you bring a smart POV to discussions.

Second, Hopefully you get home before the rain turns to ice.

Third - hotel internet - the sound of suckage is deafening. At least they had the Internet Cafe here which is where I am posting this from. It was a good connection and not real crowded. I hope this is a trend that continues at cons where the hotel internet is a black hole.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

I'm having a relaxing weekend at home. I had to go to work yesterday morning for monthly server maintenance, but other than that I'm just piddling around a bit. I got up this morning, ate breakfast, then laid down with a cat in a sunbeam to read until I fell asleep again for a wonderful nap. I think the most ambitious thing I'm going to do today is laundry.

It's quite nice outside though, so I may go to the range and plink with a new (to me) CZ 452 .22 rifle (http://www.cz-usa.com/product_detail.php?id=3) which I picked up used at a scorchingly good price (about 1/3 of MSRP, gotta love deals like that). Man those Czechs know how to build a quality rifle.

[admnaismith.livejournal.com]

I'm covered in paint, and will have to pay more electrician's bills instead of going to any cons.

Otherwise OK.

[jss]

"The usual." Annoyed that it looks like my home-office UPS is dying and will cost more than I've got in the budget to replace. Depressed due to the no-job stuff. Got stood up on a lunch date yesterday.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

I won't swear that I actually connected to a friend's wireless modem and got better results than we were getting off the free wifi, but I know I was thinking about it.

I actually had to go down to the pool to get a connection I could work with. Somebody on my subnet must have been saturating the link...

[emiofbrie.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when I cast the MMDT20 over Radio Capricon, I had to cast at 24/22/Mono. Not because I couldn't handle the better speeds for upload, but because those listening on the hotel wireless couldn't handle listening to a 64/22/Stereo stream!

I tried casting at 64/22/S originally, and Eric said the wireless listeners were getting rebuffer! When I tried the stream at home I was getting no rebuf so, yeah, the hotel wireless sucks.

That's why Eric had do use the hardwire in his room to cast Radio Capricon from. Apparently their hardwire was fine. Sounds like the hotel wireless may have only been 802.11b

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

I'm safe at home and someone just brought over their new puppy.

So way, way better than yours. Sorry!

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Stayed home, had a friend visit. (Post forthcoming.) It was a weekend made of awesome, some of it unexpected which made it the more delightful. Not enough time to do everything we wanted, though -- including a large chunk of Nothing... so we'll simply have to find another weekend soon for another visit.