I’ve always considered myself as someone with reasonable goals, means and demands in everything that I do. For example, I’m into computers, yet I’ve NEVER had a flagship PCB product (graphics card or whatever) anywhere near my machine, because it’s just too god damned expensive. Same thing with photography: I consider myself an enthousiast, but I am very contempt with my entry level DSLR and the old hand-em-down all-manual 35mm SLR that used to belong to my dad.

The internet has grown exponentially in the last decade, everybody knows that. The web has quickly grown from a collection of web pages and some mail/ftp/irc/whatever else servers sprinkled here in there, to a massive, multi-gazillion machine network, on which enormous amounts of data is exchange, and now not only in the form of static HTML pages and emails, but increasingly so in the form of high resolution images, high definition video,complex web applications, P2P traffic, and a myriad of other different protocols. People are now carrying the web in their pockets, their backpacks, and many households count more than one computer connected to the internet. Naturally, the growing number of users and uses of this great network exposed the drawbacks of yesterday’s internet, and it has now become apparent that bandwidth is an issue.

As you might know if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, your’s truly is departing Sunday of this week for a 13 year long military career. This is obviously a very big step in my life, in two ways: I’m going in the Army, which itself will surely affect my lifestyle, career and outlook on life forever. But, leaving for the military also invovles moving out of the family home, and into the RMC St. Jean. Knowing that free time is a very rare thing at St. Jean, I decided to clean up a couple of things I had laying around my room, and finalized some long overdue projects, such as my current case mod which is getting done at a snail’s pace, and a couple of routine maintenance operations on stuff on my home network.

Paypal is a blessing, because it allows anybody to send or receive money online, at no cost, and without the need of having a credit card. However, the painful part is seeing your money take DAYS to make the trip from your bank account to your Paypal recipient. Us Canucks have it extra hard:  American bank account transfers take only 3 to 4 business days, which can easily translate to a full week if you don’t start your transfer on Monday, and the delay is 6-8 business days for Canadian bank accounts. Imagine a situation where I’m buying something online from some eBay store in the US. 10 days for Paypal to clear if you count a weekend in, and then at LEAST 4-5 days for shipping and processing and whatever else the stuff has to go through before getting slammed on my doorstep by an idiot dressed in brown. In my book, that’s 15 days before I get my stuff. 15 days is over 2 weeks, and two weeks is half a month. Half a month is a 24th of a year, and a 24th of a year is pretty darned long.

Exam period… not much time to update these days. It’s gonna slow down though… hopefully enough so that I can manage to ride my bike and write stuff while working enough to afford a fixie.