I was actually searching for an answer to why my internet connection pauses for about 10s occasionally. It may be because of interference, but I'm not sure. There are two possible solutions: switch the router's channel or switch the mode to B-only or G-only. I have my command prompt opened and ready so that the next time it pauses I'll ping my router.
And just when I finished typing the above paragraph, an alert appeared next to the SAVE NOW button on this page warning me that it was unable to connect to google.com. So I pinged my router repeatedly and sure enough, there were several General Failures and some 300-400ms pings.
My guess is that it was because I had changed my router's mode to Mixed instead of B or G-only when I was encountered problems while setting up my desktop's wireless connection, and maybe there has been a new addition in the vicinity using Channel 1. So I've changed both.
Now, wow! My signal strength since I first turned on the desktop had been 3 out of 4 bars. Now it's staying at 4 bars and the signal percentage, according to the D-Link Connection Manager, has improved from around 50% to 70%.
Now that I'm looking at the Manager's list of routers nearby, I see that two of them are using Channel 11 and the third is using 12. So it wasn't interference from them, but the results clearly show significant improvement after the changes. Weird.
I'm encountering one problem after another. After the internet issue came the sound issue. Halfway through the final episode of Chuck the sound stopped. I unplugged my headset, plugged in again and everyone was fine. So I thought it was nothing.
While I was playing Empires the sound stopped again. I did the same thing and it was solved. But when 5 minutes after I returned to Empires, it stopped again. This time, re-plugging my headphones didn't work.
I tried to update my sound card driver (btw my sound card is built-in that's part of my motherboard) but apparently it's already the latest version. Disabling and re-enabling the headphones didn't help either.
Eventually I unplugged it and plugged the pins (mic and sound) into the socket at the back of the computer. Good thing the cord is long enough. I haven't tested it in Empires since then because it's getting late. Will do it tomorrow.
I readjusted the computer. I had originally placed it on the floor on my right, but I thought it would be really hard for the housekeeper to mop the floor. This is made more dangerous because one of the fans is on the front lower side of the casing. Plus the additional wires are really making a mess on the floor.
So now I have it on the left side of my desk. The wires are all bound with tiny black insulated wires to minimal length to improve wire management, while the power cords are all plugged into this multi-plug on my desk. Now the floor on the left has only a single wire from the power socket to the multi-plug. Very neat.
My room feels so tidy. Now that the path between my bed to the door isn't covered by wires from my laptop and portable hard drive, it feels clean. However, my room does heat up slightly faster now because of my sweet sweet Phenom II X4 955, which is the AMD equivalent of Intel's Core 2 Quad Q9550. The only better options are those in Intel's i7 series. Hence, this is atm the abso-fuckin-lutely best that AMD has to offer.
From what I've read so far, out of the 12 channels available for wireless LAN, only 3 channels can provide optimal bandwidth. These are channels 1, 6 and 11, all 5 channels apart so that their frequency differences are large enough to reduce overlapping while still allowing enough channels to prevent everyone from using the same frequencies.
Apparently, our wireless devices don't only produce signals that are of identical frequencies and often emit signals that have close to but not exactly the right number of Hertz. Hence channels close to each other may overlap, causing interference and noise.
I'm not sure about this but some say that channel 6 is the default for most routers.
Anyway I was reading on this because I had a connection problem again during the afternoon. Strangely, my bro and I were unable to connect to the router at around 1pm even though everything was okay before that. In fact my bro usually starts using his laptop from 7am onwards.
Turning the router and modem off for a minute did not solve the problem, which made me suspect one of them had finally "reached the clearing at the end of its path", quoting from a certain book in my collection.
However, the wired connection between the router to my mum's desktop was not affected, so it ruled out my suspicion. Which was worse, making it seem kinda like the computer version of a typical episode of House, in which the symptoms always contradicted the theories and initial treatment never worked. And it's never lupus. Never.
Anyway, just to rule out all possibilies, I told my bro to change the channel to 9, a random number that just appeared in my mind. It worked! There was only a minor problem - the ping from my desktop to the router was around 100-300ms, ie atrocious. So I changed it to channel 11 later and everything went back to normal.
In the end, I still don't understand why there was a problem with the channel. The D-Link Wireless Manager tells me that my neighbours are all using Channels 11 and 12, so no one should be affecting my network. Unless it's not showing some of my neighbours' routers or certain devices in the area is using the same frequency.
This is actually possible because our microwave ovens use the same frequency range as our routers. But to completely jam my signal? I'm not sure that my oven can do such a thing. No one has even turned it on today! And whatever jammed my signal like that must have been quite powerful.
OMFG YOU REALLY HAVE TO WATCH THIS VIDEO!
This made me laugh and say "Wtf?!" at the same time. Don't worry it's Youtube so it's not porn.
When I saw the 3 black guys I was expecting... something else altogether.
I find it ironic that the smokers I know are afraid of removing the filter before smoking. After reading the Dark Tower series I deduced that the filter reduces the impact and flavour of the cigarette smoke, so one day while I was waiting for a friend to finish his cigarette, I suggested that he should remove the filter.
His reply was simple," Siao! You want me to die issit?' ("Siao" here is the Singlish translation of "Are you crazy?" or "You're mad!" and is not the surname.)
I laughed, not because I was trying to make it seem like a joke, but because it was so hilariously contradictory. So he wanted to smoke but didn't want an early death... LOL!
Of course I didn't say that, but I'm sure he appreciated the full meaning behind his actions too. He had to. The idea was so ironic it could rust! Some things are really best left unsaid. I've also suggested the same thing to a few other friends and the responses were all the same.
Here's a mathematical fun fact: Graham's number is one of the largest number ever used in a serious mathematical proof. It is so large than even the form a^b^c^d^..... cannot be used to represent this number in line short enough to be easily read. No, that "^" is "to the power of" and not multiplication.
This number is of such an impressive magnitude it requires a special notation to shorten it to a comprehensible form. Even the order of magnitude, ie 10^x, is so huge I don't think there is a word for it. The final 100 digits of the number are as follows (copypasta from Wiki)
9404248265018193851562535796399618993967905496638003222348723967018485186439059104575627262464195387.
Amazing, but this is not the largest number ever used. There are bigger.
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