When I was sixteen, I got my first job. It was Aprilish and I got a phone call on a Saturday morning with an instant job offer from a restaurant I had applied to the summer before (it seems they held on to my application until after I turned 16). I said what the heck I'll be right there!
I got there and they pointed me at the dishwasher (a big ass Hobart), showed me the ropes, and told me to get to work.
Not a bad job for a 16 year old kid, even though at the time mini-wage was $1.65/hour (two bonus points if you can figure out what year that was).
I did weekends only. Eventually they made me the Chef Salad tosser as well (the cooks didn't like to be bothered with making them). The job, as first jobs go, was great.
Then, one Sunday in May I walked into work and the shit hit the fan.
It was Mothers Day. Nobody warned me.
I suppose if they had I would've called in sick.
The place was packed solid all day. The dishes piled up. People kept ordering Chefs Salads. I had a hard time keeping up. It was insane. I was worked to a frazzle for the first time in my life.
I went home dazed and exhausted and promised myself I would never set foot in a restaurant on Mothers Day again.
All these years later I have managed to keep that vow.
So, today, the Day Before Mothers Day 2008, I did a 250 mile road trip to see my dear old gray haired mother and take her out for lunch. She really doesn't mind since she hangs out with Church Ladies on Sundays anyway. I guess their kids are jerks, too.
As luck would have it, Mom has a neighbor who has a wide-open wireless router hooked up to a CenturyTel cable modem. I brought my laptop with me and jacked in to play UT on BOT House.
I was impressed.
I don't often get a chance to play from the Internet, since the server's right here on DinkNET. In the comfort of my own home I get a UT ping of ~18 but I kick it back with a PktLag (packet lag) value of about 120 so people don't know it's me. I hadn't played off-DinkNET since before the uplink speed was doubled and I was interested in seeing how much the upgrade had improved things.
I got a "Low" 802.11g connection (about 2 bars) to the wireless router in my Mom's neighbor's house with a wireless connection speed of about 18 megabits/sec (somewhat sucky for g) and I still got a ~46-64 ping on the server.
That is unheard of around here. Low 80s, yes. High 70s? Maybe. Rarely. But 40s? No way. It just doesn't happen.
So when I finally made it home I did a traceroute and ping test back to the neighbor's wireless router (I got the IP address from my logs).
The results: 9 hops with a 35ms ping. It doesn't get much better than that.
For instance, my covert VPN (OpenVPN - HIGHLY recommended) back to work, which is only 22 miles away, has a 35-40 ms ping and goes through no less than 13 router hops, 12 of which, oddly enough, simply bounce around inside RoadRunner's network (WTF is up with that?).
From the traceroute test it turns out there is only Level3 (a Big Ass™ Internet backbone carrier) between CenturyTel and RoadRunner.
In other words, there's probably no better place on Earth to play BOT House from than from this guy's Internet connection (although you'd probably get the same results from any CenturyTel connection in Northern Ohio).
As an unbiased test of the BOT House upgrade I probably couldn't have picked a worse connection. It was just too damned good.
I told Mom (jokingly of course) she should get a computer since she has free wireless nearby.
I wonder if she'd play UT.
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