soapbox

This is nerdy, but I just found a very nice bandwidth checker run out of Argonne National Laboratory. It’s at Miranda.

Here are the results for my computer.

Web100 Network Diagnostic Tool v5.3.3d
Checking for Middleboxes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Done
running 10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 13.00Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 12.23Mb/s
The slowest link in the end-to-end path is a 100 Mbps Full duplex Fast Ethernet subnet
Information: The receive buffer should be 482.54 Kbytes to maximize throughput

It’s really something when the slowest part of your connection to the internet is the 100B-T connection at your desk.

…but y’all need to be readin’ this:

Barbecue!

It seems Slate went and got itself someone (not me, dammit!) willin’ to ride around eatin’ barbecue and chronicle his quest. Anyways, the series should run about a week, and it looks like they’ll have slide shows for each day.

A particularly great excerpt: “If you want to see hatred, just put a Texan and a North Carolinian in a room and ask them who makes more righteous barbecue. A Democratic presidential candidate could fracture the Republican South with a few well-placed barbecue ads.” Hell yeah!

Get to readin’ now, so that you don’t have to play catch up later in the week and so that you’ll be primed and ready for some honest-to-God barbecue once the rain lets up again.

While the company itself is pretty evil, I can’t help but laugh at their new tagline – “have you had your Quaker today?” It could be promoting consumption of over-sugared cheap granola bars, or seeking to foster greater “adult relations” with us?

I read a small blurb on this in BoyCosmo (Men’s Health), saying that black tea may help inhibit absorption of mercury – and here’s a related article:

The research has revealed a mysterious anomaly. Hair or blood samples of individuals in the communities with the highest mercury exposure actually revealed the lowest body mercury levels. “There’s a huge discrepancy between mercury exposure and the extent to which it’s absorbed by people in these various communities.”