I've moved out of the Homestead Suites, and into the TownePlace Suites in Manhattan Beach. Ten bucks more a night, twice the room size, twice the number of burners on the stove, a dishwasher (the other place had a dishwasher, too--me). It also has fast ethernet. Last night, when I was futilely struggling to transmit packets on the net on the wireless at the Homestead room, I noticed that I had a signal/noise ratio of one: -79 dB signal, -79 dB noise. No wonder that it was dropping packets.

But this connection flies. I just used it to download Firefox 1.5 (I hadn't upgraded this laptop yet), and it grabbed the few megs in less than a minute. So, now the only thing to keep me from blogging is all the other things that I need to do.

I'm amazed that in the last 20 hours nobody has pointed out you signal to noise ratio was zero (dB).

True, technically speaking. I meant the ratio of the decibels of signal to decibals of noise. As you point out, the log of that ratio (which is one) is indeed zip.

It means either that no one is reading, or no one knew the technical definition of S/N ratio. Or that no one (else) was pedantic enough to point it out. ;-)