| Sunday,
January 13, 2002 With luck I'll get all the cleanup work
done and get on with fiction.
I am mildly irritated by Windows 2000 which doesn't seem to have a
timer you can set so that it doesn't poll every possible local net
connection the first time it tries to do "My Computer." Or
maybe it does, and I don't know about it. It's an annoyance not a fatal
defect but it's very annoying to sit and wait for something to happen.
Almost like being on the Internet.
And if you select one of those mapped drives to eliminate it because
the computer no longer exists, you can go have lunch... In fact it is very
difficult to delete a mapping for a non-existent computer. I can't imagine
why they do that. (But see below for command line remedy.)
But the Internet is worse by far today. Every page takes about five
tries to access it. Amazon has so many popup and silly ads that it is
about as easy to go down to the village bookstore as it is to try to buy a
book with all the retries. I have found the book after five retries. But
five more don't get me to the page where I can BUY it. This is insanity.
So I give up. That's one sale Amazon won't get because I will
forget I wanted it. Why are things like this? Is it the backbone
overloaded? Servers at Amazon? On a Sunday morning? Or ghosts in the
machine? Whatever it is, a system that continually frustrates its users
isn't going to stimulate a new upsurge in the economy.
Of course the telephone is no better. You'll spend hours before you
talk to a human being. I can't order a book that way either. Welcome to
the modern world of commerce, where you got down to the book store and
order a book they don't have on the shelves. At least our local Book Star
has courteous clerks.
I doubt this is anything wrong at Amazon. I can't send spam reports
either. When I go to the server room I see that the system is attempting
to send the spam cop report, but nothing it happening. Then there will be
a furious blinking of the satellite modem lights, then nothing again: the
modem lights are steady and unblinking, nothing going out or coming in.
Then they start again. Something is stopping DirecPC from getting
stuff to and from the Internet proper. The connectivity meter says the
satellite connection is fine.
When things are working they work fast and well, but it's all very
bursty now. For a minute it cleared up, now it's back to nothing
happening. Is this something technology will fix? More backbone? Or is it
just a new fact of life, that we will waste a lot of our time staring at
screens on which nothing is happening?
Of course it has to do with temperament. At my age I pretty well have
to use the "one less darned thing to worry about" strategy:
finish one task before starting another. Multi-processing is no longer a
useful way to do things (I am not sure it ever was, but I used to be able
to do it anyway). But if the Internet prevents me from doing what I set
out to do, I'm stuck. And the problem is predictability. If I think
something will take about a minute, and the Internet and Windows end me up
having to take ten minutes, I've lost time, and I may not have tried to do
that particular task at all. But it's a very random thing when the
Internet works and when it doesn't so you don't have any way to allocate
resources. Not sure there is much to DO about all this.
There is a lot of mail which I will get to in a few hours. Work first.
I just hope the Internet clears up. It seems to be working again, but for
how long I don't know. One feels so helpless...
Nope. Slowed to a crawl again. Even changing directories in the ftp
manager takes half a minute. Sigh. This is nearly intolerable. If I can
get anything up I will, but I don't hold out much hope this morning. I
can't tell where the problem is. I wish I could just stop worrying about
it. And now I can't connect to ANYTHING. Now it's back. But it never lasts
long enough to send up the mail files. I get a few seconds of high speed
connectivity then dead. Is it the satellite or something else?
I switched to the NetWinder and USR 56K modem (which connects at about
40K). The difference was dramatic: it works a bit slower than usual, but
otherwise just fine. So what is happening is there is some net congestion,
but mostly the latency of the satellite is worse than usual, and
everything is timing out. Sigh.
Now let's see how Amazon works. Huh. Cannot find page. But we got past
that one and I have ordered the book, with only one retry. But apparently
the net is just slow and choked up today. At least for me...
And of course I knew there
was a command line way to do this but I couldn't remember it, nor find
anything that told me how. I confess I don't look as thoroughly as I used
to because someone will probably tell me, and sooner rather than later.
Thanks to subscriber Carl Leubsdorf:
Don’t know if you already know this, but to
quickly see mapped drives (without waiting), try
net use
at a dos prompt. To delete (“drop”) a mapped
drive, say, “Z:”, quickly, use
net use z: /d
To get all this VERY quickly, press WindowsKey+R,
type “cmd”, hit enter. (This is my most-used shortcut; I’ve mapped
my extra mouse button to it.)
Cheers and Regards,
Carl
Carl Leubsdorf, Jr.
carl@carlthewebmaster.com
Thanks Again. And the net is working again at least at 40K on a dialup.
I am afraid to try the satellite again...
And Roberta is back from a grandmother visit. Fortunately I got shed of
the dancing girls...
And do drop in to have a look at http://www.beowulf.org/
where you can find out a lot about the potential of Linux and GNU...
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