Space, Time and Money

After seeing the videos of Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 from E3, I started making plans for the purchase and construction of a shiny new desktop gaming machine. Unfortunately, unless my Romanian mail order bride business suddenly takes off, I doubt I'll be able to manage it. I'll be too busy shelling out cash on plane tickets to Canada, woolly underduds, SARS facemasks and crates of Tim Tams. The exact time frame for my flight to Mooseville has been set as late November, just as the northern snows have swept down from the Arctic circle.

My flatmate and I have switched from Optus cable to Iinet DSL, but our new setup hasn't been all peaches and cream. Having our download limit increase from Optus' rather insulting 3GB per month to Iinet's 6GB peak / 6GB off peak monthly deal sounds great, but the tricky part is that if either of these 6GB limits are exceeded, our speed gets cut. This means that looking at the plan as 12GB total is a little bit broken - it's more accurate to say you get 6GB, or 6GB if you're nocturnal.

Another major drawback has been that our gaming pings have gone up by around 20ms across the board, which makes DSL a bit a of a sucky option for gaming. I'm not sure if it's just Iinet that suffers - hopefully friends will try other providers soon so I can compare.

512k/s of bandwidth isn't a lot to share between two people either, particularly when my flatmate is downloading those nature videos he likes so much. We've thought about upgrading to the 1500k/s plan, but that would take the price from $80/month to $150/month, which feels a little too much like having my lunch money stolen.