I was playing with what I’d hoped would be a new feature for the site last night. Things were looking really promising for a while, too — but it looks like it’s not going to happen, or at the very least, not anytime soon. Bleah.
A while ago, Kirsten recommended I take a look at Andromeda, an application for streaming audio across the ‘net. At the time, I didn’t figure it was something to look into — primarily because all of my .mp3 files were on one computer, and my webserver was a seperate machine. Howerver, since the old webserver died and I’m now serving djwudi.com off of the same machine that has all my music, I thought I’d take a look at it.
Downloaded and installed it last night, and after a quick e-mail with the developers to figure out one small glitch, things were up and running. It works really nicely, too. From my PC, I could hit my website, browse through my music folders, set up playlists, and listen to any .mp3 file stored on my webserver. Nifty! I had all sorts of ideas for how I wanted to play with it, too — everything from linking to a band’s directory if I mentioned them in a post, to seeing if there was a way I could integrate it with my ‘Music of the Moment’ display to add a ‘play’ button for whatever track was being displayed at the moment.
Unfortunately, there’s one key roadblock — my connection to the ‘net. My incoming connection is nice and fast (1.5 Mbps, about the speed of a T-1 line), but my outgoing connection is pretty pokey (128 kbps, about twice the speed of a 56k modem). So, I figured it was worth taking a look at what other options I might have through my ISP, Speakeasy.
Turns out that according to their pricing grid, I’ve got two options for adjusting my speed, and staying close to my current price range. For $10/month more I could drop my incoming speed in half to 750 kbps, but triple my outgoing speed to 384 kbps. Or, for $20/month more, I could keep my incoming speed as-is, and triple my outgoing speed. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to go for the first option — while I really like having the T-1 speed incoming, it’s rare that I really use it all, so I figured I could go ahead and live with half of that, and take the smallest possible increase to my bill.
So, off to the phone to call Speakeasy. At which point, the bad news hits. It turns out that there are two different companies that Speakeasy parners with to provide their DSL service locally, Covad and WorldCom (though it might not be WorldCom, I’m hoping I remembered that correctly). The connection I currently have goes through Covad, and apparently it’s the top of the line Covad connection. Upgrading to a faster speed would require switching me over onto WorldCom’s network — which would require me cancelling my current line, and re-ordering a new line at the different rate. Sounds easy enough…except that it would create about a month where I’d be without DSL access.
Dial-up access only, and no website. Ugh.
The only other option would be if I had a second phone line. Then I could order the new DSL line, hook that into the second phone line, and kill the current DSL line when the new one kicks in. Unfortunately, that would require me paying for two phone lines for that month, two DSL lines for that month (plus all the setup costs for the new line), and then the hassle of changing my phone number at the end of the switch.
None of those options are particularly appealing.
End result, then, unfortunately, is that my site stays it’s current pokey (but, thankfully, usually okay since I keep most of my pages pure text) speed, and no Andromeda integration.
Ah, well. It was worth looking into, at least.
Long story short — after two weeks of waiting, and a good few hours of ‘puter work, I’ve just upgraded my main mac (and webserver) to the newest version of