Blazing Internet Speeds Take me Back to 2005

I guess anyone who still reads my blog is pretty bored with the Starlink stuff by now, but here I am with more.

Today I finalized my dish location efforts.

The dish was originally on a short J-mount that used to hold up a Dish dish, and the mount was on the first-story roof about 8 feet from a second-story wall that runs north to south. The wall cut off a big percentage of the dish’s view of the southern horizon.

When you get your Starlink dish, which Starlink whimsically identifies as Dishy McFlatface, the app tells you all kinds of needlessly alarming things. It rants about the necessity for a clear view of the horizon.

Nobody has a clear view of the horizon. Maybe if you live in the desert or on a ship. Or on top of a mountain or skyscraper. Other than that, no.

I learned about Starlink’s somewhat neurotic horizon obsession when I opened the Starlink box for the first time. Prior to that, I had no idea. I just assumed Elon Musk, or “M,” as I like to call him, had some idea what he was doing. If the dish were hard to use in a normal location, he would have told me before sending it to me, right?

Yeah, okay.

It was because of the horizon obsession that I was reluctant to do a serious installation to begin with. I thought I might have to send the dish back in a week. I couldn’t believe it would work here in the woods.

Starlink needs to see the northern sky, and I have tall trees to my north.

When I did my preliminary installation, I got okay performance compared to my old cellular link, but I thought there was probably room for improvement. After all, in addition to the tree problem, there was a vertical wall at a bearing of around 330° (west of north), so my horizon was far from perfect. It was because of this concern that I started moving the dish around and ultimately got a new mount.

I decided to put the new mount on the edge of the second-story roof. This idea was based on some misconceptions. I thought it would be fairly easy to run a wire through the second story wall into the attic from the dish, and from there to another part of the attic where I could get access to a stretch of hallway wall near my desired router location.

I had this ridiculous idea that the southern edge of the upper roof terminated abruptly above a wall, so it would be easy to install the mount on the edge and run the cable a couple of feet down past the eave and into the attic. In reality, and I have no idea why I didn’t check this first, the upper roof slopes down toward the south, so to put the mount on the highest part, I would have to climb up the slope.

Ordinarily, I am not afraid of roofs, but mine is covered with gritty shingles, and the grit comes off under your shoes when you walk on the roof. I can walk up a slope that doesn’t have grit on it, but when you add loose grit to the equation, it’s a different story. I’m not sure how roofers do it.

I walked part of the way up the slope, and I decided it was time for plan B. I was not going to risk rolling off a roof.

I ended up putting the new mount near the old one, a couple of feet farther from the vertical wall and a couple of feet higher. The new mount is around 20″ longer than the new one, so I would say the dish is maybe 4 feet higher than it was yesterday.

Here’s the really irritating part: I turned on the app to see what it thought, and it declared my dish was free from obstructions. So as far as Starlink is concerned, my location is perfect.

If I can get an A+ in a location which is partially blocked, why make so much fuss about obstructions? For all I know, the old location was fine.

I would have checked the old location using the app, but even though I had used the app before, I was not aware it had an obstruction-check feature. I can’t explain this. Maybe the app looks different the first time you turn it on.

So I failed to scout my own roof properly, and I failed to use the app correctly.

Anyway, now I have a dish location that is beyond reproach.

I thought I would have to cut a new hole in my house, but I found I could shove the Starlink cable through a grommet from the old Dish installation.

I pulled the cable through the grommet into an attic space. Then I drilled a hole from the hallway into the attic. I ran the cable over some trusses to the hole, shoved it out of the hole, put a new RJ45 jack on the end, and hooked the router back up. A while later, after Starlink stopped pouting over my impudent interruption, I had the web again. Starlink likes to shut down for a while after you fiddle with it. Perhaps M’s way of wagging his finger at us.

I still don’t have my shielded jacks from Amazon, so I was not able to install a wall plate. I want to have a grounded dish, and without a shielded jack, that means using a jumper to connect the cable’s grounding wire to the shielded plug from the router. I can’t run a jumper through a wall plate without mangling it.

Now I have a router sitting on the hall floor next to a little pile of drywall dust, with a cable hanging out of an unfinished hole. I will fix everything up in three days when the jack arrives.

Here is the big takeaway for other confused Starlink people: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO HAVE AN UNOBSTRUCTED HORIZON. Pay no attention to the nonsense Starlink tells you. Put your dish in the best location you can find without a lot of effort and expense and let the app tell you what it thinks. If the app likes it, leave it alone. If not, move it to different locations in increasing order of installation expense and difficulty. When you get one that works, leave the dish there.

Another important lesson: DO NOT BOTHER WITH THE STARLINK APP’S LOCATION-SCOUTING FEATURE. I mean the one that tells you to point your camera at the sky and stand there like an idiot. It is unnecessary, hard to use, and worthless. It will just discourage you. Set your dish up, turn it on, and rely on the app to tell you how the dish feels. The feature you want to use is called “Visibility.”

Right now, Ookla says I am getting download and upload speeds of 83 and 6, and Starlink’s app says it’s 42 and 12. I’m sure both of these results are wrong, because past experience says both tests are stupid and unreliable, but I think they work for comparison purposes. My old cell connection ran around 12 and 1 on Ookla, so whatever I am actually getting now from Starlink is a lot better.

Why do I say the tests are stupid and unreliable? Well, I just got 83/6 and 42/12 about a minute apart. How can that happen if the tests work?

Being able to use the web 20% as well as a normal person in, say, Bangladesh or Malawi is a heady experience. It’s weird, seeing so little of the swirly Youtube waiting symbol while I try to watch videos. I can’t imagine what real Internet speed is like, though. You people with 300 Mbps must live in a different world.

