Cheap shots

So friggin tired again. I do not enjoy how freakishly exhausting the last few days have been. At least I'm starting to get myself back to something that closely approximates my former living standards. Right now I am absolutely shattered, laying on my couch, listening to the usual sour yellow sounds of my almost newfound urban unliving. I was born not so many years ago, and I feel like an old man. Well, to me it's been a lifetime, but if my grandfather was to see how I am right now, he would slap me with something fierce till i got off my butt and actually done something my age. But, today I'm not going to run my usually grumpy math on you again. At least not in the same way I've been doing so for the past few days. What I intend to do today is try to find out where the hell it all went down the drain for me, and explain why instead of passively doing what I would in my distorted point of view consider most people would do, I just can't help feeling unsettled and wanting to do something about it. Yes, I'm yet again on autopilot, and this can only mean that it's time for a brain dump, the size of a birthday cake :-).
[]
As any other good story I have, this one starts yet again with a cup of coffee, sometime in the morning of yet another sunny day. Where this story ends is a few minutes later, after having drunk that cup of coffee, finding me lying on my back and contemplating what would happen if I'd go back to sleep. Pretty weak don't you think? Another kid feeling like an old man? Well, these days i do realize that a lot of my peers in ages similar to mine tend to feel just like that. Sick and tired of almost anything going for them. Just passively taking whatever life's going to dish out for them and waiting for someone to get them of their lazy asses. And then it kinda hits you. This is not the way it's supposed to be when you're still in college, no matter what you're doing. But more and more people I know, and that would mostly include me, prefer to just be idle, waiting for someone to give them a call, or in their bed, unable to get up, or having their laughs under the same bed's covers. And that's it. A weird thought occurs to some of them, and that would be what would have been happening to me too i guess, but i quit that game, and the thought is, that's it right now, I'm supposedly doing something constructive with my life (that being just getting by in college), I have someone in my life (that again being a boy/girlfriend), i've got something to take care of that free time (take your pick here) and that's it, i feel complete. Well, I have one, very simple question. How the fark can you be feeling complete? You're 20 something and you think you feel complete because you have most of the things that someone your age is expected to have going?

I do not think that this is being complete. I believe that this is just settling for something less than you could be going for. But what's more? And how exactly is this a compromise? Let me explain: Most people just try to get by. Get by at college, while they could actually be getting their hands dirty with some digging deeper, getting by with their spare time, finding something to keep them pacified so they won't start screaming their lungs out when they realize that they're not really doing anything meaningful, getting along with the same group of good old friends because they don't really wanna be exposed to anything new, getting along with that boy/girlfriend because they're scared they might end up alone. And the funny thing is that most people kinda feel good about getting this deal, because they're going to get a college degree, and they're moving on along with a group of friends, and they've got that sweet relationship that keeps em going and they chose to kill the rest of their time by doing something while in wait for one of the afore mentioned feel-good factors to take place. I dunno about you but to me this sounds just like taking care of one's insecurities. This is just like reassuring oneself that "You know what? I'm pretty well off. I'm gonna have my shitty 9-5 job, a family and a social circle in a few years. Isn't this happiness?" I dunno, for some people this may really be happiness and success. But to me it's just like taking care of one insecurities.

This might sound really stupid, but I really do think that having insecurities is a good thing at this stage. To most people, they're just a sign that something's not right, that somebody's got problems, issues whatever. Well, i got news for you: there's always something wrong, and the universe doesn't settle the score just like that, and having problems and issues is only natural, the thing is what you choose to do about them. These are the sort of things that allow you to build momentum to move forward, to be better, to achieve and excel, to fulfill. To settle for nothing less than what you wanted. So my news and views are just the following, there are two choices when facing a problem arising from this sort of a situation. You've gotta deal with it if you don't wanna go mad, and you can either deal with it the same way most do, by compromising, or you might actually choose to give in and really do something about it. "Gee dude, you've got a weight problem? Well you know you have to love yourself and accept the way you are" OR "How about trashing all those twinkies and doing some sport for a change you lazy ass?" Your choice. I realize that most people consider me as a bastard. It's okay, I've acted like one on more than one occasions. And I don't think I can genuinely say I regret that. Being a bastard works fine for me sometimes. Especially the times I wanna be left alone. Which are significantly increasing in frequency whenever I decide I'm not afraid of being different.




