3/11/2023
Early on Friday morning I had a brief dream. I was in bed with a companion. She was short, Velma-ish, and she was east Indian to the best of my recollection. What stands out from the dream is I felt her hug me. It wasn't a hug where the other person holds on after I loosen up my arms, which always gives me some hope about being a lovable person, but this woman in a red sweater with short, straight black hair combed over her dark face truly cherished me and wanted to hold me without ever letting go.
That oneiric vignette haunted me throughout my workday.
For the past month my internet has been awful. I'm using a wifi antenna, which has been a godsend, but of late the internet has been nigh-unusable. Google and YouTube crawl to a stop. Many sites time out, necessitating me hitting shift-reload in hopes of getting a decent connection.
Last weekend I backed up then wiped my laptop's hard drive and installed Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish. High fucking time since Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver's end-of-life happens on April 30th of this year. I surmised my shitty internet was due to my using an old operating system, not to mention using some sketchy extensions with my Firefox browser for privacy and bypassing paywalls. My research to diagnose the problem had me disable Ubuntu's IPv6 implementation, which did help internet speed but not much, along with posts saying Google is using some obscure Javascript library on their sites, including YouTube, and that's slowing down internet access for people.
On reddit I learned that I was doubling up on extensions since one would do the job(s) while the additional extensions duplicate the same features. For example the Electronic Frontier Foundation's HTTPS Everywhere extension is unnecessary with Firefox since Firefox already has the same capability built into it. The doubling up probably explains why my browser, before upgrading, took so long to open up and be useful.
Since Leah's at a women's wellness weekend, I'm taking advantage of the empty house to catsit, take decent showers, and see if my internet connectivity is slow as molasses in January here.
Surprise, the internet down here is snappy just like using my phone's cell data via a hotspot.
Went ahead and texted my landlord with my findings, mentioning how I use my computer for side gigs (writing for the fortean site is a side gig), and how I want him to look into speeding up the house's internet. Inshallah, he'll do something about it.
