Gray's blog

Howdy,

So now that I’ve started blogging a bit more recently, I thought it was about time I come up with some weekly ritual-ish type of thing to do so that I get an incentive to post interesting content.

What I came up with, was ‘watch the week’. Basically I will post and embed what I’d say are pretty damn good shows/movies. You’ll see them all for the most part here, with no ads or popups.

For each one I post, I’ll do about a paragraph review to go with it. Just so you get a feel for what your about to watch. I’ll also give each a rating out of 5.

So then, I’ll get started with the first one ever:

I’ll open this one with a pilot episode I just finished watching:

Show: White Collar
Hulu’s Description: When the trail of elusive criminal “The Dutchman” deadends, FBI Agent Peter Burke teams up with a most unlikely partner to catch him; the imprisoned Neal Caffrey: master criminal, con man extraordinaire and Peter’s most accomplished collar.
Hulu Rating (At time of writing): 4 out of 5.
My Rating: 4 out of 5.

This episode is a very interesting pilot, for what looks like it will be a good season. Coming from USA network, which is starting to push some good ideas for new shows, this looks to be another good one.

For this one, I’ll go with a movie I just got around to watching based on reviews. It came out in 2000 but I hadn’t heard of it and don’t know how many people have seen it:

Movie: Boiler Room
IMDB Plot: A college dropout gets a job as a broker for a suburban investment firm, which puts him on the fast track to success, but the job might not be as legitimate as it sounds.
IMDB Rating: 6.9 out of 10
My Rating: 4 out of 5.

This is a very interesting movie to watch, the story moves quickly and is narrated in a style similar to ‘Fight Club’. As a forum member put it, ‘It’ll make you go out and want to make a million dollars.’ Well worth the watch.

Anyways that’ll wrap it up for this first post. Just keeps getting me thinking what I should do with this blog. If you got anything you think would be cool to watch / listen to, feel free to drop a comment!

Ciao,

- Gray

Sup,

So last night (10-20-09) I made a tweak to the search engine part of Axcid that greatly improved the service. So before yesterday, keyword searches such as:

mac dre, dr dre, rem

would return nothing. Also words under 4 letters in length weren’t counted, resulting in less relevance in search results & various other bugs. Last night I set out to correct that and did so successfully.

You’ll notice that specific searches now get more results, as well as the searches above which before returned nothing, now all return results.

This is just another step for Axcid’s future as a search engine, it gets better nearly every day.

Alright, I’m fed up with this god damn service!

I have called ‘tech support’ many times and heard all kinds of crazy stories & ideas on how to fix my connection issues including but not limited to:

- Duct tape modem to window
- ‘Your modem is connecting to a tower across the lake when your surrounded by them’..
- ‘We know it’s slow’
- Youtube is not considered ‘normal internet use’

This bullshit is coming from a company that pitches ‘go beyond 3g’ on their billboards. If anyone wants proof t-mobile’s 3g on a wifi tether is faster then this feel free to drop a comment, but rest assured it kills it.

Clearwire reps/tech support also admit that it is slow and much slower then T-Mobile’s 3g. They make claims about Wi-Max but I doubt that service will be better. Not to mention it hasn’t rolled out yet.

Let’s just see the average day on clearwire’s speedtest:

Which is about 1/3 the speed of decent dial up. Ugh.

This is with 5 out of 5 bars on the modem by the way. And this is on a day when the internet service itself actually works, outages are regular occurrences. I’m also on my second modem, due to the other one completely failing to connect _at_all_ after several months of use.

I have NEVER received the ‘1.5′ mbps of speed my service plan dictates. Yesterday, a 10mb download ended up taking 2 hours.

This is, without a doubt, the worst internet service I’ve ever used.

Edit:

So I decided to speedtest T-Mobile’s 3g to compare. A couple things first:

- Contrary to the image, I am not in kansas.
- The ping time went down about 200ms on average after I did this test.
- This is the WORST it has ever been (Tethered 3g), although it still kills clearwire it’s not SUPER fast.

The proof is in the pudding here.

Edit Again:

So about a day after posting this (19 hours), my internet speed suddenly increased beyond anything it has before. Ever in 2 years of having it:

I also noticed the amount of bars went from 5 to 3, and the speed increased significantly. Meaning the tower I was connected to changed, although the positioning of the modem did not. I find it a bit odd that the time I get the fastest internet I have had comes a day after posting this, but that’s a bit I’m not going to touch on.

Ciao,
Gray