"’cause he gets up in the morning,
And he goes to work at nine,
And he comes back home at five-thirty,
Gets the same train every time.
’cause his world is built ’round punctuality,
It never fails.

And he’s oh, so good,
And he’s oh, so fine,
And he’s oh, so healthy,
In his body and his mind.
He’s a well respected man about town,
Doing the best things so conservatively."

The kinks -- well respected man


two much old rock and red bull for me i guess. so what? everyone can take cheap shots sometimes

Where have all the good times gone: Fun days as a unix terrorist

Today, after a long time I decided to take a small trip to see an old friend of mine, with whom we've had a few too many all-nighters doing what we used to think we were best at, what at that time we used to call unix terrorism, or in reality just being plain unix geeks, messing around with a bit of this and a bit of that. I assure you that nobody got hurt while we were at it, but I can also tell you those were some of the happiest/funniest days of my life. As a refresher to me, the friends I've shared these crazy moments and my anonymous readers, I'm going to talk about some of those nights (staying up during the day was not really our strong point) and enumerate some of the highlights (or really lows, it's funny how when sometimes from some aspects you've hit rock bottom, years pass and you start to really appreciate the way it all happened).

So, let's get started. a few years ago, talking to some friends on irc i get my hands on what they said, and i thought to have been a 0day exploit. All cool up to this point. Logged in to my computer with an account I used to have in order to only use when testing new stuff coming from unidentified sources. Run it once. Didn't seem to delete anything. Now all I had to do was to find a target box [before you start the script kiddie flames bear in mind i just wanted to test it and i was going to leave it alone afterwards]. So, my friend suggests an old system which for the purpose of this entry I am going to name kenny. The thing didn't seem to work on kenny, and then the same friend started obsessing about how we should delete the logs. An few minutes later he gets a shadow file from a forgotten nis server in kenny's neighborhood, so decides to distribute the files to everyone. But, how do you distribute a shadow file between four geeks? Just to give you a hint, not with a usb stick, not nfs, not samba, not afs, not sending them over msn/icq/aim/whatever. You have to set up an irc server on your lan, so you can also centrally coordinate your efforts. (The thing that still escapes my understanding is the fact that anyone involved was in the exact same house, so why the hell did we really need all this? i dunno). So, because the guy was tired to set up the ircd himself he gets on his walkie talkie in order to have the following amazing conversation.

A: Dude, I need you to set up an irc server for me
B: Man, I'm kinda busy now.
A: What's up are you getting your ass kicked in an MUD again? Or just downloaded another porn flick?
B:Mkay, I'm on it.
[5 minutes later]
A: What's happening with that irc server?
B: I'm on it. Just give me a minute.
[5 minutes later again]
A: Look man, get the f* off the MUD and set up the ircd. It's important.
B: I am setting up the ircd.
[5 minutes later and after sniffing traffic to find out that the other guy was indeed in an MUD]
A: Dude, i disconnected the modem. I just downloaded bahamut on the box. Now set it up.
B: Ok, I'll start now. Any particular thing you want me to set up?
A: Just set up the ircd !&^&*!^!@*&^@*&^!@*&!^@

So, we spent the rest of the night running john etc. Moral of the story escapes me, but every time i think that they were using walkie talkies in order to talk with somebody in the next room and convince them to set up an irc server kinda cracks me up.

Then again there were other stories that were more like a recurrent theme. Like every time I got a used unix box from ebay. It all started one day, when I got an sgi indy. Happily opening up the package I connect the indy to a 13w3 monitor we got in an epic dumpster diving session. Soon enough, the indy was powered up and going through its booting sequence. When that was done, what i got was a pretty plain login window. I looked in the box for a password, nada. Tried just the usual sequence of week passwords, nothing again. Now some people may say maybe i should connect the disk to another machine, but at that time I did not have another machine that could read sgi drives. So, what do we do next? First google the matter of resetting a password. I still remember some junk about removing a jumper on the indy's mobo and then doing some things in the administative menu, but that didn't work at all. But there still had to be a way. And indeed there was, as my then working as a sysadmin friend showed me. Hook up the indy on the same network with an old laptop, and try logging in with a default account. A lot of people who have used SGIs can say that they do come with a fair share of security holes. So, soon enough we logged in via telnet, got a look at the good old /etc/passwd, soon got cracking and a bit later we were in. To our surprise none of the info that was on the box got deleted, In our hands we had a box belonging to a financial company and running just the way it would run in their offices. We figured they probably gave it to somebody ti get rid of it for them, and that someone never bothered wiping the drives. Moral of the story always wipe your drives when you decide to sell something on ebay, and always poke around when you get something. We sure did after that point.

