Lionesses discuss snacks

For a lighthearted lion topic.

Vote, then pray your ballot is counted - Daniel Ruth, Times Columnist

A very critical opinion piece about Florida's election head. Well worth reading!

Anybody have a test program that will stress a computer?

I posted before about my husband's Acer laptop that had been throwing BSODs constantly even with fresh installs of Windows 7 Home and nothing extra installed. I took one of the suggestions and got information from the BSOD which indicated it was a problem with ntfs.sys. Searching that got to pages that said that was caused when a driver forced dumps and one source said to turn off write caching. So I've done that.

Now I want to stress the thing and see if that fixed the problem. I don't have time or inclination to mess with the damned thing myself. I already got my husband a new laptop - nice Toshiba on sale the week before July 4. But if I can get this one to be reliable I can use it for email and browsing when we're on vacation and not have to take turns with the husband using his laptop.

Any test programs you can suggest that I can just start and run for a while?

Amazing sight in North Florida - lots of wading birds!

At least 100 wood storks, a dozen or more snowy egrets, a good number of American egrets and one tri-color egret! Oh, and a great blue heron that kept flying back and forth as if he was trying to claim the entire pond.

I wish I could post my pictures - maybe tomorrow.

The birds were seen today on a pond next to US 19/US 27 between Capps and Lamont. I've never seen that many wood storks at once. They seemed to be chasing frogs or tadpoles - we could hear the frogs closer to the road complaining. Some of the birds were tummy deep, going after their prey.

If anyone wants to drive out to look, watch for a really ratty pecan stand on the north side of the road, the pond was almost directly across the highway from it. It was the first stand if traveling south from Capps, a few miles from the intersection where US 19 leaves US 27.

Welsh Government Responds to UFO Questions in Klingon

Centurylink local trunkline is really really slow right now - Tallahassee Florida

Last week our internet speeds were really, really slow. When I ran the Centuryline speedtest it started out at less than 2 Mbps and dropped to 0.13 - we're paying for 10 Mbps.

I called in to tech support and they ran me through all kinds of tests, reboots, etc with no improvement. Finally they scheduled to have someone come out to check the lines. The guy called and told me to check my speed - it was over 15 Mbps! He said he'd replaced a card in the fiber optic network out our way.

Yesterday the speeds were way down again - 0.71 Mbps. I rebooted the modem and my computer and it got up to 1.49 Mbps. I tried doing a Chat session with their tech support. The first session got cut off; on the second, after a ten minute hold the tech came back and told me I'd have to call in.

So I called. After explaining the problem as a repeated experience for the third time last night, retesting the speed, bringing down an ancient Vista laptop from the attic and hooking it up, testing the speed yet again, the tech finally told me what was going on.

The trunkline that connects the internet for the entire Tallahassee region has issues. The fiber optic card that was replaced last week was an effort to repair it - those card cost $275,000 (!) so they don't want to keep replacing them on the off chance another one is the problem.

They hope to have it fixed by next week but the tech I spoke to was pessimistic. He said they've over sold their high speed internet and the trunkline needs to be upgraded to handle the load.

I'm paying for TV and 10 Mbps broadband coming through those lines. I'm supposed to get at least 80% of that speed. On a good day I can hit 20 Mbps especially if I'm the only one home and I'm watching DVR rather than TV coming in on the same line - with the TV and internet we have we're supposed to get combined 25 Mbps.

TV has been crappy - lots of pixelization and frozen pictures. If this problem continues, I'm going to ask for a partial credit!