Most-Recent Entries

M.O.R. Episode 3 -- Michael Dryburgh
By: Ben Cannon, Bram Epstein, and Darrin Snider
Sunday, June 6, 2021


M.O.R. Episode 2 -- Ian Thomson
By: Ben Cannon, Bram Epstein, and Darrin Snider
Sunday, May 23, 2021


M.O.R. Episode 1 -- Mark Kelly
By: Ben Cannon, Bram Epstein, and Darrin Snider
Sunday, May 16, 2021


An In-Snide Look: I Think I Could Get Used to this Life Sometimes
By: Darrin Snider
Sunday, June 7, 2020


Getting Down to Earth with mOOnMen
By: Amy Foxworthy
Sunday, February 16, 2020


The Musical Journey of Jethro Easyfields
By: Amy Foxworthy
Tuesday, February 11, 2020


Monday Mixtape: Etwasprog
By: Darrin Snider
Monday, February 10, 2020


Monday Mixtape: Excerpts from the Summer of 2014
By: Darrin Snider
Monday, January 20, 2020


Mix Tape Monday: Mashin' it Up
By: Darrin Snider
Monday, January 13, 2020


Mix Tape Monday: Back to the Gym Workout
By: Darrin Snider
Monday, January 6, 2020

An In-Snide Look #224: Wherein I Test My l33T IT Troubleshooting Skillz

By: Darrin Snider (darrin at indyintune dot com)
Friday, July 11, 2014 7:30:00 AM

  

Funny how sometimes your anger is completely misplaced and you feel like a total idiot about it later. Take for example my recent struggles with AT&T, who provides the Internet connectivity for myself as well as all things Indy In-Tune ... much to my chagrin. For almost a month now, I've been getting daily alerts from them about my "extreme usage" ... and telling me that they are billing me an additional $10 for another 50GB. Now, at first I had assumed that their silly automation was merely telling me about it on a daily basis. You're AT&T, you can't limit yourself to one email telling me you're billing me an extra $10 for heavy Internet use?

Of course, then I saw my bill... With 15 of these $10 charges on it. Ooops. How the hell can that be right? That's almost the equivalent of continually streaming 1080p video 24/7. I don't even watch TV, and streaming audio 24/7 is just over 50GB for the month.

I ran through every possibility I could think of. Did I leave the Netflix on? No. Neighbors hacked my WiFi and were BitTorrenting kiddie porn? No. Bad router port continually downloading gibberish packets? No. A dozen or so rogue viewers on the webcam staring at the console wondering if it's a static image or live video? No. It has to be a problem on the circuit. Gotta be AT&T's fault. Bastards.

By now you're wondering why I'm still going on about this. Well, frankly it's because I had to blog about SOMETHING today, but mostly because right before I was about to call AT&T and give them a piece of my mind, I found the actual culprit -- something a lot of you, my dear readers, may encounter at some point, and you'll thank me for going through the troubleshooting pains for you.

You know those "shared drives" we're all using these days for passing files back and forth? Personally I use Dropbox, Amazon Could Drive, and Microsoft Skydrive in my various lives. Obviously you know they're always running and constantly talking to the cloud. You can tell because of what is usually an animated "synch" icon that pops up from time to time. Did you ever count how many computers are actually talking to that shared drive? Personally, just in my home, I have a phone, a Kindle, a laptop, a desktop, and the console in the studio hooked up to these. This way if I get sent a cool track in the mail, buy a band's CD on my phone while I'm at a show, or somebody submits something, the other four computers I'm NOT on at the time will download a copy for my convenience.

Did you ever wonder what happens when five computers running poorly written cloud drive software (Amazon Cloud Drive, in this instance, by the way) argue over the same corrupt file without any means to recover or give up? Yep, they all continually attempt to download it, fail, and try again. Turns out when you do the math on the bandwidth of five computers downloading the same file over and over 24/7 for two weeks adds up to about 55GB per day ... or $150 if you don't catch it quickly enough.

So, screw you, Amazon for writing shitty software with poor error handling ... and bite me, AT&T for being heartless and not at all helpful about my plight. To the rest of you, you're welcome for the free troubleshooting.

But, on the bright side, I notice my Internet speeds are a lot better now. Still not good, but a lot better.



Previous Post:
Show #162: The Chicago Typewriters
Next Post:
A Few Words with Terri Nunn of Berlin


Blog comments powered by Disqus

Today on Indy In-Tune

Listen Live:  

It's Hard Rock Thursday!

12:00 AM: Random Access Music
6:00 AM: Artist Spotlight
7:00 AM: Whiskey on the Rails
8:00 AM: Work Safe Weekday Music
6:00 PM: Artist Spotlight
7:00 PM: The Rock Show (Hard Rock / Metal)
10:00 PM: Local Is Our Genre
11:00 PM: Artist Spotlight

* Schedule subject to change without notice. Sorry, but that's rock and roll.

Solicitations and Submissions

Solicitations for blog posts can be made by sending and email to "blog -at- indyintune -dot- com" and should follow these guidelines:

  • Local (Indianapolis-based) acts always have priority.
  • Visisting acts playing a bill with one or more local acts are also considered.
  • We generally don't like to repeat content found on other sites. If your request already has a lot of coverage on other sites, it will be considered low-priority unless you can give us an exclusive angle.
  • For obvious reasons, we don't do solicited album reviews, though we do appreciate you letting us know when you have a new release. Consider coming in and talking about the album yourself live on the air or a podcast.
  • All of our staff writers are unpaid enthusiasts. All requests for blog posts are entirely at their descretion.
  • As such, they generally need a lot of lead-time to put something out -- we're talking weeks of lead time, not hours.
  • That said, individual authors have full authority to ignore the following guidelines and write whatever they want ... if you can convince them to.
  • In addition, feel free to write your own post and submit it for posting as a "guest blogger." Those almost always get accepted.
  • Finally, regional or national acts submitting without meeting the above guidelines are generally ignored. We're not trying to be dicks, but if you send us a generic form-letter with your press release, and it doesn't even remotely concern a local artist or event, then you're not part of our core focus.