Well, after three weeks, I’m back in Santa Barbara and have returned to UCSB just in time for two back-to-back midterms and a paper due on Thursday. The time in San Francisco was fun, but I’m glad to be home. While there, I registered as a communist, bought a Prius and was forced to marry Clay Aiken – I guess there’s some new law? In all seriousness, I saw more people wearing Barack Obama shirts in five minutes downtown than I have in Santa Barbara in the past twenty months. I’ll add a few photos to Flickr when I have a spare moment and sort out all the things I’m behind on.

Posting should return with some semblance of regularity later on this week.

Most of the items for apartment have been ordered from Amazon.com (thank God for Prime) since it’s tax-free in California and there was a vast selection of items. The furniture is coming from people I find on Craigslist (thus far, I’ve secured a kitchen table with charis, a couch and a coffee table); I don’t expect to find all the items I need on day one – I’m fine with sleeping on a couch until I find a nice bed for sale. One of the biggest benefits for me, however, is that I’ll no longer be using the awful ResNet service offered in the residence halls at UCSB. I’ve signed up for a 15Mb down, 1Mb up connection from the local cable company and I hope that works out.

My biggest concern is how I’ll make it ‘home’ since I expect to live there for at least a year, most likely two. I asked about the whole move-in process and personalizing an apartment on MetaFilter and received a variety of great responses. The general consensus seems to dictate that lighting, scents, wall decorations, plants, and colors make the biggest impact. I’m limited in how much I can really change about it; I’m prohibited from painting it which is a bit of a let-down. I’m sure that making this place something that resmebles home will be the most difficult and the most time consuming. Living in the residence halls didn’t afford much room for personalization and as such, my room looked sterile and bland – something I’d like to change this time around.

In a rare trend, I believe this is one of the few things personal endeavors I will publish on the site. I’ll be updating this and posting further with pictures and updates.

.. Returned home for Spring Break, have been engaging in a whole lot of nothing. I can be happy about the fact that there is a 15Mb/s connection here as compared to some places.

.. Successfully sold the 17″ MacBook Pro and settled on the newer 15″. Craigslist works surprisingly well in the Santa Barbara area; although I did have a run-in with a Mitt Romney supporter. Long story.

.. In the rush to purchase books for the new quarter, a single textbook for an intermediate accounting course costs $186.00. One hundred and eighty-six dollars. I’ll mull over the new quarter a bit later here, but, just, wow.

This is the issue I can’t seem to understand. At UC Santa Barbara, there is a pool of 200Mb of downstream bandwidth allocated for about 7,000 students. The logical response to that statement is of course, “WTF?”. Let’s run through a few hypotheticals. Assume that a tenth of the students are watching a YouTube videos or other streaming media (the average FLV stream is 300Kb/s); that consumes the entire bandwidth pool and leaves all other HTTP traffic only to slow to a crawl. Let’s assume you throw in some rogue P2P file sharing and the infinite Facebook clicks, it’s clear that it isn’t enough. The uptick in bandwidth consumption per student is not unwarranted with the shift in how individuals consume their media and it is only going to continue. Now, as a network administrator, how do you solve the issue? By spending tens of thousands of dollars (per device) for traffic-shaping equipment that prioritizes other traffic over others, deprioritizes ‘recreational’ activities to create the illusion of a functioning network.

That is the case here. A common cable equipped-houshold has access to to upwards of 10 megabits of downstream bandwidth. One can argue that this is not guaranteed, but that’s beyond the point. Let’s say that’s functional for a household of five average internet users. That would suggest the average user requires two megabits each. Let’s divide that by four since we assume most users won’t be constantly pulling data or won’t be online at the same time. By this math, a campus with 7,000 residents would need a 3.5 gigabit downstream link for acceptable performance. Compare that to 200 megabits; the current network capacity is less than one-seventeenth what it should. I don’t expect some type of miracle due to both budget and infrastructure limitations, but an honest evaluation leads on to believe that devices from Packeteer and Procera that cost upwards of $20,000 per box is not the best course of action and merely offsets the inevitable.

Links: Procera Networks, Packeteer PacketShaper, Traffic-shaping at Wikipedia.