There were a lot of other good moments to remember from back at that time. One that I believe a number of people might relate to was a moment that can really stink, but when done right and with a number of friends, it can really be fun, dumpster diving. We've tried dumpster diving in a number of different places, universities, company offices, there were nights were we would just go out for a walk and bump into something interesting coming out of a big black bin, and soon enough what would be sticking out of the bin would be one of us. Some of our most prized possessions come from dumpster diving such as a big ass 13w3 sgi monitor, computer parts, cabling, i even remember one time we got enough parts to build a completely new box, which you can see along with the indy from the previous story:





I can go on with stories, the amount of stupidity, mischief and funny stuff that can go on in a house full of geeks in three years is just too big. From setting up our machines to work as a cluster, just because we could do it, to these too many days we used to get up just to find a room fool of parts and empty pizza boxes and coffee mugs, we used to do an incredible amount of things, that without having any specific meaning at the time or even now, they are still too fun to ignore. Things I've been missing during the last year. Sometimes, just like this one I wonder what the hell has happened to us? Well, others have started working, others have gotten into the world of startups, me, I'm a research student and I hear that some have even got a life. I guess we just grew up, but times like these when it's five in the morning and I'm still awake in front of a keyboard sipping a cup of mud I can't help but to look back and hope that one day maybe we can do it again.

When your brain is crapping up on you...

Today I had a good idea. An idea I liked at least. You or anyone else for that matter might find it stupid, but it sounded good to me. What do rational people do when they have good ideas? Well, in the old days I'd probably procrastinate on it and forget it by the time i hit the next day. But these days are different. These days I'm feeling like a working man. I do things. So you follow it up and try to see where it gets you. What happens if this idea lands you to a place where you are sick of the way things are going for you, while you're stuck at 6.00 in the morning feeling kinda sick, in a chair in front of a computer running your program for the gazelionth time while, you no longer have the brain juice to figure out what's wrong with it. And to top it off, you doubt how good your brain is these days because of strange incidents. Such as the whole rodent from hell thing, and the possibility that this was only happening in my head. The possibility that I might be needing psychiatric monitoring at the age of 21 is not as glam as it used to be back in the day. I mean I knew that one day I was definitely going to go nuts, but brain damage when you actually start finding something interesting can really be daunting. You see 48+ hours later still no sign of the rat and I'm still kinda hearing things. But unless the rat in awe realized whose house he was trespassing and went to commit suicide in honor of the master of the house he soiled (and that is if the rat was real) OR the possibility that the rat is french and waiting for the cheese on the traps to turn blue along with that bowl of red wine, there are only two more possibilities:

A. the rat has somehow mysteriously already left the house,
B. there was no rat to begin with

Because the ways in and out of the house do require more muscle and brains than I am willing to admit a rat that is not the reincarnation of Einstein might have, current evidence points mostly to B. In addition to that I do have to admit that I have not been giving my brain (and myself too) proper attention lately. Especially when it comes to sleeping habits I am a really lousy guy. At least my brain got really creative while trying to give me the word that I am not doing stuff right. So, what's going through my head while my brain wants to make his way out of it? Not a lot of stuff right now thanks to the fact that yet again I haven't slept for a while. A bit of satisfaction for the fact that another one of my ideas seems to be working alright. A lot of frustration cause I'm running out of brain juice to improve on that idea and further explore some others. Even more confusion when I'm trying to put the pieces of the rat puzzle together and yet I do not have enough evidence to just do so. It is now 6.30. The dawn is upon me yet again and the sky looks cloudy. It's almost inviting to forget about everything and just go to bed. Maybe I should do just that. On the other hand right now I'm in negotiations with myself, concerning if I should just try to (probably in vain) do some more work, till it's time to go to my supervisor meeting. Additionally I'm doing some research on rats. According to which rats are prone to upper respiratory problems. Starting to wonder here if my cigarette smoking has managed to scare the rat away. Hmmm, that would be a nice selling point for my dear tobacco companies. Have rats? Start smoking.

