I reinstalled the router with Ubuntu Server 7.10, right? Everything's been working well enough. Torrents are still slow, but I was able to run Bittorrent on the router's command line, and it was slow, too, so I think it was just the torrent itself this time. I disabled QoS on the Windows systems and that helped a bit. I would rather that the programs I run have complete, unfiltered access to the network, and if I don't want two programs fighting for power, I'll stop one.

Well, everything was fun... Until about an hour ago, when my brother signed on to World of Warcraft to raid Karazhan again! (I can't, because I'm supposed to be doing school.) Sure enough, the modem started to go on the fritz again, almost immediately. Five crashes in the space of 10 minutes, requiring a manual restart of the modem. Interestingly enough, the new software on the router works far better than the older Debian stuff I was using. If the modem goes down, all I have to do is restart it and reload the router's NIC interfaces and voila! Done. (Took some coaxing on Debian.) All in all, I like the router the way it is, and I not longer think it's the router, which would go with my original instinct, because I found something new.

I was looking to see if maybe there was a new firmware update for the modem (there isn't, of course) and I did a weird search that I didn't normally do to look for firmware, and I found something very interesting on the first hit! "Hey, I recognize that address!" The World of Warcraft official forums. Very, very interesting, indeed. I check it out and the very first line?

We are currently investigating an issue where logging into or playing the game will disconnect your network from the internet.

Woah, what's this? It's a Blizzard issue?

This includes being disconnected from your other programs (instant messenger, Teamspeak/Ventrilo, streaming internet radio, etc) as well as everyone else on the network. This does NOT include just you being disconnected from the game by yourself while everything else works.

That's exactly the trouble I've been having! But wait! There's more:

Thank you all for posting your information. This will help our compatibility department narrow down the problem hardware and acquire it for testing. It looks like ~90% of you have either a Siemens, 2wire or older model Motorola modem or Netgear router.

Guess what modem I have? Oh, yes... Of course! The Siemens. First on the list.

After discussing this problem with our development team, they have told us that it looks like the most recent patch revealed a bug in the hardware that many you have. Our compatibility dept will attempt to narrow what the bug may be and contact the makers of these pieces of hardware so that they can get out a fix.

Blizzard, Blizzard, Blizzard... Don't bet on it. The modem's have had the same firmware version for over a year now. I'm not expecting a firmware update, and you shouldn't beat yourselves trying to get in contact with the manufacturers because they're not going to bother.

Thank you to those of you that took the time to post the information that was asked for in the original post. We have passed this information along to our Quality Assurance department for testing, but as of yet they have not been able to reproduce the problems you all are experiencing. We have made the development team aware of this fact, but as it stands now, I don't know if or when a solution on our end will be possible.

This is, no doubt, in response to people who think this is actually Blizzard's fault. It's not. No software should ever cause this to happen, and it's entirely the fault of the modem manufacturers for releasing fault firmware. Bugs happen, I know, but Blizzard shouldn't have to go out of their way to work around a bug that no other modems are having... That's just stupid.

So... I need to go to town and buy a new modem. A cheap one, just to see how things work. Then, if I get the money, I'll invest in a nice quality DSL modem... And some shielded telephone wiring and network cables. Just a few feet to connect the modem without interference. I also need to pick up a VGA F/F cable, so I can connect stuff to my TV... And set up computers without dragging out the a late 80s 12" viewable 640x480 CRT that flickers like you wouldn't believe.

Okay, so I wake up, watch Atlantis (always awesome) and then I get to reading my piled up news! I always find interesting stuff to tag as favorites, and a few things to share on that public page I get, and today? I found something to blog about...

CBS News ran out of articles yesterday, I guess, and make a write up on... You can't even begin to guess! They wrote an article on... The Tooth Fairy. Or, to be more specific, the parents who give money to their children for baby teeth. And if that wasn't bad enough? They're taking some random poll by Securian Dental, which is, I guess, a dental health insurance company and... Well, just hear what they start off with:

Even the tooth fairy feels inflation's bite. The price per baby tooth is 22% steeper today than it was a year ago.

That's according to a new tooth fairy poll from Securian Dental, which runs dental plans.

The poll, which included 647 parents, shows that the tooth fairy pays $2.09 per baby tooth, on average, up from $1.71 last year.

Oh, you better believe it. They're trying to say that inflation is infecting what parents pay for their son's tooth! Wow... Just wow. I can't even begin to laugh, because it's so sad, so I'll just leave it at that.

As some of you may know, I'm obsessed with Okami... I mean, in case you didn't notice.

As such, I regularly visit deviantArt looking for that kinda stuff! My Favourites are absolutely packed full of the best Okami art on the site. I probably went through their entire collection twice, to start, and I very nearly daily browse the latest submissions. Yep. Obsessed. But one of the more awesome artists I've come to find and start watching is Lyanti, quite possibly the coolest wolf artist I've seen in a looong time. Needless to say, I found her by searching for Okami stuff, and I found this particular piece: Amaterasu - Happiness, which is now... Up for sale. The original whatever... Uhm. Canvas? It's not a digital piece, it's a traditional paper drawing. AND SHE'S SELLING IT. Aaah! I'm very, very torn... On the one hand, I'm scrapped for money, but on the other? It's freakin' Okami, and one of the coolest drawings I've seen. I mean, even normally, I probably wouldn't consider this, but she's a Christian, too, so I know I wouldn't be paying some weirdo I don't know, heh. (I'd... Just be paying someone I don't know, as opposed to a weirdo.)

