Broadband VI gave us a fixed IP address, and since then we haven't lost our connection (been about 2 days).

Well it seems the speed comes at a price... Couldn't connect to our VPN. I called customer service, and to make a long story short, I had to set our wireless router into bridge mode and use the DHCP built into their device instead of using our router.

All is fairly good now, but they don't seem to like TCP connections that last more than 30-60 minutes and routinely disconnect them. This affects ssh sessions, game playing, and other stuff, making it very frustrating to use.

Broadband's customer service seems really good though, so I will let them know about these problems tomorrow and see what they say...

Our new ISP, Broadband VI, still hadn't updated our network speed as of yesterday. In addition, the network was getting flakier and flakier. We would regularly have outages of an hour or more every day or two, and the uplink bandwidth was degrading to as low as 20kbps.

I called last night to let them know, and this morning a tech came out and switched us over to their other network, replacing the radio receiver. Now I am getting burst speeds of 3Mbps down and 1Mbps up! Glad to finally have state-side Internet speeds again. So far, I'm very happy with the service.

The only downside is we are behind two private networks via NAT. I used to have a security camera that I could look at while away from home as well as a remote login on my Linux box that I could access while traveling. In order to make those work now, I will need to set up a reflector on a public server somewhere. That seems like an acceptable price to pay for the better speed, but it's a bit of an inconvenience.

Of course the real test of the ISP is to see how often they have outages. That's something I'll just have to wait and see.

Clinton's and McCain's recent accusations of "elitism" against Obama seem like a bit of psychological projection of their own personality. They so fear being called elitist themselves that they jump eagerly on any chance to apply the name to their competitor.

Of the three candidates, Obama is most in touch with reality. Anyone who listens to the original recording in question will see how hard he works to empathize with Americans and understand what issues and concerns they are facing. Perhaps his description was politically incorrect, but no one can truly relate to all Americans; we are a hugely disparate gang. We need someone as President who can show the ability to empathize with anyone and work to understand their situation. That's what makes a President who's loved by his constituents and is great at foreign relations.