I don't cook bacon and eggs any more. The last time was 8 May 1976, 50 years ago today. On that occasion (on a Saturday) I got a call from work and
put it off. Two days later I was fired.
But for old times' sake (literally), today I cooked bacon and eggs again. The real issue is
the eggs, not the bacon, though that came out somewhat uneven. From other experience, it's
clear that the pan temperature is important. Measure it:
Losing my job wasn't the only anniversary today, though it was the roundest. But 11 years ago we moved into our current house in Stones Road, Dereel, the longest we have ever lived
anywhere. And there's more to come.
Yesterday's anniversaries didn't come alone, though none were as round as the 50th
anniversary. 51 years ago I married my first wife, Doris Pischke, and 29 years ago
Yvonne, my second wife, arrived in Australia, marking the
beginning of our residence here.
But wait, there's more! My daily calendar tells me:
May 9 The first parliament of Australia opens in Melbourne, 1901
May 9 VE day, end of Second World War, celebrated in many countries
VE Day was on 9 May? Not 8 May?
Well, yes. The exact time was 23:01 on 8 May, Berlin (summer) time. That's 21:01 GMT, but
more importantly 0:01 on 9 May in Moscow, or 7:01 on 9 May here. So 9 May it is.
I have a domestic Internet link providing 25 Mb/s down and 5 Mb/s up. By modern standards,
that's slow, and I could easily update to something like 400/40. Why don't I?
One reason is the price, of course. 400/40 currently costs $119 a month. Even 100/20, the
next step up, costs $93, and I currently pay only $75 on a legacy plan. I can afford that,
of course—30 years ago I was paying much more for a 64 kB/s ISDN link, round $800 or so for the meagre
amount of traffic I could afford.
But more to the point, it doesn't buy me anything. Most of my Internet traffic is file
downloads, mainly video programmes. And those downloads typically max out at round 200
kB/s, or 1.6 Mb/s, far below my link speed. I can do them in parallel and get more, but why
so slow?
TCP/IP tuning? A while back I
investigated that, but for some reason I didn't implement it. Now we have Google Gemini. What does it tell me? Quite a lot, of course. It boils down to a number
of sysctls:
And the results? Varied. Downloading from ARD increased to round 1 MB/s,
but ZDF barely changed. That was
half to be expected: downloads from SRF were frequently
in the 1 MB/s range, so there's more to improving throughput than tuning the network stack.
Still, a relatively quick improvement.
Yvonne cooked „Falschen Hase“ for dinner this evening. What's that in English? I had guessed
“false hare”, but Wikipedia just wants to call it meat loaf, ignoring the details. Maybe
“mock hare” is the best suggestion I have seen.
For me it was mainly an opportunity to check the new flash relationships. This one, in
front of the oven, looks correctly lit and exposed:
What can I do there? I have a flash that I could theoretically put on the other side, but
there's nowhere to put it. I think it's a case of “well don't do that, then”.
I receive a lot of mail from eBay, and the
email address I chose (not ebay@lemis.com) gets exposed to the sellers. So it's
not surprising that I got spam and had to change the address.
That works well, but of course eBay is quite incompetent in many ways. One was sending me
copies of messages I send to sellers. Tick “send me copy by email”, but nothing happens.
Today I sent a message to somebody and took a look.
May 9 00:03:58 lax postfix/qmgr[68036]: 48D3428754: from=<member@ebay.com>, size=52136, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 9 00:03:59 lax postfix/smtp[80565]: 48D3428754: to=<ebay@lemis.com>, relay=mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253]:25, delay=597, delays=596/0.03/0.59/0.23, dsn=5.1.1, status=bounced (host mx0.lemis.com[121.200.11.253] said: 550 5.1.1 <ebay@lemis.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table (in reply to RCPT TO command))
What was that? It's clearly from eBay, sent to the old address. The time looks right.
I'll probably never know. I'll reinstate the address and see what comes through.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
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