I played tennis on Saturday and the strong wind played a major part in the game. Whenever we switched sides I had to compensate for the fact that the ball would either go much farther than anticipated or it would fall short of the opposite side. In spite of the wind, I managed to get my serve to the point where it was mildly consistent and won in straight sets 6-0, 6-1.

After getting back home and recovering from the exercise, I began to notice that the wind was blowing rather angrily outside. After a few more minutes of trees being violently tossed back and forth the TV channel that I was watching scrolled a message that a severe weather storm watch was in effect in my area. I switched channels and it was only a short while later until every channel had a similar warning scrolling across the top of the screen. The storm soon subsided as quickly as it had appeared and with the exception of a few branches on the ground, I didn’t notice any serious damage. It was also a trial by fire for the satellite dish installation, which weathered the storm without a problem.

Speaking of which, I’m currently at my desk in the condo blogging away and the speed (besides latency ) is quite acceptable. In fact, I just downloaded Winamp so I could play some MP3s and it got up to 91KB/sec before it finished. Those types of speeds I can deal with. I had to do a few tweaks to the TCP/IP stack using DrTCP. I wouldn’t have known what to tweak if it hadn’t been for the instructions I found. I’m benefitting from my internet connection already. Although, I wouldn’t have needed those without the connection, so it appears to be a rather circular argument. Regardless, I’m happy to finally have something at the condo. I’m not entirely sure the changes helped, but there did seem to be an improvement after rebooting.

At long last, my computer is usable again. It has been sitting idle for about 5 months now, because a computer without access to the internet is like a car without gas. Almost everything I do is in some way related to the web, to the point that I felt no need to even turn my computer on until I had a connection to the outside world.