No, let's get serious. Let's take some facts about rats [according to wikipedia]:

1.Rats have a significant impact on food production. Estimates vary, but it is likely that anything between 1/5 and 1/3 of the world's total food output is eaten, spoiled or destroyed by rats and other rodents. -STOP WORLD HUNGER, KILL A RAT TODAY

2.The Black Plague is traditionally believed to have been caused by the micro-organism Yersinia pestis, carried by the rat flea Xenopsylla cheopis which preyed on Rattus rattus living in European cities of the day; it is notable that these rats were also victims themselves. -OOOHHHH Those poor little rats, it was like ratocide, and a few people died along the way

3.While modern wild rats can carry Leptospirosis and some other "zoonotic" conditions (those which can be transferred across species, to humans, for example), these conditions are in fact rarely found. -That's nice to know, i still wish that if you disagree with me you should die from leptospirosis tho.

4.Wild rats living in good environments are typically healthy and robust animals. Wild rats living in cities may suffer themselves from poor diet and internal parasites but do not largely spread disease to humans. -So, i had a malnutritioned rat in my house. If he's gone i certainly hope he never comes back and has bowel problems.

5. (about rat baiting):Before the contest could begin there was a requirement for the capture of potentially thousands of rats. The rat-catcher would be called upon to fulfill this requirement. A famous rat-catcher from Victorian England was Jack Black. -Jack Black followed up his rat catching career as an actor and musician. Moral of the story you might need to swim in rat shit in order to make it big in showbiz.

6.Although the payment would be high for catching and selling rats to breeders, there is a high risk of getting bitten. Rats are a carrier of disease and can be life threatening. Also, if you wind up in a location with a rat infestation, there is a liability of getting mobbed. - Death by a mob of rats, wtf? What can ever be more humiliating?

7. Rats have been observed to self-cannibalise their tails. -Well, do you think my rat ate himself? Hmmm

8. Either sex will make a good pet, however if you plan to purchase more than one, it is recommended that they are of the same sex, as rats breed quickly and often. -Rats get more action than me, why the hell should i be feeling bad for wanting to kill them?

9. Rats are part of the chinese zodiac system, famous rats have been:
Adolf Hitler
Heinrich Himmler
Kim II Sung, North Korean dictator
Peter the Great, Russian emperor and absolutist
Catherine I, Russian empress and absolutist
Alexander I, Yugoslavian king and dictator
Eva Braun, mistress of Adolf Hitler
Richard Nixon
-Just look at this list, some of the biggest Pieces of historical crap are rats. Do you still like them? Do you admit to having dreams of totalitarianism? Be very very careful with your answers from now on.

10. Finally I am a rat according to the chinese horoscope. Do you think that my visitor was a female rat who could no longer resist my species transcending sexuality?

Well a lot of developments here. Things to sleep on if I may also say. Especially if for yet another day i wake up without any sign of pest activity in my house reinforcing my belief in the possibility I have been spending a good amount of time hallucinating. At least i get a weekend off. Almost off. Just repeating old pieces of work. Hrmf. At least a good night's sleep? Not exactly , but still just some rest. Not exactly quality sleep, but rest. Time to clean up tomorrow. Sterilize the house. And maybe use a day for something else. Go someplace except london.
Hmmm, time for a night walk down the neighborhood. And down Abbey Road, with my shoes of soul.



A walk in Bayswater and some fresh air can be good right now. Clear my head for a bit. Hopefully.

Research, rats and insomnia

Coming home from my questionably brilliant overnight mix of insomnia, alcohol, failing computation and aimless wandering around west London i thought i caught something crawling on the kitchen floor through the corner of my eye. Unsure, dazed and confused, I did the only reasonable thing under the circumstance, said to myself f* it, grabbed my wakizashi and sat down in the living room to see what was on tv. And then there was that noise. Without hesitation I went to the kitchen in order to investigate. After demolishing the lower part of a kitchen counter with the wakizashi and for a second marveling at the fruits of my as always innovative handiwork a rat jumped towards my direction from the now diseased counter and then hid behind the kitchen sink. There were now to courses of action available to me:

a. repeat my handiwork, destroy the kitchen and finely chop the rat with my wakizashi
b. call my landlady and religiously bitch about it.

