It’s a hard knock life, being a n3rd. The zits, the angry stares when you set the curve, the “please don’t look at me…ever” look that the girls get when you walk up to them. But the worst is that “please don’t use all my bandwidth” look that the network admins give you when they have to shut off your network connection because your uploads are taking half of the school’s upload capacity.

Of course, I’m kidding…mostly. As some of you know, I was taken offline for a couple of days, a few days ago. What happened was that when I upgraded to the new version of eMule, the eMule traffic had a new signature that our school’s packetshaper couldn’t identify, so it didn’t know how to throttle it. I was expecting the packetshaper to take care of throttling eMule for me, so I had my eMule transfer rate caps off. Soooo when people started downloading from me, they were getting hella fast transfers, and I wound up using at least half of the school’s upload capacity, which looked really suspicious. So they canned my internet. But in the end, it was just an honest mistake and an unforseeable incident, and the guy who took me offline totally understood and was a really cool guy and so I’m back online with no problems.

That doesn’t stop the zits, angry stares, or “please don’t look at me” looks, though. But it helps.