Frustration

I haven't been able to play many games in the last 10 days or so, my internet connection has been brutal.

The last month or so my connection has been extremely laggy, to say the least. I'll click an action and it'll take 5-50 seconds to go through. I managed to get in about 8k vpps worth of games in the first 12 days of the month, but since then it's just been too bad to play.

Comcast (my ISP) has been out here 4-5x now, they sent their head tech the other day. He climbed up on the pole and saw that squirrels had chewed through the line, so he replaced that. He also replaced our TV box (that had been laggy as well) and all signs pointed towards the problems being fixed. That was Thursday.

I played a game Thursday and the connection wasn't the best, but I only lagged briefly 3-4x and hadn't disconnected at all from any messanger programs nor had I experienced slow browser page loads.

Yesterday, I tried playing a few games and the bad lag was back. I made it through about 5 games between the regular speed regulars and I fighting for games, but that was about it.

Today I was hoping the connection would've improved somewhat, but it's worse as ever. I'm being disconnected from trillian (basically AIM) a few times an hour on average, web pages are loading very slowly and most importantly the Pokerstars connection is being lost every couple of minutes.

I previously had a Sprint Broadband card that broke a few months ago, I forgot about it but got a free month of service and a free replacement card from Sprint, so I went to load it up yesterday on my girlfriend's laptop and it wasn't connecting. Today, I tried to install and load it on my PC and for some reason it won't install the drivers nor will it update automatically. So that is my second internet option and it is also not working. I'm going to have to bring it into the Sprint store on Monday.

My other option of internet I ordered Monday, DSL from ATT. It arrived Wednesday, though they told me it wouldn't arrive until the following Monday. It cannot be activated until Monday, however, so that is another option down the drain.

Another option is a friend of mine that lives nearby. He has DSL, but he is out of town at the moment.

Needless to say, I am beyond frustrated at this point. I've been mirred in a downswing for the last few hundred games, and it's really upsetting me that I can't get some games in to work my way out of it. It also sucks to not really be making any money (besides a little staking and coaching income, I'm not really bringing money in at the moment, husng.com isn't up yet and my business is done until the spring). Luckily I have some money in the bank and on a few poker sites, so I'm not starving or anything, but gaps in play/profit always hurt even if the impact isn't immediately felt.

One other thing that has bothered me lately was that I received a ticket last week on my work truck, which I park on the street in front of our house. I have kind of a makeshift bumper (it's a work truck obviously) so I put my front license plate in the window of my truck. I got a 50 dollar parking ticket for no displayed license plate last week! I've lived here since August 1st and had the truck parked here a majority of the time since then, and not a warning, citation or ticket up until now. I didn't even realize it was illegal, I've been pulled over twice (just random, no tickets or anything) in the few years I've owned this truck and not once has the officer said a damn thing about this. Needless to say, I don't see much I can do about the ticket except pay it. I'm thinking about filing a complaint to the town's police department, but what does that accomplish besides pissing off a bunch of cops? Next thing I know I'll be fined for having a piece of litter on my lawn or something even more silly. If I were wealthier I would probably hire a lawyer for a few hundred dollars just to piss off the police and get out of the ticket, but I can't afford to be a jerk and it's almost certainly the better life choice to not do that, but in all honesty I can see myself doing that.

So, besides all of that bull, life has been ok. Our first 3 beers seem to have come out great (the last two beers aren't finished but I am highly confident that they will turn out good at the very least) and there's a noticable forward progression in them from the prior beers we made. We were both a little worried that we might take a step back from the 3+ month layoff of brewing, but it seems we've continued to progress. I've also been reading more about some smaller breweries run by former homebrewers like myself, in which they use very small batch sizes when brewing beer (very similar to the sizes we use). This is a very good sign to me, because if we end up able to make award winning beer (homebrew competition) I would be very confident that I could start and operate a profitable brewpub. I'm getting a little ahead of myself in that regard, but it's in the back of my mind as we continue to brew. Up next on the brewing list is a holiday beer, an oatmeal cookie beer. We're using a Southern English Brown ale base and adding some oats and spices to create what hopes to be an oatmeal cookie type taste and aroma in the beer. I've read up on this one a little bit, but it doesn't seem to have been done too extensively. I'll be eagerly awaiting this one. We are also going to brew a big barleywine with our other two buddies that brew, a collaberation brew if you will. We will be doing our first 10 gallon batch on the new system for this one, and splitting up the batch 5 gallons each, fermenting and serving the beer at our respective places. We may even use 2 different kinds of yeasts and hops for dryhopping, to give each beer a unique taste.

I guess that is all for now, I feel a little better after unloading my depressing start to the month, but I just need to be a little more confident and less lazy and I'm sure things will start to pickup around here.