Being ahead of your time is tough. For example although i knew my handiwork is something that one day humans all over the planet are going to appreciate as the founding basis of an unimaginably distinctive wave of artistic (and not only) deconstruction( and destruction) being the tired, lazy and angry sob I was at that point of time i decided to go with plan b. Soon enough I had my landlady setting traps all over the kitchen for me. Wanting the smell of fresh rat blood to be the last thing i smell before going to bed and being greeted the next morning by the sweet stench of a decaying rat corpse, i decided to wait for it a bit more. I waited and waited, and then I waited a bit more. During that weight period images of what can be done with a rat had been running through my head. BTW: IF YOU FIND KILLING RATS INEXCUSABLE ETC PLEASE DIE FROM LEPTOSPIROSIS YOU RAT LOVING HIPPY. Anyway since the rat didn't seem to be hungry I said to myself well dimmu, you might as well move on to your daily routine. So 40 hours with no sleep at all, more red bull and working with matlab for which in the past I have expressed very angry feelings. My idea of applying a classification algorithm to a regression problem seemed to work. The ideas about the rat were stalling tho. And because of the whole being tired factor getting in my way and possibly messing up what I thought might work, i decided to go to sleep hoping that the rodent would soon meet the great rat-catcher in the heavens above and I would wake up to the beautiful stench of its dead body. En contraire to my beautifully planned master-plan i woke up sometime next noon from the manic beeps of msn messenger and a doctor friend of mine asking to see if i once again managed to miraculously survive from yet another manic binge.

Sharing my experience with the good doctor also enabled a different perspective in the whole matter. You see research suggests that people who have been awake for a long amount of time, and consumed alcohol have been reported to be suffering from hallucinations. And, the most common hallucination is, you guessed it, rats. NOW, i've paid good dollar in my youthful days for a nice hallucination, and I must tell you, although I'd hate to advocate the use of central nervous system stimulants, this was a much more welcome alternative to the one of a living rodent still at my place. However, I must for the record state that this was not a salient stimulus of a rat walking past the corner of my eye. That was a rat coming at me and making sounds. However, it did bring up a couple of ideas/suggestion. Yes dear acid-heads if you can't get your supply, just wait. If you see a rat there's a pretty good chance you might be getting freebies from your cns. On the other hand if you live in a rat infested house, how about trying some booze and staying up all night? Might not take the rat away, but it will fill in the void of loneliness your unwanted roomy was down with lately. Anyway, further exploring the possibility of what I had experienced being a hallucination, 24 hours later the rat still hasn't gone for the bait of the 6 traps set exclusively for him in the kitchen. Except if the rat's French and waiting for the cheese to turn blue. In which case maybe i should get a bowl of red wine for him out too. On the bright side of things tho, i definitely didn't hallucinate about the algorithm working while waiting for the snappy sound of a rat trap choking a rodent to death to fly like music to my ears. So, i sat down again today, verified that the whole thing works and send an email to my supervisor, who also thought the experiment was good, and then gave me a load more to experiment with, but hey, I'm the one who wants a degree and a phd next year so I shouldn't really be complaining now should I? I mean I might have a rat in my house, and writing some more code is the problem? Well, as long as matlab doesn't crap up on me again it shouldn't be now, should it? And I am really happy to be working on something interesting instead of pottentially reducing my life span due to oversleeping as the latest study suggests. However as my current research habits indicate I might be in for a treat as the following picture illustrates:


But hey, you know, i'd take lung cancer and psychotic breakdowns to a bacterial infection from a rampant rodent any day of the week.

Convergence of an algorithm and why i think the beta band where previously programmers

After my incident with matlab crashing on me somewhere in the early hours of this day its now 8.00 in the morning still sitting at my freshly awoken friends house, listening to some happy ska from the mighty mighty boss tones. Sun is still up there, 2 hours and counting of pure, blissful, uninterrupted sunshine, i think that the sun is going for a year record considering his track behavior for this year. Intentions for whatever this turns out to be (day, hours, minutes): study graph visualization techniques & an intro to spectral graph theory, prove one theorem, an extension concerning regression, some helper functions and work on graph kernels. My attention span is minimal, my ability to hold a train of thought is questionable when I'm really rested and feeling like doing something with my day. So what are the expectations from whatever follows? I really wish I knew.

For some reason I can't stop typing like a tazmanian devil, while i am informed about the latest live gigs from my friend. 16 may funeral for a friend in shepherd's bush, no tickets, goldfinger?3rd of may, can still get tickets. monsters of rock? 38 pounds for alice cooper and deep purple? dunno. SLEEP SOON PLEASE. Also doing some notes on stuff on my moleskine. And looking through some flash cards/to do list on the not so hip hipster look-alike i have laying around like a gutted small notebook all over the floor.

