A Quantum Immortal

I’ve been playing Magic online for quite some time now, and have always had problems connecting to other players. Magic isn’t a bandwidth intensive or particularly sensitive to network latency, but I found that more and more I’m getting disconnected, have huge (10 seconds +) lag, and just plain connection problems.

Well, today, the problem is solved. It appears that Smile 012, my ISP, had to classify me as a “Gamer Profile” in order to get a straight connection working. These two test sites just would not work 99% of the time under the normal profile. It appears that the so called Gamer Profiles are connected to the internet backbone by fewer hops (012 usually charge 15 NIS – 4$ for this privilege). I’m not sure why it worked – as I mentioned, Magic shouldn’t be affected this much by latency.

Anyway, if you have the dubious pleasure of being a 012 customer, and want a supposedly better connection to the backbone, just tell them the tests sites I listed don’t work well for you – they won’t charge you for it. I think it also improved my torrent speeds.

I’m visited the US with my family for a couple of weeks, and staying with an Aunt, who has a 56Kbps dialup internet connection and an 8 years old laptop (which is usually kept tucked away in some closet). 

Whenever we try to use the internet the response we get is something like “but you already used it yesterday, why do you need it again so early”? Everything takes ages and ages to load up – very painful. Add to that the fact that we’re about 5-6 people who have to share this tiny laptop+internet connection…

We’re now at the mall and I feel much relief – free internet here at several computer stores, we’re leaching computer time from them. The saying is “you don’t know how much you need X until it’s gone” – but when you get it back again (high quality internet here at the Apple Store – Shlomo, you’ll get your keyboard) for a short while, then you really know how much you’re hooked.