Life at Cornell, part 2

I really shouldn’t be blogging but I’ve got fans to please so I’m taking a little time away from my studying to give you another glimpse into the Cornell life.

I received this message on March 7 at 12:03 pm:

Dear Christian Montoya,

You are receiving this alert because the system registered in your name on the ResNet network has exceeded the 2 GB (2048 MB) of off-campus network usage included in your basic network service for the month of March. Additional off-campus network usage is available to you at a rate of $0.0015 per Megabyte ($1.54 per Gigabyte).

In case it is not immediately obvious here, Cornell only provides 2 gigabytes of bandwidth to each student. After that, you get charged $1.54 per gigabyte. This is definitely one of the more annoying things at Cornell. I think they do this to discourage massive torrent downloading among students, but I never do that. Let’s have a look at what I managed to do in one week to use up my monthly allowance of 2 gigs.

• Watch the VW GTI MK5 commercials on Google video, over and over and over and over. Video 1, Video 2, and Video 3. Download them too. Oh snap!
• Watch Loose Change on Google Video and then find the website for it and download it and other videos in MPEG format so I can watch them without an internet connection.
• Play True Combat: Elite almost every night, giving up a couple hours of sleep (or not, if I just can’t sleep at all) for a little bit of trigger happy stress relief. I know the website isn’t too special but the game is very cool, apparently the #3 most played mod on the world.
• Upload lots of files including images and plugins to various Wordpress sites that I’m still working on.
• Reload my inbox. See I have no new e-mails or weblog comments. Mope about and feel sorry for myself for two minutes. Reload my inbox. See I have no new e-mails or weblog comments. Mope about and… this goes on for hours.

Actually I don’t know if that last item consumes much bandwidth, but considering the frequency at which I do it, it might. Judging by my performance in the past week, it looks like I will owe Cornell $4.62 at the end of March just for normal internet use. That’s lame.

I know some students get around the bandwidth issues by using the Cornell wireless network to download torrents… which is definitely stupid since that means that the Cornell wireless network is always crawling at the slowest pace because it is bogged down with huge files being transferred. I never get much done when I have to rely on the wireless network. That’s lame too.

So I guess this is another Cornell rant. It isn’t the last one, but the rest will have to wait. I’m off to check my inbox.