BeigeJournal

I’ve had broadband Internet at home for almost two weeks now, and I really like it. Duh. I knew I would, of course, but it has had a bigger impact on my life than I expected.

I look at the weather online in the morning now. With dialup, I just didn’t have the time to wait for the system to dial and timeout and re-dial, and then, once finally up, slowly download the graphics. Instead, I’d turn on the Weather Channel, usually just as the local forecast was ending (‘…and now for the Tropical Update!’).

I’ve become quite the weather radar loop addict. The National Weather Service has lots of great stuff available, particularly satellite products. Weather Underground has all the usual data with quite nice user interfaces. For $5 a year they’ll turn off all the ads and enable 40-frame radar loops. I’m quite the fan of their radar user interface.

I do use the Internet more now, and use it differently. No more grumbling about graphics-heavy sites, and no longer do I pause to consider the waste of time before clicking on something.

Big files, of course, are much easier to get now. IT Conversations is much easier now. I downloaded the Fedora Core 2, all 2.2 gigabytes, by BitTorrent in a few hours one night. I’m very happy with Core 2, which I’ll report on at length later. I think I’ll have a much easier time keeping the system up to date, between apt-get and yum automating all the dependency installation and the bandwidth making hundred megabyte downloads seem fairly trivial.

Having the computer up all the time, with a quite stable IP address, is very handy, since now I can connect via SSH from the outside, and transfer files by sftp. SSH can automagically tunnel X11 connections through the secure link, which is really nifty.

Although cable Internet is rather more expensive than dialup, it is worth keeping the whole cost in mind. $45/month (once the six-month introductory rate ends) sounds like a lot, but of course I’ll no longer be paying just over $21 for the dialup. I’ll also no longer be making over 100 local phone calls, at $0.05 each, each month, dialing and timing out and redialing and dropping and redialing endlessly, so that’s another $5 saved. New we’re down to around $19 extra per month. It doesn’t sound so bad that way. Indeed, since DSL is cheaper than cable these days, that might be just about equal to dialup.

100 Suns, by Michael Light. Knopf, 2003.

One hundred photos of US above-ground nuclear weapons tests. Arranged in no obvious order, with a few pages of captions, generally a paragraph each, collected in the back. I understand the desire to not clutter the photos with the text, but it is awkward to have to keep the book open in two places and flip back and forth. These are mostly very pretty pictures, if you don’t think too much about what they are pictures of. It really is amazing, to those of us who grew up in the modern era of radiation protection guidelines, that people used to set these things off right out in the open, and with soldiers nearby, no less.

There are several Castle Bravo photos, the test that, though expected to yield 4–8 megatons turned out, due to the unexpected boost from lithium-7, to yield 15 MT and a radiological disaster. One wonders why, when testing a fusion bomb, they felt that they just couldn’t wait for more favorable weather. It also seems that a lot of the airdrop tests missed the target, starting with the very first, Crossroads Able. One wonders, if so much trouble was had hitting the target in very carefully organized tests involving dropping live nuclear bombs, when one would imagine extra care would be taken, where the bombs would have fallen in the confusion of actual war. No wonder there was such interest in high-yield weapons.