Okay, I think I got

Okay, I think I got my wireless issues sorted out now. There are about a dozen random ad-hoc wi-fi networks, and my machine was jumping between them all, which kept disconnecting me. I made my machine a little less aggressive now, and it seems to have stabilized. This Google stuff is fascinating, the amount of thought that goes into even their ad placement is really impressive. They use off the shelf PC hardware for their datacenters, they showed us some funny pictures of the first Google center at Stanford, it looks like my junk room, with an assortment of old PCs. Their router handles 256Gbps of traffic!