VOIP Blues
Yeah, more horses from Lin and Roy's place.
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Junie and I were discussing Darfur tonight, and she asked an interesting
question: "If we throw our support wholeheartedly to U.N. troop
involvement, will it turn into another Iraq?" This led to a discussion of
famous 20th Century atrocities, including Mao and Stalin's starving of millions,
and Clinton's decision to back the NATO involvement in the Kosovo Operation.
Meanwhile, four hundred thousand Africans have been killed and countless numbers
raped or injured. It's too late to blame colonialist policies and too
early to point out the billions in Swiss bank accounts accrued by those who took
over. The African Union is a military joke. So, what next, now that
it's been almost a year since Bush declared the situation a genocide? I
don't know, except to think that it's increasingly apparent that there's a Human
Suffering Scale that equates 100 black people to 10 Asians to 1 Caucasian, and
even the U.N. Security Council seems to abide by the formula.
I'm still working my way through AQR. There's lots of nonfiction
(70 pages) and oceans of fiction (110 pages), and all the rest is Albert
Goldbarth — 80 pages of work that doesn't seem as
encyclopedic as most of his work, nor written with the same quirky charm, but
I'm still going through it.
I was going to tell you about the latest Dean and Deluca, but it's just more of
the same: marzipan Halloween candies, rib eye steaks at $30 a pop, Iranian
caviar in small tins that would cost you a week's salary. There was an
interesting collection of hams, including Smithfield's and imported prosciutto,
which were reasonable by comparison.
I'm still trying to figure out why Junie's Packet-8 VOIP phone is garbled at her
house. Her own charter.net VOIP phone works fine. Packet-8 support
provided some of the answers: it turns out that most cable companies
install a separate router in each household that reserves bandwidth for their
own proprietary VOIP phone, while letting the competition's packets fend for
themselves. I suggested that Junie run the VOIP test at
www.testmyvoip.com and she did.
Her results were "Forget the phone, try the Pony Express" with a score of 1.1.
Sigh, what you gonna do?
Yes, I got the latest Poetry, but it has sat on my desk while I was in Silicon
Valley. More on that tomorrow, hopefully.