Tag Archives: Gadgets and Nerdery

My groggy day.

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A link: To the media: Do your job. Long article, but worth the read.

We’re moved in to the house! Holy cats. We keep finding more little things that need work, and our landlord/repair guy team are being responsive and actually seem happy that we’re relaying this stuff to them. They’re not annoyed that they have to fix things. They seem to -want- to make sure the house is up to par. It seems that they get that fixing things now means less work than having to fix a cascading failure later.

That sounded geekier than intended. In that vein, Ubuntu installs have a habit of being at 33% of whatever they’re doing when I look at them.

Yes, I’m a little sleep deprived, why do you ask?

While , Cassie, and Aidan were napping, and while Hunter and Killian were playing, I sat upstairs in the finished attic and finished up a piece. When I get a chance, I will be typing it and Steven up.

Prepping CentoS for a Xen install now. Man, this post keeps swinging back toward the geek-centric content, doesn’t it? Why am I even a little bit surprised?

Much of my computer stuff has already been moved into the basement, where a wall-mounted workbench and metal shelving unit await their transformation into the SETI@Home for Twilight Computers. I’m not sure if any of the 486 machines survived, or if my oldest down there is a Pentium. In any case once Comcast (some would say, the devil) comes by on Wednesday, I’ll finally have the wired connection I need to sink my teeth into that project. Not that I’ll have the free time to nurture it, but whatever. Debian pretty much runs on its own, once it’s set up.

Maybe some of the cardboard forest will be defeated tomorrow. Wish us luck! :)

“You played it for her, you can play it for me.”

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There’s about a billion things in my head that I keep wanting to get out, so I’m going to do a couple at a time.

This weekend’s move will start at 11 AM, and we’ll meet at my current apartment. Tomorrow is a packing/get water and gas turned on/grocery shopping day, and I should have the whole place packed by the end of the day. If you need directions, or the address or some such, just drop me a phone call or a comment here.

I desperately need to shave my face.

traded me a sweet shiny black computer case for my portable CD/MP3 CD player the last time he was down, but I totally forgot to get it to him. It’s sent out with delivery confirmation and tracking, so it best get to him in one piece.

Remember that cassette tape MP3 player that I’ve been gushing about? This one? Well, I finally spent part of my Micro Center gift card on SD cards for it, and it… has issues. It spazzes out with anything longer than a four-minute song on MP3 when it comes to pausing and resuming. It ejects from my car’s tape player with an E11 error – broken tape. So, it’s basically useless to me. I ordered the thing back around my birthday, in early May, and so I figured I was stuck with it. No harm in trying to return it, though, right?

I e-mailed ThinkGeek with the situation, quoted this spot from the ad:

You will have no problems listening to hours of your favorite songs via the built-in SD card slot, and you can easily change to different songs if you have multiple SD Cards.

and got an email back the next day with a shipping label, RMA number, and apologies. So, I’ve packaged it up, labeled it, and sent it back. They’re going to give me a full refund. I think I’ll end up with a microSD-expandable Sansa player, because I want to be just like . I mean, c’mon. Don’t you?

Never been so thankful for Pinball Pete’s

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The car has glass in it, and is able to be driven. Which puts me back to the repair that I was -about- to have done before a tree fell on it. Heh.

Ever see a seven year old video game lover walk into an arcade for the first time? I have, and it was just about the coolest thing ever. I even have one of those cheesy four-picture Polaroids to commemorate it. It’s hanging in my cube, labeled “My first Father’s Day, Hunter & Dave, June 2008.” Also, he told the waitress at Emil’s that I was his “part-Dad”, and I don’t think that I could have smiled any bigger. If you’re scratching your head, wondering how a guy without kids celebrated Father’s Day, read this post.

I have fifteen virtual servers running SETI@home on an OpenVZ test box. I’ve been working on this project in my spare time here at work for a long time, and it feels like I’ve earned a whole slew of geek points.

*sigh*

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Attention Canonical:

Please do not use a piece of beta software as the primary/default browser for your next release of Ubuntu. Firefox 3 Beta 5 is sucking so loud I cannot hear my industrial beats.

In short, don’t do this:

SUCK > 00NTZ

Thank you, please drive through.

The Tubes

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I used to work for Comcast, doing support for their cable modem network in the metro Detroit area. I know how their network works, and exactly how underhanded they can be.

After reading this article by Cory Doctorow and this one by Charlie Stross, it’s giving me a flashback. The comments on Mr. Stross’s post note that even BT (British Telecom) is knees deep in screw-the-customer-because-we-can land.

My options, here in Lansing:

Free wireless provided by my apartment complex
Unreliable. Too small a pipe for two apartment buildings. They seem to be blocking content somehow, as Pidgin will drop certain IM networks (like gtalk over jabber), but it’ll work fine from within gmail. Currently, the only option I’m willing to use. The upstream provider? TDS Metrocom.

Comcast
Did I mention that I worked for these corrupt wanks? I want to be able to distribute legal files over P2P software, so this group is out. Not to mention the difficulties with getting Windows-based VPNs to work over their network.

Also, I’m not paying for a tech to come out and fix Comcast’s broken shit ON TOP of their ludicrous monthly rates, and taxes directly passed on to the customer as fees. All I want is a pipe to the internet, at a reasonable cost. Unless I buy their TV and phone services, I can’t get it through them. No matter what, I pay close to or over $100 a month.

Um, no.

DSL Options
As far as I know, AT&T owns all of the local lines. Any other DSL provider has to use AT&T’s equipment at least up until the CO-to-customer hop. This makes me extremely nervous. AT&T was the primary cooperator in our government’s illegal phone-and-internet tapping program. While I’m generally open and free with my information, I do not like to reward idiocy with my money.

AT&T: Your world delivered… to the NSA.

As far as I know, that’s all the options I’ve got. I don’t have the ability for satellite, as my apartment complex has strict rules about putting dishes on the roof, and I don’t have a balcony. I have no idea how far Ethernet over Power has come, though I’m pretty educated about Power over Ethernet. Heh. Arialink has said that I’m out of range of any of their wireless solutions.

Peter’s mesh network idea just keeps coming back to me as a good one. Intrinsically anarchic, but good. Lansing-wide ad-hoc network, anyone? Maybe Google will put up a network here, since San Francisco won’t let them out there.

Vastness of space.

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Barack Obama speaks on the need for supporting the troops, especially after they return home, and of the war’s cost to our economy: http://youtube.com/watch?v=6ztgD1d4fL8

UNICEF tries to tackle water: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OmN4B7yyS8

After a wonderful little thing called Envy, Ubuntu 7.10 now works -with- my laptop’s video card instead of against it.

I wonder if anybody else looks at popcorn kernels and sees spaceship designs.

I wonder if anybody else sees a person that’s significantly older than them, and wonders if that’s a Future You come back in time.

I remember that Tai Chi, when I was introduced to it in Japanese class in high school, made me feel good.

I wonder what happened to landing people on Mars.