I got no strings

[austin_dern]

Another bit of cable company oddness -- while I hadn't gotten a bill, I did get an offer of some free stuff for signing a new contract for cable modem service. Signing up for two years of the really high-speed cable modem offers the choice of an ``HP PSC 2355 All-In-One Printer; HP Photosmart R607 Digital Camera; 10 % off Monthly Subscription'', worth altogether S$1189; or ``Linksys Wireless G Broadband Router; choice of either Linksys Wireless G PC Card or USB Adaptor; Free Cable Modem; 15% off monthly subscription; waiver of installation fee'', worth S$670. One year with the lower-speed cable modem (the one I've got, though see below) gives a choice of the digital camera and ``Zara Fashion Vouchers'', worth S$699; or the wireless router and choice of card or USB adaptor, worth S$189.

I'm easily talked into getting free stuff for things I'd buy anyway, and since I've got a perfectly good digital camera I'll go for the wireless router. It's odd there's such a disparity in worth of the giveaways, though. It turns out you can't sign up for this in person; it's done online or by phone. The URL they gave for signing up, doesn't work, though the right one can be figured out by searching the web site.

Oh, and they've sent two letters -- one, that my cable modem was going to be slightly upgraded, improving speed and not changing cost. The other ... was my bill.

Trivia: Apollo 9 was the first Apollo mission for which the three crewmen all slept at the same time. Source: Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, Courtney G Brooks, James M Grimwood, Loyd S Swenson Jr.

Currently Reading: Redcoats and Rebels: The American Revolution through British Eyes, Christopher Hibbert.

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Ahh, wirelessness is wonderful. I finally managed to get the house's WiFi network established the other week, thanks to a friend's surplus WaveLAN card from an old AirPort base station, and the OS X generic wireless card driver (http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net/). Although fate doesn't quite agree this is a good thing, deserving of nurturing.. the first time in the bath, everything was fine (what? Doesn't everyone take their iBook in the bath with them?). Second time, as I squirmed around in the rather narrow bath, a tiny jet of water aimed itself squarely at its keyboard. Third time, the restart after applying the latest security update caused a loss of NAT, so I could only access Ocelot from either Dormouse or Bunny.. seems as if BrickHouse (the firewall front end I use - sadly moribund, but still works fine) hadn't automatically started natd as usual. Still, I did get to play with VNC over an ssh tunnel, so my watery geekish amusement was sated.

What does "low" and "high" speed cable modem access actually work out at? Certainly, that's a most decent offer. ISTR the best @Home could come up with was free installation (thankfully, they didn't insist on installing their version of IE, accepting all I needed was a live cable modem offering up an ethernet socket).. still, while they lasted, the service was pretty good - I'd routinely see 100-200K/s, sometimes up to 500K/s, depending on what the route and server in question was like. Though their homepage.. oh, I wish I'd saved that. This was the height of the Portal Revolution, when every business' front page was striving to be all you could ever need for the day, at a glance. *cough* This added many, many obnoxious animated GIFs to the mixture. It was.. memorable.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I am a touch intimidated by the thought of setting one up -- assuming I figure out how to get it, since the phone number given me is ``1630'', which is four digits short of being, well, a number -- but it'd be nice to not have wires running all the way across my living room.

As for cable modem speeds -- somehow I managed not to figure out the pattern before, but now it's obvious. Starhub 1500 (my subscription, the low speed) offers downloads of 1.5 Mbps; 3500 (the high speed) offers 3.5 Mbps. They're upgrading the two to 2000, 2.0 Mbps; and 6000, 6.0 Mbps, respectively. Upload speed for 1500/2000 is 128 kbps; for 3500/6000 it's 384 kbps. No hardware exchanges needed.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

*adjusts your tail as a wi-fi antenna*

seriously.. nice!
best of wishes with the free stuff.
the best wi-fi i've found (in affordable range) has been the Airport Express ^v^ ..

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, the Airport Express is very attractive, although since it doesn't seem to have a phone plug-in I couldn't use it to simplify things back home. Still, as something that comes in for free the Linksys thing does have a rather good price point.