Fourth Anniversary of 9-11

Well today is September 11, 2005 which marks the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Come to think of it, prior to the attacks, I do not really remember hearing much about terrorism. Now, ever since that day, there has been so much in the news about terrorism and it really annoys me how such a thing is going on in today’s society. Speaking of which though, Australia has now proposed some new laws to help combat terrorism. But still, no one should have to go to the extent of having to increase security measures just to prevent such a thing.

So it looks like Murphy’s Law strikes once again. It’s either I wash my car and it will rain within the next few days, or I don’t wash it and it won’t rain at all. Well today it looked pretty close to raining; even the trusty ol’ weatherman said it would. But now, just as it’s getting darker (and I can’t really be bothered to go out to wash the car), the skies clear up and the weather looks fine. Chances are too that if I wash it tomorrow, it’s going to go overcast again. Doesn’t Murphy’s Law just suck?

Well, the other week I found out that TPG Internet here in Australia has actually gone to the extent of upgrading their system that shapes your download bandwidth. To quickly sum up what shaping is if you don’t know; all it means is that normally I have a maximum of 1536kbps download for my ADSL account and if I download 20GB (actually 20000MB) of data, my download speed gets throttled (shaped) to 64kbps. In the past (before a few weeks ago), the shaping system would not kick in till some time between midnight and 9am. This meant that if you time your downloads perfectly, you would be able to get up to around 32GB of data downloaded before you get shaped.

This new system that they have implemented now means that the shaping is applied at intervals of around 30mins. Therefore the most that you can probably download before you get shaped is around 20.25GB. I am fairly sure that I am not breaching their Terms & Conditions, and anyway, the plan I’m on specifies unlimited downloads. So it looks like I will no longer be able to squeeze in any heavy downloading. But when you have such a high download speed (highest we could get anyway), it is so difficult to keep an eye on how much you download. Oh well, I guess I can’t really complain considering that the conditions do state that I will be shaped when I reach 20GB.

The weekend has come to an end, so that means no more relaxing and back to concentrating on uni work. Hmmm, it seems that I have managed to write a lot once again, but I guess that’s because I have just started this blog. Maybe as the week’s progress, I’ll start writing less, depending on what there is to write about.