Net connection

Our new home net connection has been activated. We're not really using it yet, since it doesn't have a fixed IP. So we have to move some stuff to other computers first. The only thing on it right now is my iBook running a Battlestar Galactica torrent (which has over 25000 people connected to the swarm at the moment. Twenty-five thousand!) and uploading at around 500 kilobytes per second. Which is about a sixth of the new line's 30 Mbit/s theoretical maximum.

Thirty megabits per second. In an RJ-45 jack next to the front door. That's about thirty times faster than the national backbone was back when I first came into contact with the Internet. Fuck, 30 Mbit/s is faster than most LANs were ten years ago. It's a hundred thousand times faster than the first modem I ever used.

But the thing that really weirds me out about it isn't that we have this much bandwidth. No, the really weird thing is that for the first time in my life I don't have the fastest net connection I could possibly afford. We could get 100 Mbit/s for not very much more than we pay for the 30 (which is less than we pay for the 8/1 assymetric ADSL line today). But we thought about it and decided that we don't need more than 30. Even that is well into the territory where for nearly all applications the other end will be the limit.

We can affordably get more bandwidth than we have a use for right into our home.

That is weird.

Fastlane S1:11 "Strap On"

A couple of days ago, I found out that Hudson Leick was on CSI back in November. So of course I had to download that. While looking at her IMDb entry, I also saw that she'd been on Fastlane. So I had to get that too. And while I was getting that, I got the one episode from that series I'd heard about. The one with Tiffani Thiessen snogging Jaime Pressly. In a hot tub, among other places.

Fully expecting nothing but lesploitation, I just watched it. And was somewhat positively surprised. The episode is actually a pretty good demonstration of the difference between just plain gay and slashy. I think. Some of the scenes between Billie (Thiessen) and Sara (Pressly) fall clearly under the "just gay" heading, like them being out on a fairly ordinary date or flirting in a nightclub. Other things were definitely slashy. Like first showing the two male main characters not being able to pretend to kiss each other even when they needed to, and soon after showing Billie not even hesitating before kissing another woman. Or Billie dodging Sara's "why are you doing this?" after she's offered Sara a deal that'll keep her out of prison. Or Billie being asked if she ever misses going undercover, thinking about dancing with Sara in the nightclub and then answering in the affirmative. Other scenes were a lot hotter (see above about snogging and hot tub, for example), but these were more fun. Because they were about personalities and feelings, and not just good-looking bodies.