I tend to write a lot more articles than I end up publishing on here. It's my way of ensuring the readers of gthing.net get the highest quality content available on the 'net. Sometimes I will write three articles for every one that I publish.

As my brother before me, I will give you the titles to some unfinished articles and let you decide which one I finish and publish. Just leave a comment with the article you want to see. Some of these go back 4 years or more. Here is a selection from my current drafts:

Gold Course Letter
A Win for Chinese Censorship
It's 2007 Already
A Rant About Health Care
Remote Code Execution
Treos Are Retarded
Black Friday
Super Site Power Rankings
Pulling A Code In California
Anything Worth Doing
Dear People [A rant asking people to stop asking me so many computer questions]
Waking
Most Hates States in The Union
Things That Suck

Here in the unassuming town of Orem, UT we have a little thing called Utopia. This is the city's publicly backed fiber optic network. To the layman - that means we have fast internet here and the network is run by the city as a public utility, with carriers leasing the lines.

The carrier I use at my house is called XMission, and I'm quite certain they are the greatest ISP in the country - probably even the world. Not only do they have a technically-enabled staff on hand 24/7 via E-Mail, Phone, or even IRC (!), but all their services run on 100% renewable energy sources. Awesome, right? I have had nothing but great experiences and quick responses from their tech support team.

But that's not even the best part. The best part is the speed. 50Mbit up/down - making it the fastest residential Internet connection in the United States (so far as I am aware). The next fastest is Verizon's FiOS service (the "only" all digital, 100% fiber optic network straight to your home). I've heard FiOS is pretty awesome, but at only 30Mbit down and 15Mbit up it's a fraction of the speed of our Utopia connection. Utopia FTW!

I'm surprised you haven't seen more about this on the tech news sites. People need to know that Orem is the technological super-hub of the States! In fact, the only place with faster average internet speeds is Japan - with an average connection speed of 60Mbps.

But do we actually see these speeds? Not at first - as it turns out my wireless G router was acting as a bottleneck. I had to upgrade to an 802.11N router to get the full capabilities of our speed. Once I made the upgrade I started seeing speeds like this:

That's a screenshot from my bandwidth meter program. That's right, I'm actually uploading slightly faster than the theoretical limit of our connection (50Mbits/sec = 6.25MBytes/sec). I've also seen my download speed peak around 6MBytes/sec but what you see in the picture is more of an average.

An internet service provider who under promises and over delivers? Who would have thought it possible? That's what you get with local companies.

At these speeds I can download large files - like linux distribution or movies (legal ones) in a matter of minutes. It's pretty much the greatest thing ever.

I was driving through Spanish Fork today and saw this store. Unfortunately they were not yet open for business. There was, ironically, a bed inside the store (the frame of which you can see in the window).

I have no idea what the function of this store is. I mean, it seems pretty straightforward - they make custom, life sized, weighted babies. But can that REALLY be what they do? Is there a big market in Spanish Fork for fake human offspring?

My hope is that "babies" refers to something other than the pooping, crying kind. Some people call their car their "baby," so maybe these guys make replica cars or something.

I did a little more research on the net and found that there is apparently some kind of weird market for lifelike fake babies. Enough to justify a store front in a small Utah town? Not sure...

Here's a fake baby you can buy on the Internet. Her name is Ashley, she is made of vinyl, and she breathes. Also, if you buy her (for the bargain price of $129.99 or 5 easy payments of $26) you are completely our of your damn mind. Not only are real babies free, they are a lot more fun to make yourself.

I guess I can see one upside to having fake babies: Completely crazy people will avoid actually reproducing and just settle for the vinyl alternative to childbirth. The less those people procreate, the better. By some stretch of the imagination, this might be considered a sort of birth control.

I searched around for other fake people you can buy on the Internet and was only able to find the usual assortment of inflatable girlfriends. Apparently there is not a market for fake vinyl adolescent children, fake teenagers, or fake decrepit old people. They do have fake corpses, though, so we can rest easy on that one.

I really tried, but there is simply nothing more I can say about this.

Here are some choice quotes from the AP Article:

Authorities are considering charges in the bizarre case of a woman who sat on her boyfriend's toilet for two years - so long that her body was stuck to the seat by the time the boyfriend finally called police.

Police found the clothed woman sitting on the toilet, her sweat pants down to her mid-thigh. She was "somewhat disoriented," and her legs looked like they had atrophied, Whipple said.

"We pried the toilet seat off with a pry bar and the seat went with her to the hospital," Whipple said. "The hospital removed it."

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body," Whipple said. "It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself."

He told investigators he brought his girlfriend food and water, and asked her every day to come out of the bathroom.

...and perhaps the best quote:

"It really doesn't surprise me," Ellis said.

O RLY???

Have you ever experienced that awkward moment when you're in the car with someone from out of town and you drive through American Fork on I-15? Suddenly your car smells like someone had way too much mexican food and no qualms about letting loose in such a small and enclosed space.

Your passenger of course assumes you let loose and you realize that even if you explain that American Fork is apparently on the other end of every flushed toilet in America, they're not going to buy it. It's like going into a restroom that stinks to high heaven before you got there, and then finding some cute girl standing outside the door when you leave. It's not as if you can stand there and explain that you didn't cause the stench.

