We've spent the past few days fretting about why the internet seemeed so slow at our house. On the way to finding the answer, I learned a few things:

• NetPeeker is a pretty decent shareware app for windows for monitoring network usage.
• Netstat works OK on linux for TCP (netstat -a, then look at Send-Q and Recv-Q), but doesn't help much to tell you how much bandwidth is being used up for UDP packets. For that, use netload, which comes in the netdiag package. I'm not sure if it can pinpoint which program is using up all the bandwidth, but it can at least tell you that, yes, this computer *is* saturating our upload capacity. Turned out to be a certain non-copyright-infringement-based P2P app that I've dedicated 40kBps upload speed to (it's been maxing out at 17kBps lately).

This evening we went to a 'Democratic Platform Meeting' and met up with some random other folks atht the Union. We decided that the Democratic party should stand for:

• Improving infrastructure (rebuild railroads, invest in renewable energy sources)
• Not selling everything to China
• Holding Bush + Co accountable for all their crap, and making government more transparent so that the next Bush won't be able to hide his mis-deeds so easily.
• Focusing on practical issues instead of wasting time arguing about ideology.
• Improving education, especially civics, since having the population not be a bunch of idiots will make all other issues easier to deal with.