WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

YO! Where’s all this rain come from? Have we had the Pacific Ocean evaporate over our home?
The whole back yard is flooded. The drain can’t cope. He’s lost his bottle, man!
The car port is flooded and a river is flowing down our driveway!
Haven’t seen this much rain since the day I flew up here to check out potential places to live.
I heard on the news on the way home that they expected severe weather conditions so I put both cars in the carport tonight. It’s a wonder they don’t float away anyhow.

I hope Blake is going to fly home tomorrow okay. They said on the news also that if you expect anyone flying in tonight to ring the airport as they might not be coming after all. It appears some flights were cancelled.

We’ve decided to go back to ii for our internet. I went to check our plan for internet and our phone bundle. I found out we were on the highest line rental plan there is. Over $40.00 per month! Also, we had thought it was costing us $44.95 per month, but that’s the 256k/128k (iirc) plan. We are really on $59.95 per month. We were getting 12Gb per month for our limit then being shaped to 64kbps if we went over that.
Now, ii has $49.95 per month for a 1.5mb/256k plan with 10Gb peak/10Gb offpeak plan with $29.95 line rental! WOAH big difference. Since Second Life is extremely bandwidth-hungry, we need all the speed we can.
So, we can get three times the download speed for less cash per month. Hmm. What would Jesus do?
I rang them today and signed up straight away! We should get it by next week and have 2 - 5 hours downtime, which is quite good.
The thing with Second Life is the textures are all on the server and uploaded by players, so if you enter an area you have to stream download the textures via UDP to your PC before they can be rendered. Also, any sound bites or streamed music/video has to be downloaded to your PC as you play. This is different from other MMO’s where the world is mostly static with minor updates downloaded in a big patch once. Second Life is totally dynamic and any part of it can change from day to day or even hour to hour. In fact, I was reading where one place people frequented they had decided to completely re-do it, so they wiped all buildings and other 3d objects and totally rebuilt the place from scratch.
I exceeded our download limit for this month at the start of the week, so we’ve been shaped to 64kbps until Friday when it gets reset so only one of us is able to play online at a time. My game isn’t affected by Bec’s but if I play her game will lag so much that it’s totally unplayable since mine will be sucking all the bandwidth to download textures, etc.
The game can cache up to 1Gb of data (the main reason I resized my C: drive the other day) which really isn’t that much in a ‘game’ this size.
Now we can’t wait until next week. 8Gb pm more download space, triple the speed and cheaper charges. Sounds great
The funny thing is, when we were on ii before (when it was still called iiNet) if you joined their iiPhone as your preferred long distance provider, they HALVED your download limit per month. That’s fuct up! NOW they do the right thing and DOUBLE your download limit per month for using iiPhone.
We don’t care whom provides us with our phone line. If we didn’t have ADSL we wouldn’t need a local line anyway, but it’s a pre-requisite unfortunately. We make most calls mobile to mobile since we get free 10 min mobile calls all day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 29th, 2005 at 10:30 pm and is filed under 1st Life, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.