Okay, seriously - the stench is foul. I was going to come up with some snarky way of describing what must go on there like "it's as if they pile up the waste of every individual in Utah, line the highways with it, and use fans to blow it at the cars," but the reality is just as bad as anything I could think of.

That's right, the solid waste from 190,000 residents from American Fork and surrounding cities is laid out flat in the fields along I-15 so that it can age and dry.

Really? That's the best we can do? We collect excrement from a couple hundred thousand people and plop it down right at the entrance to our city?

Welcome to American Fork! Come live with us in a city literally built in vast rolling hills of feces!

The interesting thing is that if you're out walking your dog, the law requires you to pick up the doggy-doo and throw it away. Yet right down the street we have fields of human variety plop laid out nice and neat like some kind of sick scat fetish wonderland.

American Fork's Field of Feces is a popular spot for high school pickup games.

The problem is actually bad enough that companies have to send people home early when the smell gets bad enough and some companies avoid bringing out-of-town guests to their offices for fear of giving the impression that Americans for some reason love to wallow in their own putrescence.

Here's a handy tip: Start recirculating the air in your car when you hit Orem and don't stop until you get to Thanksgiving Point. I've mused about creating some kind of GPS-enabled switch for Utah drivers that would perform the task automagically. I think there is definitely a market for it.

This week brings good news for those of us who don't like smelling our foul bodily waste every time we go outside; the Lakeside treatment facility is going to upgrade their facility with some machines that will keep them from having to spread everyone's filth out on the front lawn of Utah valley. That's right, they'll no longer be using waste management techniques invented in the neolithic era! The rest of America welcomes you to 100 years ago!

So beginning next week they're going to start using this new machine. Then all we have to do is wait for the current crop of human meadow muffins to bake and dry out and we should be home free (good news for my friends at Sewell Direct). They say that will take until the end of summer this year.

Then we'll just have to worry about the stench from Utah lake, where everyone else dumps their raw sewage.

(As a side note, I actually found this definition for "poop" on dictionary.com quite entertaining and I don't know why. Poop -noun: relevant information, esp. a candid or pertinent factual report; low-down: Send a reporter to get the real poop on that accident [unless that accident happened in American Fork in which case the poop is already all over the accident].)

All night mexican food places span the country. In each locale they go by a different name. Up until recently, all night mexican food places in Utah were called Betos. You know the place - they all look the same, they have the same crappy menu photography, the same food, and the same non-english speaking employees.

"3 rolled tacos"

Being a big fan of all night mexican food, I thought I would give you guys some helpful instruction on how to properly place an order and what to expect after you do. You see, all night mexican food employees are a wily bunch and you never quite know what it is you're going to get.

First of all, if you don't know spanish then you might as well not know english either. If you can't speak to them in their native tongue then you are at their mercy. You are buying yourself a spicy mexican food lottery ticket and you can't be sure if you're a winner or a loser until you have that food in your hands.

Don't try to mix up menu items. Let's say you like rolled tacos like I do. All night mexican food places usually have a menu item that is something like "3 rolled tacos." In my case it costs $2. Since I'm a fatty McFatty pants I like to place two orders. So here is your pop quiz: Do you ask for 6 rolled tacos or 2 orders of 3 rolled tacos?

The answer: it's actually a trick question. It doesn't matter what you order because they're going to give you whatever they want anyway. When you order your 6 rolled tacos and notice that the total is a dollar or two more then you should be being charged, you know you're screwed. Even worse, once that total is in the machine, no amount of conversation can change it. Whatever comes out is what you're going to get.

Once you realize that they are going to screw up your order (which should be well before ever walking through the door), don't argue with them. Mexican food employees are vindictive and the only thing worse than a messed up order is a messed up order given to someone they don't like. I tried to correct the girl at the register once several times and ended up with rolled tacos with no meat, a missing drink, no silver-(plastic)-ware, and a few more dollars out of my pocket than was justified.

When I order a taco and am charged $5, and I can clearly see that they are $2 on the menu, you just have to roll with it. If it bothers you, tell yourself that it is a subtle hint from the employee that you don't want whatever it is your ordered. Even when you know what you're getting, you never know what you're getting if you catch my drift. I mean, these people can't even understand spanish words like "taco" let alone being able to read health regulations.

In closing, I'd like to give you a few handy phrases in Spanish that you can use next time you order from an all night mexican food joint. Don't expect them to understand what you're saying because I don't even know if those people speak spanish. They might be aliens for all me know, carrying out experiments by sneaking intergalactic drugs into our food and observing our reactions. In fact, maybe the food itself is an intelligent form of alien life - a theory supported by the inhuman revenge that it takes on your system well after you eat it.

I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, helpful spanish phrases:

"No lettuce" - "Ninguna Lechuga"
"Hold the diarrhea, please." - "Lleve a cabo la diarrea, por favor."
"I am allergic to guacamole" - "Soy alérgico al guacamole"
"six rolled tacos. That's two orders of three." - "seis tacos rodados. Ésa es dos órdenes de tres."
"Get it right, or I'll call immigration." - "Consígale la derecha, o llamaré la inmigración."

Feel free to correct me as I just used babel fish to make those translations. Oh, and only use that last one as a last resort.

Good luck!