But, maaaan... I would so totally buy it. I even messaged her, asking how large it was, and if anyone else has put their sights on it... I would totally frame it and hang it on my wall, too, even. Well, not exactly frame... My friend Iaian had some neat way to kinda-sorta frame something between two pieces of glass and it wouldn't exactly irreversibly pin the thing inside a frame for eternity.

So, great... I'll be up all night waiting to see if it's really free to buy or not.

Before I forget again...

I've noticed that over the past several months, my dreams have become increasingly... bizarre. I mean, dreams are usually pretty other-worldly, but these are becoming memorably weird and outright creepy (when it comes to nightmares). Most of them are plain awesome, don't get me wrong... But WEIRD. And some are even story-caliber, which I don't be sharing publicly, because... Well, they're story ideas now!

Have you ever had a dream where you're home, but everything's WAY out of proportion? Like, our property has buildings all clustered together in a space of about, oh... 2 acres? The road runs north and south. Directly to the east of the road is our house. Butted up against the house, more or less, to the northeast, is a big barn/warehouse/shop where Dad works. Directly to the southwest of the shop is a nice sized pole-barn. Directly to the north of the pole-barn is an old shack where the previous owners made apple cider (we live on an old orchard farm). Directly to the south of the pole-barn is a little blue shed where migrant workers lived. Directly to the west of the little shed is a little red shed that also housed some migrant workers (and now house chickens). Just to give you an idea. Oh, and on the southeast corner of the house, directly connected to it, is a garage that really isn't a garage, but stores lots of junk. All of this isn't very large... I should take a picture sometime and show you, but then people would STALK ME and that's bad. Anyway!

My dreams that take place at home are... bigger. All the buildings are absolutely enormous, like huge sprawling warehouses. Even the house is some huge, squat, single story building. And its always run down. Windows are missing, doors broken, maybe a room is open to the elements. Even last night, the shop was large enough to house an alien wreck that a group of us were sent to investigate (I guess). I remember precariously walking on narrow platforms spanning bottomless pits, and that other people had managed to fall in. And then? We all gather around the Puddle-Jumper (so I guess we're from Atlantis) that was parked in the garden (which is west of the little red shack and south of the attached garage) but it was only me and one other person who managed to get back, because there were zombies milling around. Yep! Zombies. Not entirely spooky to me, but it was freaky in the sense that there were a colossal amount of them. If you didn't move, they couldn't see you, but there were so many moving around on their own that they would get close enough to see you anyway, if you didn't move... Which... Let them see you. So there was a lovely bout of brain-eating by the zombies, and the massacring of the oncoming with my trusty P90 and... That's all that I remember. All this taking place at my house.

I've also had a parcel of Doctor Who dreams... The most vivid one I can recall right now was that I had the key to the TARDIS, and I was in the kitchen, and it started glowing! For some reason, I knew exactly where it was, and there was an intense sense of urgency... As far as I can remember, there wasn't actually anything I saw that made me want to run, but it had that nightmarish feeling where you just had to GET OUT. So I run to the basement and there's the TARDIS, all dim and fading, trying to appear, but it wouldn't, and there I was panicking for absolutely no reason, because I couldn't get the door unlocked. I'll tell you sometime about my old house... That was a childhood experience. I'm almost thinking it was haunted or something, because that house seriously creeped me out at all ages until we moved sometime in the late 1990s. Never been afraid of a house since! But basements are always creepy in my dreams because of it, and this was no exception. One of those... Your salvation is there before your eyes, but you can't get to it, and you know you need to defend yourself somehow, but you're too ghastly afraid to turn around and see what's coming up behind you? Really weird...

Then there's that one dream where I was the only "good guy" in the area of my house... The sky was creepy red and everything was desolate and run down and my house was taken over by a group of... People. Not sure. It wasn't really important. This, too, was a nightmare, because they had released some sort of monster to hunt me. It was really big, and really strong, and really FAST, and I had to hide in the shop, which, of course, was completely run down. I remember running into one of the back rooms and locking all the doors as best I could, and hiding under a small broken window while it kept running around the outside of the building and trying to break down the doors and jump through the holes in the walls. I was hiding under the window because even if it managed to look through, it couldn't be able to see me... Because I knew once it actually saw me, it would easily be strong enough to smash through the wall and devour me or whatever it was supposed to do.

But then there's always the perfectly harmless dreams, but still very, very odd. Like... I was the President of the United States? Yep. Just elected, and I my inauguration was scheduled for that afternoon and everyone was gathering and everyone was waiting for me to give a huge speech, but... Suddenly, I realized that I didn't have a speech, because my writers had managed to forget. As I realized my predicament, I knew I had to come up with something on the fly, so I asked the only person in the area who would know what to say in this situation! That's right... Bill Clinton. I asked freakin' Bill Clinton what he said during his inauguration, because I had absolutely no idea, and I needed something fast. Wow.

Interestingly enough, as much as I obsess about wolves and stuff, I very rarely have dreams about them... Okami or Wolf's Rain or just anything wolf-related. Not so much. I've noticed, though, that the majority of the weird dreams I remember are directly related to either Stargate Atlantis or Doctor Who. I'm either running around with a P90 on an alien world or on a space station, or I'm running around on an alien world with The Doctor... Even last night, after the zombie-Atlantis dream, I had one where we traveled to some really messed up world, and people saw us arrive, and they all tried to commandeer the TARDIS so they could escape the disaster, but that's all I remember.

Well! There you go... I was bored and not at all tired, so I thought I'd brain dump a few of my non-important dreams so I could remember them and/or share them. Might as well make a new category for them, too, because I'd like to start remembering them. I think it'd be awesome to have a trove of dream stories all stored up that I could reference later, once I become that famous professional novel writer that sells out all his books! (Oooor not.)