Cruiz is Right

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky

From this article on Cnn about Ted Cruiz:

Instead, Cruz blasted his fellow Senate Republicans, saying they are most to blame for the failure of the push to defund or delay Obamacare.

“You want to win an election in 2014? Republicans need to stand for principle. And it is the grassroots, organized, that will win elections in 2014.”

That last quote is exactly right.  If the Republicans would actually stand up and fight for something…heck, they’d win elections hands down.  That’s why I didn’t vote for Romney.  That’s why I didn’t vote for McCain.  That’s why I didn’t vote for W the second time.  They weren’t conservative and didn’t stand for anything I thought.  They were “safe” and “safe” loses elections.  If we’d get more people like Ted Cruiz and the Tea-Party types to run…wow.  I think it might take a couple of wins and a couple of battles well fought (like the House started doing in this most recent shutdown) for people to see they really mean business.  But…if that were to happen.  Wow.  The US would be on the way to moving back towards the country it should be…and back towards the country the Founders envisioned.

Image from Talk Radio News Service via flickr

New ISP

20131016_Sky 20131020_VPNSpeedTest
Sky (ISP No VPN) On StrongVPN

Well, we just signed up for Sky Fibre /  Fiber.  It isn’t really fiber to the house…but it is fiber to the cabinet. You can see the actual results above.  This is way different from our previous aDSL servce.  But, on top of this, I run Strong VPN through a dedicated router.  I spent the best part of this week trying to sort out the problem.  I learned two things:

1) How to calculate the maximum theoretical speed of a wan link.  With my latency to the states, the max speed I can expect to the states is around 7Mbps.
2) I upgraded dd-wrt to a new version.  I’m not real sure what the difference was/is but it works better.  The connection is more stable and I get better more reliable throughput.

[Update 2013-10-20 06:21:47] I finally got around to doing a speed test on the VPN that I think is representative of the speeds we really get.