I got an unexpected phone call the other day. It was the phone company, trying to sell me DSL. I'm sure I rolled my eyes as soon as they started their pitch.

Required background: I've been trying to get DSL ever since we bought our house, three years ago. In fact, I ordered it from Speakeasy/Covad, and had it installed and sort of online for two weeks. Of course our loop length turned out to be double what SBC/AT&T (the ILEC) claimed it to be, and at 22000 ft the only way to get stable service was to drop it down to 386/128 Kb, from the theoretical 6.0 Mb / 768 Kb service I had ordered. This was quite a blow, since I was still dealing with a billing fuck-up nightmare with the cable company from cable internet service at our apartment. Alas, since I work from home I had no choice but to go with cable again. Still I didn't give up on the hope of being able to tell the cable company to fuck off for good.

Posted by ra in tech at 01:06 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

So I've been spending some quality time with the Wii lately.... damn that sounds bad. Anyway, I've been playing Wii Play (Gold on 8 out of 9), Elebits, and I've been getting old school with Super Mario World and Super Mario 64. I had been going for Pro on all of Wii Sports too, but I haven't played it much lately. I'm Pro on Tennis, Bowling and Boxing right now. I do like Elebits, our newest game, but I've taken a break from it I guess.

I must have been in need of a Mario fix or something because I just got all 120 stars and beat the shit out of Mario 64, and now I'm most of the way through Mario World, but the Star Road/Special courses have been kicking my ass a little bit. These may be old games, but they are GOOD ones!

UPDATE: beat Super Mario World as well, all 96 levels/exits. Crossed that one off the list; on to the next!

Posted by ra in games at 19:54 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I recently got my first new keyboard in a long time. In the past there have been very few viable options in keyboards for me, because of a lack of industry interest in ergonomic, corded keyboards (the only kind I like to use). I've seen cordless ergo keyboards around but I'm still a little wary of broadcasting my every keystroke through the air. I've experienced problems with wireless keyboards at client offices where different keyboards and receivers crossed signals and I actually saw one that was receiving input from the wrong keyboard 35 ft away, and through multiple walls. Yikes.

So I finally found a nice corded one. It is the Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000. This one is not actually split-style like my old favorites, the Microsoft Natural series, but instead incorporates some stretched and curved keys to give you similar hand position as the old style. It's also black, and looks awesome. I hate the way beige keyboards look over time. Even if you keep them clean, they start to yellow and look like crap. The Comfort Curve feels very good and it's is a big improvement over my old keyboard, which was quite noisy. It uses very short, low profile keys and they are very quiet even with fast and heavy typing. Oh how I love quiet keyboards!

Posted by ra in computerish at 12:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I've known about Squid for years, but only recently got an excuse to play around with it. I commented about the stupidity of someone blocking IP addresses on a firewall to prevent people from wasting time on non-work websites, and before I knew it I was setting up a new Squid server. I think my comment was something about "the wrong tool for the job". I didn't know enough about Squid to know if it was the right tool, but after some research I was confident it could meet the needs of this client, and at the right price.

As I got started, I was struck by the depth of the configuration file. I admit I got a little lost in it. I finally managed to configure a basic installation for user access control (I disabled caching due to the age/speed of the server). Now that I've configured a few servers, I'm liking squid more and more. We're planning some new installations, this time more for caching purposes than access control, so I'll get to put that aspect of Squid's features to the test as well. I have to say I'm not a big fan of seafood, but I really do like Squid!

Posted by ra in computerish at 21:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I've been dealing with a lot of Cisco routers lately. We've put in several 2811's and a 2851 recently, and I've had to reconfigure some older 1700 series routers. I'm not cisco certified or anything, but I'm fairly comfortable with IOS just because I've been thrown in to make changes on routers so many times. I've heard rumors about web interfaces or gui tools for configuring IOS, but I've never seen them. The CLI is pretty easy to use once you get acquainted with it, and I like it pretty well. I've used way too many GUI's that just got in the way and made things difficult, or outright removed functionality.

The bad thing about Cisco is of course the cost. For the price of the 2851 and WIC cards for 6 T1's you could buy a small car, new. Alas we've tried to look into other vendors, like Juniper, but can't seem to get anyone to return our calls. Oh well; we'll stay with Cisco for now.

Posted by ra in computerish at 19:14 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

After my last energy-related post, I bought a cool little device that allows me to measure power consumption of everyday electrical devices. I've been testing various computers, appliances and electronics that I have or have access to, in order to discover just how power hungry they are.

Some of the surprises included my Pentium 4 file server which uses only about 40 W, a dual processor Pentium III server which uses a whopping 175 W, and a small stereo system which uses about 22 W in standby mode! Just how much power do you need to watch for a button press from the remote control?!

Interesting statistics after the jump.

Posted by ra in other geeky stuff at 01:40 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Although I had been planning to buy one for a while, it wasn't until yesterday after I placed an order for Wii Play at Amazon that I decided we should go ahead and acquire a Wii. Phone calls to the usual suspects yesterday turned up nothing. I decided to strike again today at lunch time. Bingo! My first call, to Meijer, confirmed that they had just ONE in stock. I raced over, ran in, and asked if they still had it. "Are you the person who just called?" they asked. Yup, I said. "That was fast!" they replied.

Posted by ra in other geeky stuff at 18:11 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)