We made it! Driving a moving truck almost 2000 miles across America was no picnic (it gets HOT in Arizona) but ~4 days of travel were relatively uneventful (only one flat tire!). Pretty much everything made it intact, including a few hundred pounds of lab benches and equipment. (Note to self, next time get twice as many moving pads as seems necessary!)
My wife and I have been getting acquainted with our new city. One of the interesting/unique things about Austin is the local trailer food scene. One example, shown below, is odd duck, where you can purchase local, sustainable, gourmet wood fired food out of a trailer in South Austin. Yum.
The biggest downside to Austin I have found so far (aside from the lack of In-n-Out and Trader Joe’s) has been the pitiful upstream bandwidth that Time Warner provides with their Roadrunner internet service. Check out these Speedtest results:
Holy asymmetric internet access, Batman!
Compare those results with this test I ran before I packed up my computer in San Francisco:
Over 4 megabits! If only I knew how lucky I was on Comcast when I could upload entire Flickr albums and HD videos in minutes!
Time Warner – 512K? Really?
Ok, that’s enough for now – time to unpack the power supplies and oscilloscope.
PS. I almost forgot. There are a few pictures of the move on Flickr.
I tested my upstream bandwidth another way, by uploading a file to a site with lots of bandwidth. The results met my expectations.
512kbit/s * 1 byte/8bits = 64kbytes/s max upload speed.
Which is about what I got.
I haven’t tested downstream.
I ran the speedtest.net on my ISP (Cable One) and although I have 10mb service, it clocked nearly 20mb on the download test…. The test server connection was not local and the automatic server showed a 130ms ping. I know where the cable company routes their service and manually picked a location in Dallas and got a 60ms ping. Both tests came in at exactly the same 18.97 download and .97 upload.
I have NEVER seen that type of throughput in real usage. This REALLY smells like some creative cooking with a local cable caching server.
Can you get FIOS or whatever that SW Bell equivalent is down there?
As far as I can tell (based on my address) FIOS is not available where I live. 🙁
Does Verizon or SW Bell service your area? SW Bell (ATT) has that U-Verse service. That’s available in my neighborhood, but haven’t extended the lines to my street from the trunk 2 streets over :-/
I’m in the area serviced my a ma and pop cable provider, but I’m still getting 9 down 1.5 up……
No Verizon, no AT&T / SW Bell. 🙁
It looks like there is a 4G/WiMAX(?) provider in town, but they don’t say what their bandwidth limits are.
Austin has great food.
One word… Mariastacos!
http://www.tacoxpress.com
I miss those tacos every time I try some inferior tacos out here.
Josh –
I think Seattle is a little too far from Mexico to have good Mexican food. I’ll give Taco Xpress a try, thanks for the link!