Today i decided i'm also going to try to take a look at some new media projects, or more specifically how can AI and data mining improve the methods for acquisition processing and transmission of newspieces from a grassroots journalists point of view. NOTE TO SELF: Find somebody who really takes media work seriously like a media student or something. Other things that are on my todo list: Set up RoR on the mac today and try out some of their screencast style tutorials. Take a look at visual environments like processing and nodebox (they do have some pretty impressive capabilities at creative & interactive information visualization ranging from scientific to seriously tripping on something that would make mister tim Leary proud and shooting theories about how cognitive evolution was affected by copious neuroactive chemical agents). Really interesting frameworks. Finally, some reading material has to be revised for both science, and strangely industrial design implications on sociological evolution -more especially on that later, on my other blog


"Start is the end
More or less
Do you brake for the bend?
More or less "
The Beta Band -- Space, heroes to zeroes

Digital Masochism Universal

So, you've got a great algorithm, up and running and you think to yourself, maybe i should really push the sucker. But first, let me explain. These days I've been doing some work for a change, and my specific area of interest is semi-supervised learning over data dependent graphs. Given a dataset and a limited number of labeled examples in {-1, 1} the purpose is to assign positive or negative labels. You could do this, in a relatively small time of iterations without really pushing your computer's processor to the great chipmaker in the sky from overheating. However note that the predicted labels will only assymptotically tend to +1 or -1. So, yours truly although having got an absolutely correct classification but not in that theoretically possible group of values decides, well if in only a thousand iterations i get these results, maybe i should go for a mil.

A few hours later at a friends place my mac was happily crunching away every single number in the dataset, making progress. After seeing phantasm and confessions of a dangerous mind, we got to the point where it was past 2.00 in the morning but at least we have gone through the 500k iterations milestone. Almost happy i thought cool, it should be ready by the time i get finished with seeing ghostbusters and maybe annother movie.

So happily i leave my mac crunch away. Ritually repeating to myself, yes dimmu, the energy should converge and everything is going to be okay. Just a reminder, when something works in theory, theres a world of difference of really trying it. Somewhere during watching ghostbusters the algorithm had reached the point of 850k iterations. Schweeet this humble hacker thought to himself, almost there. And then, then a whole world of pain, screaming and frustration, and no i am not referring to Bill Murray, OR Dan Akroyd. I am referring to matlab crashing on me when i though i was getting somewhere. Why dear mother of the flop have you abandoned me? And another question arose, where the hell is that thing that generates c-code from your .m files? It now is 7.22 in the morning and this humble hacker is at it again, downing yet another can of Relentless( thank you coca cola company for a cheap alternative to red bull that comes in cans of 500 ml, the programming community seriously wants to voice its satisfaction with your new product through the carpal tunnel encumbered hands of this immensely aggravated writer).

So, what have we learned here today? A. Even the language of scientific computing can crap up on you at any time. B. If you wanna do something right there is a significant chance that you might be much better off by rolling your own tools. C. I seriously need some sleep, or a girlfriend, and a corporately employed programmer who works on numerical computing software to punch. Mostly sleep tho. And i still have to walk home. Seems like a great day out there, the sun's been up and gracing this sunlight deprived country called england with his presence for the past 1 and a bit hours. Too bad i'm probably going to be in a seriously comatose state once i get back home. Oh well. What can you ever possibly do? Except practicing obscene acts of violence on software engineers so they can make a product that really scales? Strangely, i find myself wishing i was an eschimo today, with a really big harpoon somewhere where they write mathematical/engineering software. Just making sure software meets up to its hype and the people behind it stay focused. Biiiiiig fucking harpoooon.

This sucks!

Once I found a place to move into in London i settled down, ordered my phone line and a broadband connection with tiscali. And for a time it was all well. And then one day, once the honeymoon period was over i could no longer surf. I could no longer browse. The reason for that is their fair user policy. Right now I'm trying for the gazelionth time to register with a yahoo id. And so far i cant friggin do it because simply the connection will time out while i'm trying to complete the signup process. This fair user policy is so fair it's killing me. Lesson learned, next time you're looking for broadband make sure you know every little bit of policy. Just cause they don't have a cap doesn't mean they cant f*** you in the a**.