Leeches
Stupid bloodsucking such-and-suches…
So, we were experiencing very slow internet for a while now. We'd get speeds of 10kb/s consistently. I didn't really think about it much, because the internet has always been somewhat up-and-down in that way. But today we all were annoyed at it, so I logged into the wireless base station and looked at the list of connected IP addresses. 13 computers connected. After noting that Aaron Brown has two computers, and that Aaron Moore is connected with both a hardline and wireless, there were still 3 computers left unaccounted for, if everyone in the house had their computers on. So Aaron Brown and I changed the password on the base station (which was still the default), and set up some WEP encryption, and guess what? The internet jumped from 15kb/sec to about 1000kb/sec. I don't know how someone was muscling the rest of us out, but it was pretty atrocious. I am much happier now, because it means that I can work on web design and upload every minute or so without having to wait 20 seconds for each text file.
We should have done something to the leeches computers before we encrypted the signal, but I'm not so much into retribution. Alas.