You don't realize how much you depend on fast internet until it suddenly vanishes or slows to a crawl. Last night, I noticed my primary connection, Comcast Business gigabit, was offline. Thankfully, I've got a cellular backup that automatically kicks in when the main line drops. That's crucial around here, especially during hurricane season in Southwest Florida.
I probably wouldn't have even realized it was down until I went to watch some Hulu and noticed it was buffering a little longer than usual.
The cellular connection is good enough to keep my database server online, check email, and browse the web. But try uploading a video to YouTube? What normally takes 30 seconds now takes over an hour. And forget playing music on Alexa or watching TV at the same time too. Nope. Not gon happen.
It's like Voyager trying to initiate warp drive with the nacelles stuck in impulse mode. The lights are on, the engine's humming, but you ain't going nowhere fast.
I've already tried power cycling the modem twice, once last night and once this morning. No bueno. Now I have to wait until Wednesday for a Comcast technician to show up.
So if you've got fast internet right now, take a moment and go hug your modem. Seriously. Because a good connection is like a good secretary. You don't realize how important they are until they go down.
Yeah, bad joke. I know. But as my grandpa used to say, if you're old enough to understand that, you're old enough to hear it.
Even my Wispr Flow voice recognition isn't working well unless I speak in real short sentences. It works by sending your audio clip to their server and returning the text. Same problem: upload speeds are crawling right now.
So... I guess this means I actually have to... [gasp]... TYPE!? Good thing I spent the last 45 years of my life typing because up until recently voice dictation has been awful. Good to practice typing once in a while though... keep the chops up...
Kinda like when Picard actually got behind the helm and flew the ship for the first time in years...
Sick of the Trek references yet?
TOO BAD! This is my Captain's Log, and I'll write what I want! :) LOL
They have taken the Bridge and the Second Hall. We have barred the gates, but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes... Drums. Drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A Shadow moves in the dark... We cannot get out... They are coming.
In all seriousness, this has made me thankful that the bulk of my data is kept in-house in my local SQL Server and not "in the cloud" or on my web server. If that were the case, even doing customer service emails would be like wading through molasses. Fortunately, I have a system set up where the business data is kept in-house and it "syncs" with the website on a regular basis. I have an Access database that runs on a loop, so whenever you update something on the web, it copies it down to my local server. Whenever I update something, it copies it up. I prefer that over having everything just stored online. There's a short delay sometimes in order processing, but it's usually never more than a minute or two.
Thomas Gonder 8 days ago
Not only that, my browser keeps getting stuck in your main site. Something about asp bottom of page.
Thomas Gonder there's a "keep alive" iframe down there that's supposed to keep you logged in to the site as long as your browser window is open. I added that because people were getting kicked in the middle of watching a long video, or if you pause and go have dinner and come back - it's annoying to have to figure out where you were. So the keep alive refreshes your browser in the background every 5 minutes, I think.
Thomas Gonder 8 days ago
Thomas Gonder 8 days ago
That's an image of one of the places the pages seem to get stuck. I'll add more if you need it to troubleshoot.
Thomas Gonder yeah, I'm getting that bottom page links keep alive every now and then too. I'm working on fixing it. Thanks. I'll let you know if I need more help with troubleshooting.
I figured out a sweet hack to get my laptop to stay connected to my LAN via Ethernet, so I still have access to my server, printers, and everything else. But I also turned on Wi-Fi and I'm hot-spotting my cell phone. I figured out how to tell it to prioritize that for internet. It's a really cool hack. I'm making a video on it today. This is good for any office situation too where you've got a very slow internet connection over your LAN or maybe - hint - you wanna hop outside their firewall. You could turn Wi-Fi on your laptop or whatever your PC has and then hot-spot your phone for internet.
So much better until Comcast gets here tomorrow to fix my connection. I wish I would've thought of this yesterday. I also purchased a USB-C to Ethernet adapter so in the future I could plug my phone directly into my LAN and use that as my internet connection instead of the slow 4G cellular backup.
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