As promised, I removed the ads from this site.  I ended up hitting around $101 which just doesn’t seem worth it, IMO… If you were one of the people who clicked ads, let me know and I’ll buy you a beer, once I get the money from Google.

I recently verified that the onboard network adaptor, in my primary machine, sucks.  It seems that there is some sort of a hardware problem with it, and as a result it ends up capping my upload speed at around 10kB/s.  It got to be very annoying when I had some active torrents.  So… I decided to drop $10 and get a standalone network card.  But a moral issue arose within me because I didn’t want to just give up the builtin network card.  So, I chose to implement load balancing in XP, which happens to be very easy to do… After I did this, I’m averaging 80-90kB/s upload speeds now… happy happy ratios

Just make this registry change, if you have multiple network adapters:

System Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesNetBTParameters]
Value Name: RandomAdapter
Data Type: REG_DWORD (DWORD Value)
Value Data: (0 = disabled, 1 = enabled)

I’ve been looking to move some of these sites to a professionally
hosted solution.  I ended up doing some research the last two weeks of
some of the asp.net hosting solutions.  I narrowed my search
down to Webhost4Life, MaximumAsp, OrcsWeb, DataPipe, and ThePlanet.com.

To make a long story short, I ended up going with OrcsWeb.  They were
by far the quickest and most thorough with answering all of my
questions regarding services they can provide.  ThePlanet.com didn’t
bother contacting me
again.  DataPipe just didn’t fit what i was looking for.  And
MaximumAsp quickly said no to a few of my requests.  I really didn’t
give Webhost4life the chance that they deserved… I had read too many
bad reviews online, to keep them in the running.

So we’ll see how well OrcsWeb perform as the future keeps rolling on…

[Update] ThePlanet.com got back to me with some impressive services.  I’ll consider them for service in the future.

Every so often, the lottery jackpot grows to an enormous sum.  This
sparks desire and hope inside many people, and as a result, they go
purchase some tickets.  I’m the same way, I like the idea that my
financial troubles could be solved with a simple ticket. 

But, I have done some thinking about what would really happen if I won and I talked with some people this weekend… 
The result is that I have to say that I really don’t want to win the lottery.  I
really don’t see that the good could outweigh the not so good.  You’re
probably thinking what the hell?  Everyone would love to win the
lotto…. let me give you 3 reasons why I wouldn’t want to win…

First, say good bye to your friends.  I haven’t really come to a good
solution for how you could get over this issue.  Your friends will
become instantly jealous of your new found money.  I don’t care how
long you’ve been friends, it’s just human nature to be jealous.  If you
give them money, they’re probably going to think that there are strings
attached.  What happens if you give money to some friends, but forget
some others… Even giving friends an annual salary just to hang out,
probably won’t solve the jealousy issue.

Second, say good bye to your privacy.  Chances are that you’ll have to
move.  This depends on where you are in the country, with how far
you’ll need to move.  If you’re in a fairly large city, you could make
due with moving across town… if you’re in a rural part of the
country, you’ll probably have to move much further.  Why?  well, one
reason is that you’re going to get beggars coming to your house. 
People always try to profit off of other people… the beggars probably
won’t be the traditional bums that you see on the streets, but rather
they would be blue/white collar beggars.

Third, travel… for me, I would initially travel a lot.  I think that
would be cool for a couple years, but that it’s possible that it would
get old after a while.  This is a weird subject for me… on one hand,
I’m sure I would see more places than I will w/o unlimited funds, but
the flip side is that I really look forward to travelling now.  it
excites me, and to lose that excitement would suck.

So why do I keep playing?  It’s exciting to think that you could win
something that random.  If I did end up winning at some point, I would
keep it as much of a secret as possible.  I would make sure that my
family is taken care of.  I did hear an idea that sounded pretty good,
and that was to give x number of people the exact same amount of
money. 

Even though I never knew you, rest in peace Chris McKinstry.  More info…