Got it covered.

With a little help from Paul Grzelak (well, actually quite a lot of help) we came up with this batch file:

:pinger
ping -n 1 google.com > tmp0.txt
echo %date:~0,5%, %time:~0,5%, > tmp1.txt
type tmp0.txt | find "loss" | cut -f 2 -d "(" | cut -f 1 -d ")" | cut -f 1,2 -d " " > tmp2.txt
echo , > tmp3.txt
type tmp0.txt | find "Average" | cut -f 4 -d "=" | cut -f 2 -d " " | cut -f 1 -d " " > tmp4.txt
paste -d "" tmp1.txt tmp2.txt tmp3.txt tmp4.txt >>pings.csv
sleep %1
goto pinger

that gives exactly the output that I want. I've attached a CSV file of the first 12 hours, and it is pretty damning for my ISP. I do NOT think it was a coincidence that the two-hour outage last night ended at exactly midnight with ping times suddenly about 25% of what they were before the outage started.

Here's what the output looks like if you don't want to load the CSV file:

9/21 21:33 0% loss 326ms
9/21 21:34 0% loss 336ms
9/21 21:35 0% loss 217ms
9/21 21:36 0% loss 242ms
9/21 21:37 0% loss 318ms
9/21 21:38 100% loss
9/21 21:39 0% loss 332ms
9/21 21:40 0% loss 208ms
9/21 21:41 100% loss
9/21 21:42 0% loss
9/21 21:43 100% loss
9/21 21:44 100% loss
9/21 21:45
9/21 21:46
9/21 21:47
9/21 21:48
9/21 21:49
9/21 21:50
.
.
.
9/21 23:57
9/21 23:58
9/21 23:59
9/22 0:00 0% loss 84ms
9/22 0:01 0% loss 74ms
9/22 0:02 0% loss 60ms

Well, sort of what it looks like. The bbs munches up the formatting a bit. Note the long ping times a few minutes before I lost connectivity. Paul's help was to give me the "cut" and the "paste" commands which are not part of Windows, and he parameterized them for me. The rest is mostly my work.

As soon as I can figure out how to do it, I will change the ping destination to be my ISP instead of google.com. I just chose google.com because I knew how to do it and they are a reliable ping object.

Anyway, I think a week or so of collecting this data should give me some ammunition to use when I visit my ISP.

tanstaafl.