Tuesday, April 01, 2003

The internet is alive!

Ah yes, the internet.  One of those necessary evils in today's culture, standing alongside other evils such as thank-you notes, Microsoft, responsibility, and manners.  We don't know why we have these things, but we do.  And when we have something, we do what we Americans do best.  We never notice it until we lose it.  Yes, my friends, I have lost something.  I have lost my internet connection.  Obviously, it is not totally gone or you would not be reading this.  Allow me to explain.  KSU changed their network setup during spring break.  They use these ridiculously expensive devices called packeteers to figure out what you are doing online, like a QoS service.  From port numbers, they can tell if you are web browsing, playing q3, or downloading from kazaa.  Anyways, it's all a master plot to block everything except HTTP (web pages), so its faster for everyone.  Unfortunately, the people who run this system are idiots.  They know nothing about how an internet connection works, and in trying to make it fast they just ruin it for everyone.  The internet, you see, is not made of hypertext markup language, it is made up of TCP/IP.  It is a connection, not a file.  You can download from the internet, but you cannot download the internet itself.  What I mean is that the internet has so many features other than web browsing that these dolts forget about.  The funniest one I can think of is Secure HTTP, port 443 or something (I cant check because the internet is down as I am writing this.)  They completely forgot about this type of connection, and made it impossible to get to sites like paypal, or even the website that runs our work schedule!  Yeah, you guys are qualified to run this operation.  FTP, ssh, and many other important ports were blocked as well.  They eventually 'fixed' this, but it doesnt help when the university is so poor that they can't afford janitors, much less an internet connection.  Fuck you, Bob Taft!  We all know it's your fault! Republicans...  Of course, who needs the internet anyways?  We have phones, and books and crap.  The internet wasn't always around.  What did people do before computers took over the economy and proceeded to fux us over?  How did they send each other their photoshopped pictures before email came around?  What did hackers do all day?  They must have been bored.  They couldn't have posted all these fucking hilarious April fool's jokes.  Some were funny today, such as the QuakeCon trick.  Jo did one for Trancender.  But no one ever goes to the index page of that site.  :D  Almost made my heart jump.  Almost.  Penny-arcade and PvP drew comics for each other, and it was stupid.  That could have been funny if a normal pvp comic appeared on the penny arcade site, and vice versa, but people make it dumb.  Let's see, there was also the ever done "Microsoft buys Linux" ([url=http://www.tomshardware.com]Tom's hardware[/url], how could you?) and Nvidia buys ATi on some loser site, AOL buys DeviantArt, U.S. Soldiers advance towards Baghdad...yeah, I don't believe anything I heard today.  Seriously, some of these jokes are being way overdone.  Its like going to Maddox's site and wondering if he's going to criticize something that people like.  Yes, this is the role that the internet plays in our lives (Thank you Al Gore).  Maybe I will go to sleep earlier tonight.  Nah, it's quake time...lata