Observations

Yeah, not bad. That's from 6000/768 service. I upgraded from 1500/384 because a) the price of that was going up and b) the price of the faster service was less than I paid originally - they cut prices about six months ago. Pretty nice. Hope that should help with any XBLA issues I might have.

Also, I was in a waiting room recently and worked out something pretty cool. The carpet there had a pattern that looked roughly like this:

00__00--00__00--00
00__00--00__00--00

except picture the dashes at the top instead of in the middle. When I first looked at the carpet, my brain interpreted the 00s in diagonal lines, as if there were something connecting them. I looked at the pattern close to my feet, so I could focus on it, and saw what you kind of see above. I looked out again, and this time my brain looked at it as if there were only rows, no diagonals.

Basically, it didn't get a clear view at first, so it saw the larger shapes and figured there were probably lines between them. (It's not too different than looking at black squares with white lines between them and seeing black squares in the intersections.) Once I gave my brain the correct mapping, it interpreted the pattern correctly, so it knew what I could see farther away.

If your brain has seen something similar before, it maps a new thing onto that memory until you provide it details to distinguish the two. If it's unlike anything you've ever seen, your brain can't interpret it correctly, so you may have no idea how to explain it.

Sorry, that's just science babble, but I thought it was cool.