No 30Mbps service? Only 22 or 50Mbps? Thursday Cap told me Comcast was offering 50Mbps internet in San Francisco, so I jumped on it. Their website and two customer service reps also told me they offerred 30Mbps service with only a modem upgrade. I opted for that and today drove to the local Comcast office to swap out the modem. The very helpful, but confused reps there told me there was no such 30Mbps service. Only 50Mbps and 22Mbps, both of which require a truck roll. While I waited for them to cancel my old order, which I guess was to change my 16Mbps service to, umm, 16Mbps, I looked up the 30Mbps service on my iPhone. Yep, they did offer 30Mbps, but the systems at the store had no hint of it. The reps aplogized for the confusion and said they would talk to people about the issue. I left with the modem I’d brought, and an appointment for a 50Mbps install this Tuesday.

In general everyone at Comcast I talked to was very helpful, but it seems their internal communication needs some work.

This just keeps getting worse.

“The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, ‘revealed’ such contacts.”

I think torture is ineffective for intelligence gathering because people just tell you what ever they think you want to hear so you’ll stop. We’ve heard stories of the forced “confession” and denunciation of capitalism, etc, that many American POWs had to endure. John McCain was a good example of this.

Now this Powell aide claims the Cheney’s office ordered “enhanced methods” (AKA torture) to “prove” the link between al Qaeda and Iraq.

As if it wasn’t enough that we had the CIA coming up with unsubstantiated evidence for Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction,” we were also likely torturing people so they’d make up more bogus justifications for that war.

And the Democrats went along with it…

Maybe it really is time to upgrade my WRAP to an ALIX. I’ve been using it as my home router for several years and it’s held up quite well, but my net connection may have surpassed what the WRAP can handle. I boot embedded pfSense off a CF card. It’s pretty solid.

It turns out this Comcast cable is actually pretty damn fast. It’s supposed to be a 16Mbps connection but I’m seeing a fairly stable 18Mbps with peaks up to 20Mbps. I don’t get much more if I connect my MacBook Pro directly to the cable modem, but the WRAP is totally maxed out when I’m doing a sustained download.

Download speed

The WRAP is spending nearly all it’s CPU services interrupts.

It’s very encouraging that Roubini actually likes the Obama administrations plan for toxic assets. I also hope he’s right that it doesn’t rule out nationalization of insolvent institutions. We may just come out of this mess.

I’ve been talking to several ISPs about upgrading our office Internet connectivity. Since we’re in downtown SF there are quite a few options, but none are all that cheap.

A ton of ISPs are offering an Ethernet over SHDSL service with speeds ranging from 5 - 30Mbps with pretty good SLAs and guaranteed bandwidth.

They funny thing is, all the sales people I’ve talked to suggest they are the only ones using this technology. They want to have me believe everyone else is selling ADSL with lower quality guarantees, or some expensive fiber based service. The reality is, most of them are selling about the same Ethernet over SHDSL.