Ramblings

Did you ever play Super Monkey Ball on the Gamecube? Well I did, and so did a large number of us in Q4. I was poking around a week or two ago and ran across Neverball, which is a clone of the game for the PC. Way too much fun … way too much time spent playing it. Go check it out if you enjoyed the original … it’s harder with a mouse than with that little joystick.

I ran across this article on Stephen Hawking and black holes a few days ago, but didn’t think to post it here. This could completely change many assumptions and theories running around right now. It looks interesting.

Well, not anymore. He’s been detained by the Japanese and is awaiting extradition to the US.

Well, I got a phone call yesterday around 6PM from the cable company. They said that a tech had come out earlier in the day and adjusted a few things on my line. The woman on the phone asked if I could check and see if my porblems had been resolved, which I was all over. I asked if there was a number I could call back if there were still problems and she said there wasn’t, but that she would call back in 10 or 15 minutes to check on me if that was ok. It was quite ok by me. So, I hooked up the splitter again and everything worked! I think I even had a better picture on the TV. So, it’s up and running. Now it’s time to consider that TV tuner card I’ve been eying up, but Lucky was talking about building a settop box (a PVR) and if he does that, I may just join him on the project.

My cable signal doesn’t seem to have enough power after a splitter to make the cable modem happy. I’ve tried other splitters, ones that *have* worked on cable modems before, just in case it was my cheap splitter, but it was all to no avail. I called on Friday night to try and get someone to come out and boost the line level, but the on call tech had no idea what to do and therefore wouldn’t even try. So, she set up a work order for Tuesday evening for me. Someone should be out here after 5 and before 7 to fix this for me. It sucks! I can’t watch TV (which I’m paying for now) because I would have to disconnect the network (which includes Gollum).

This is now my second entry from my apartment, but the big news is the fact that Gollum is now sitting right next to me here at the apartment. My father came up here Saturday afternoon and brought all sorts of goodies (routers, switches, and Gollum). It looks like the DNS entries are finally propagating around the net. If you are reading this, then your DNS server already has the updated entries. We had one unexpected occurance after moving the server. Gollum had not been restarted since I got the RAID array up and running (uptime of almost 90 days), so I didn’t realize when there was an unclean shutdown that the array would want to rebuild before you can access it. Well, all the home directories (except root’s) are on the array, as well as the web server files.

So Gollum was choking on bootup and we couldn’t figure out why. I decided to try booting into single user mode and what do you know, I was able to get in. I took the opportunity to remove everything I could think of from the default runlevel (so it would skip it on the next real boot). Once I did that, Gollum booted up normally, but when I tried to log in (as me, not root) it would just hang. Once I got in as root and poked around a bit I realized the array was rebuilding. At that point I theorized that once it was done we would be ok. An hour later, we were ok. I was able to access the array, and therefore, able to start up all the services that I had killed off.

Well, it appears things are working … now to go do something else …

Ha! My first blog entry from my apartment. The cable guy showed up around 5:45 and asked me to test my TV. It worked! He said that it hadn’t even been hooked up yet (which I expected) when he had opened up the box. Yay.

Well, it’s been non-stop fun trying to get Internet access at my apartment. I’m glad I didn’t try to do this when I first moved in, as I had way too much other stuff on my mind then. I ‘ordered’ the service on Tuesday, and at that time they told me I could either wait until the 16th to get someone to come out and ‘install’ my cable modem for me, or I could go pick it up at the office on the 6th (since I was ‘technically minded’ as the rep said).

So, obviously I wasn’t going to wait around until the 16th just to have someone come into my apartment and plug a stupid cable modem in then puzzle over my desktop, since it isn’t Windows, and then tell me that they don’t support non-Windows OSs. I left here right after work yesterday to go get the modem (thankfully they are open until 5:30). I had to hitch a ride since I’m trying to limit the driving I do in my van since it’s acting up again (stearing and brakes this time), which didn’t turn out to be a problem at all.

I wasn’t expecting a very high quality feel to the place, and I wasn’t dissapointed when I arrived. What really gets me is that they have this large TV sitting in the waiting area (actually had some decent furniture) that just shows their little community channel. This is the channel that goes for *days* with Windows error messages plastered all over it. How can they not notice the errors, and if they did notice them, how can they leave them up for so long with obviously no attempt at a remedy.

Ok, so moving beyond that little issue … I walked up to the counter where a woman was beckoning me. I explained why I was there and she began gathering the equipment I would need. Sometime during this process she decided it was 5:30 (it was actually only around 5:20 according to the atomic clocks) and went over and locked the entry door. Whatever … a minor distraction. So it takes her probably like 10 minutes to find a cable modem and a plastic bag for me. Then she realizes she needs to ‘activate’ the modem so that I can use it (which amounts to entering the MAC address of the modem into my account). So that took another 10 minute since she couldn’t do it by herself and had to enlist the help of her manager. Ahhhhh!

Finally, I have signed the paperwork, given them money, and recieved the cable modem and copies of the paperwork. I’ve been reassured at this point that all I have to do is go home and plug the stupid thing in to get it to work. What I found suprising at this point was that they didn’t provide any instructions at all for post install configuration. Not even a users manual for the stupid modem (which I have pulled from Motorola’s website since). So I get home, plug it in, and wait. I know from previous experience that it can take a while for a cable modem to chat with the server and get all happy.

I plugged my computer directly into the network jack on the modem while I was waiting and decided to try to get an IP address. Apparently the modem/router has a DHCP server built in because it assigned me an IP address from the class C private address range (192.168.1.*). At this point the modem still had not settled down after a reasonable amount of time. I got to thinking and decided to hook my TV up to the cable to see if that part was at least working. Nope! No TV either.

So, I’m stuck, the office is closed, and I’m tired. That was it for last night. This morning I called in and reported my problems. I had to reassure the woman on the phone that I did *not* have cable TV as their records *clearly* showed that it had been connected the day before. She eventually entered a trouble ticket into their system for someone to come out and check on it for me *today*. I’m not naive enough (especially with this company) to have left it at that. I called back this afternoon to follow up on the ticket. I just wanted to make sure that it had made it into the system and was going to be handled by sometime this evening. It turns out that the trouble ticket was assigned to a tech and that the tech should be out there to work on it between 5 and 7 this evening. Good, I’ll be home then!

I was sitting here in my office just after that call and got myself all worried over something else … the username I picked. On the paperwork that I got a copy of last night the woman had misspelled my username (I chose Q4RadioGuy). I was worried that they had in fact misspelled it in the system. So, yet another phone call. Thankfully the same woman I had just talked to answered again, so the basics were already taken care of. When she looked up the info, she found two usernames attached to my account, but only one of them was active. Well, I think you can guess which one was the active one … the wrong one. After more time on hold she was able to make the change over to the correct one and I finally was content and hung up.

The only question is, will everything be sorted out tonight, or will it be another day?

If you can trust the numbers presented in this, then I think it is time for people to realize that lower software prices would make a big difference. Personally I don’t have any software installed that is ‘pirated’, as I use OSS entirely, but I used to and totally understand how price affects people’s atitudes towards software piracy.

I wish people would stop reporting that different foods are either bad for you or good for you. They can never seem to settle on one. A certain food may be good for you today, and then someone releases new ‘research’ indicating that it is now bad for you. Lucky and I were talking briefly about this last night when we saw this on TV: Drink milk, keep colorectal cancer at bay. Now obviously it wasn’t this news agency that we saw on TV, but it is the same news.