My next Starlink project will be a cable running under the yard to the shop. I have the Starlink ethernet connector, which should have been built into the router. Elon. I just need to install another wall jack, find the path the old cable used to get out of the house, run a new cable through it, dig a slit in the yard, bury the new cable in it, run it into the pipe leading into the shop, put in a wall jack, and hook up the PC.

In other Musk news, my wife tells me Kathy Griffin and some other celebrities and demi-celebrities have decided to SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER. They are fighting the system. They are determined not to pay him $8 per month for their identity-verifying blue checks. Some are threatening to leave.

There are problems with this movement. Apart from the obvious triviality of the dispute.

First of all, if you leave Twitter, no one will care, and you won’t have a voice any more, so no one will hear you if you continue to criticize. A lot of celebrities are basically washed up, and Twitter helps people realize they still exist, thereby helping them get jobs. If it weren’t for Twitter, who would know people like Kathy Griffin and Valerie Bertinelli were still alive? Until today, I thought Griffin, a cancer victim, was probably dead.

Griffin and Bertinelli changed their Twitter names to Elon Musk and put up tweets supporting left-wing political candidates. They said they did this to prove the blue check process is flawed. Seems to me they proved Musk was right.

Bertinelli says the blue check makes it harder for criminals to impersonate celebrities. So she’s saying the system she describes as flawed works. What? So how does charging for the check make impersonation easier? Is she saying she can’t scrape up $96 per year? Is she saying criminals will pay but celebrities won’t?

If the system works, how come she was able to call herself Elon Musk without losing her blue check? It was still there when she pulled her prank. Shouldn’t blue-checkers be prevented from changing their handles? After all, the check is supposed to be proof they’re who they say they are.

Maybe I don’t understand her argument. She says the system is flawed, and then she says it works. Somehow, charging makes it less likely to work? Maybe I missed a vital tweet that reconciles these claims.

Okay, I’ll clear things up for everyone. First, a disclaimer: I don’t care what happens to Twitter. Second, blue checks should be screened well, and screening should be continuous so blue-checkers can’t change their handles. Third, everyone with any self-respect should get off Twitter and try to regain some dignity.

Who really cares? It’s all junior high to me. It’s amazing that human beings are willing to hiss and claw at each other like this in public. Over $96 per year.

Maybe they do it because celebrities aren’t busy. They have long periods (sometimes multiple decades) of inactivity. What better to do than caper and prance for attention on a free service that brings them attention from lots of people?

I like what Dave Chappelle said about Twitter, but for the profanity: “Apparently they dragged me on Twitter. I don’t give a ___, because Twitter is not a real place.”

What is the other problem with celebrities SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER? Well, they ARE power. Liberals are the establishment. Conservatives and Christians are the counterculture. Elon Musk is an insurgent who just happened to get very rich. Musk is the rebel and protestor. Griffin and Bertinelli are establishment stooges. They’re on the side that slaps down the little people. They’re organs of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Insiders. Swamp creatures. They’re sith lords. Musk is Luke Skywalker.

I had a thought recently. What if Instagram starts increasing its word limit and giving people checks for nothing? Instagram is a leftist organization, very much in favor of ending free political speech, and it already has a big base. I wonder if Instagram could kill Twitter.

I can’t predict the future, but I know what’s happening right now. Liberals all over America are calling each other and meeting, trying to find a way to end the existential threats of free speech and blue check fees. They really think these phenomena are disastrous for the world. Satan has convinced them up is down and down is up.

Projection. That’s what it is. I was talking to my wife about this the other day. Controlling, abusive people who can’t tolerate dissent project. A delusion comes over them, and they think they people they hurt are the real oppressors. They think they’re victims. When you manage to prevent them from abusing them, they think what you’ve done is abuse.

My dad and sister had this problem. It is truly a mental illness. A state of bona fide delusion. Not far from psychosis.

My sister used to accuse me of having her own faults all the time. It was bizarre. I’ll give you the weirdest example. She used to walk around the house in her underwear. It was trashy and very rude. She would do it in our house and even my grandparents’ house. She would spend the entire day that way. It was normal for her.

One day she was abusing me for some imagined offense, and while she was listing my crimes, she said I walked around in my grandparents’ house in my underwear all the time. Never, ever, EVER happened. I would have been mortified if I had accidentally walked through the house like that. It’s something white trash people do. Decent people have the courtesy to wear clothes.

I think this was the moment when I understood how crazy projection is.

It made me realize why my sister hated other people so much. She thought they were like her. And even more unbelievably, she thought she had their good qualities and the moral high ground.

Maybe that’s why she loved and admired herself so much. I wonder.

Projection is slander and accusation, so no wonder Satan’s children do it. He is the devil, and “devil” means “accuser” and “slanderer.” Look up the Greek.

Sometimes they know they’re slandering, but a lot of the time, they really believe the insane things they say about the people they’re abusing. They hate us because they think we’re like them.

It’s an important thing to understand. It’s a big mistake to treat a crazy person as though he were sane. You waste a lot of time. Reasoning with them is like reasoning with a stump.

It’s so weird, seeing the people who run the world acting like they’re the French Resistance. So brave, agreeing with all the people around them. Agreeing with the people who pay them. Agreeing with most people in our government. What kind of rebellion is that? What kind of revolutionary props up the ruling regime?

The Nazis shot resistors without trials. Here, the people who think they’re rebels get to go to the Oscars.

It’s all incredibly interesting to watch.

The Twitter squabble. Not the Oscars. They’re ridiculous. A bunch of insanely wealthy people, patting each other on the back for playing make-believe.

As of Thursday, I should have a real Internet wall jack, and by next week, I hope to have Starlink in the shop. You can keep Twitter, though.