Notes for Spring Break...

This being my third Spring Break associated with LeTourneau University (though only the second that I'm staying on campus), you'd think that I'd learn a thing or two about the way things happen here. Firstly - the hours for many things (like the library where I can go to get free Microsoft software because I'm in the Computer Science department) are reduced. That's to be expected of course, but I forgot how drastic it is. For instance, the library is closed all weekend. I was expecting to drop in there today to pick up some software (Vista, baby!) and get it up and running over the weekend. Alas, I can't do that until 8am on Monday. It would have been nice to check this YESTERDAY so that I could have checked the software out then. Oh well.

The other thing that you'd think that I'd remember is that....there is nowhere to get food on-campus from today (Saturday) until Sunday or Monday (I forget which). I found this out today as I migrated to the dining hall at 11:45am for lunch and found it shut tight. *sigh*

Thank God for Taco Bell and for nice former roommates who fly home leaving you with their car.

It's March!!!!

Ohhh, look what I got in the e-mail inbox yesterday! Well, about 20 minutes ago actually.

As of Wednesday, February 28, 2007 11:50 PM, you have transferred 3,078MB of data which is 100.20 % of your service level of 3,072MB.

Since you have used your monthly bandwidth allocation, computers you own will experience greatly reduced internet speeds for the remainder of the month.

I am amused and happy and stuff.

On the woes of one day's indiscretions...

My school, in an attempt to curb the problems that our network has had in the past (namely, slow access to the internet) has instituted a policy wherein users are allowed 3 gibibytes of transfer (combined up- and down-stream). After you reach your limit, you are placed in what has popularly been referred to as "The Dungeon." In the dungeon, you share a low-speed connection with everybody else in the dungeon, so the more people there are, the slower it goes. I spent the last week of January in the dungeon and was blessed with 0.5 kibibyte/sec transfers when I stayed up until an insane hour when nobody else in their right mind was awake. Most of the time my transfers would time out before completing, causing me to refresh webpages 10 times before they would actually come up. Downloading a page such as this one with Flash and images disabled would probably have taken something on the order of two minutes.

Well, thanks to some decisions I made a few days ago about downloading some software, I may find myself in the dungeon again. If that happens, I'll probably not post more than a single blog entry since it's so bleeding painful to do so. As it stands, I have 4 days in which I must stretch out 100 mebibytes. I think I can do it.