Lambda

• Eating quiznos in denver. Frontier > US Airways! Have about 2 hr before heading to Dallas… #
• Chillaxin at the Rangers game. Astros are goin down! #
• Blew the fuse in my car for my radio and cig lighter. I just learned about the electrical system of my jeep though. Bonus! Cheap fix! #

• RT @plarkinjr: blackberry vids of the band from yesterday: http://bit.ly/155cJY and http://bit.ly/EPsSS #
• This weekend was fantastic. Had a great time playing with the band and listening to all the rest of the great performers out there! #
• Watching WWDC live via @LeoLaporte and http://live.twit.tv/ #
• Hey @Steven9088 thanks for the stream (WWDC 2009 Live Stream live > http://ustre.am/18N6) #
• Sure, a free iPhone sounds cool… #squarespace #
• Packing for Spokane… Yay! #
• Hanging out at terminal E36 at DFW International waiting for my plane to board. Joy. Security did a double take at the pipes like normal. #
• In phoenix. Looks like I have insheduled plane change. Hoope the luggage makes it! Maby foood if time #
• Us airways rocks… I got off a perfectly good airplane to wait 1.5 hours for a new airplane. Go team! #
• While I wait for US Airways to sort its crap out, I suppose I can try to get a free iPhone. #squarespace #
• Touchdown spokane! #
• Sittin in the most beautiful place on the planet. Camp Cross ftw! #

I’m on my way back to Spokane today. I almost said on my way back home, which I suppose is still true since it is where my brother and parents live, however it seems weird to say simply because I haven’t actually lived there for 7 some years now. That is some food for thought.

This is a fairly quick trip. I’m there today, and I head back home next Monday. I have about another week of vacation right now, but I’m trying to hold on to it in case Nortel does some divestitures in the near term. The extra cash from those days would be sweet.

The main purpose of the trip is to hit the Alumni Weekend out at Camp Cross. I’ll be out there with several of the former co-workers that I used to work out there with. Should be good times. Hopefully I’ll have some interesting stories.

They just announced boarding for my flight, so I’ll cut this one short. Hopefully I’ll catch you on the other side.

TSF '08

It’s time for the Texas Scottish Festival again this year. Located in Arlington, TX. this is my second year to play with the band at the festival. It’s 2 and a half days of heat, humidity and work, but it is a hell of a lot of fun.

We play tonight at the opening ceremonies. It’s not too much playing, but the opening ceremony is a long winded event and can get pretty boring when you’re standing “at ease” for an hour. Saturday and Sunday, there are 2 “walkabouts” and 1 stage performance. We tend to draw a pretty good crowd when we play on stage, so it should be a blast. It is going to be a long weekend and I’m going to be tired, but it’s all worth it.

In other band news, I’m working with a few of the other band members as we redesign our website. http://ntcpd.com is a bit outmoded and we’ve finally decided to do a redesign on it. I’ve got some of it put together, and some day I will get the time to clean it up even more, but we may be going live this weekend if the rest of the band approves. Should be good times. It’s been so long since I’ve tried to do web design that I had to do a TON of relearning for this project. Eventually I will have to move to a php backend for this thing.

Found a great site for checking the connections between the major Tier 1 internet providers.

http://www.internetpulse.net/

Godspeed STS-125

STS-125 Liftoff

I had a 120gb Seagate go out on me at some point I guess. I have 3-4 hard drives lying around with a TON of data from back in the college days that I never use. I was looking for a particular file on one of these drives today, so I started plugging them into an external case I have. All of them worked EXCEPT for the drive that I needed… joy. The drive seems to be able to read data, only reeeeeeeeaaaaaaallllllly slowly. It reads a bit of data, and then emits a beeping sound… rinse repeat, and I’m slowly retrieving data at a snails pace. The drive is a Seagate Barracuda 120gb drive, so I am a little surprised that I am having issues with it. C’est la vie I guess…

As such, I purchased Spin Rite, a sweet action piece of HD recovery software that is second to none when it comes to really getting in and sorting crap out. Unfortunately, the hard drive seems like it is going to take some time to actually fix since it is having this weird slow issue. I guess I’ll have to let it run for a few days and see where we get.

Luckily, I found a bunch of camp pictures from my tenure as a staff member out at Camp Cross in Idaho. Arguably the best time of my life, camp was hands down one of the sweetest things I’ve been involved with… ever.

As I recover these pictures off of this bunk drive, I’ll try to start putting them up here in the gallery. Should be good times.

I’m currently running DSL at my apartment. It’s not ideal, and I wish I could go with fiber, or even cable, but I’ve got what I’ve got. I recently upgraded from the slowest package (which I’ve been on since I moved here… no idea why) to the fastest package that At&t offers. This is basically a jump from 1.5 mbps to 6 mbps. Not great, but for 10 bucks a month, not a bad boost.

I did start having issues though. When running at 1.5 mbps, I had no issue with the DSL whatsoever besides the fact that it was regrettably slow. However, after the upgrade was finally completed the other day, I started noticing a large number of garbled and dropped DSL frames from my modem. The connection would periodically drop, and instead of having services like Netflix on the XBox tell me that my quality was going to be better than before, they told me that the service was unusable on my connection.

Since streaming video was the primary reason that I upgraded in the first place, I contacted At&t tech support through their web based chat client. I realize that most tech support is a tiered service with the first layer being… well… a filter to weed out the really stupid people. I was clearly in a chat room with someone who didn’t have a firm grasp of the English language. Luckily, I was able to throw enough technobabble at this individual that they rather quickly escalated me to an actual phone number.

The next two levels of support were surprisingly helpful. I really have to give At&t credit for not having too much fluff in there. The second level support was able to log directly into my dsl modem without any assistance from me (A scary notion to begin with), and asked me some basic questions about my wireless settings. I had a pretty good idea that it wasn’t the wireless settings, but it was a good start for troubleshooting. Once we determined that even a wired connection had the same issues, this guy quickly opened a ticket for their 3rd level of support.

About an hour later, this guy called me and ran an automated line test on my connection. Apparently there was a large amount of attenuation on the line. Instead of the 6 mbps they were trying to push to me, I was getting about 2.5 mbps. The first question he asked me was if I had any telephones or satellite/cable receivers that weren’t behind filters. Apparently the individual that installed my satellite 2 years ago didn’t put the line on a filter. Once I put one on there, problem solved. It took the third tier guy 1 simple question to fix something that I should have known to check for. Bravo him. Saved me a ton of money in having a service guy come to my house.

Fortunately, things work great now. I learned something about dsl and the filters that are apparently not just for keeping weird noises off of the line. Faster connections need a much cleaner signal (go figure). So, if you have dsl and it is running like crap make sure you check all connections have a filter.

David is a fairly avid computer enthusiast, and has both a Linux server and an Asus EEE pc that is running ubuntu. As such, I picked his brain this weekend for things to do with my EEE pc. On his suggestion, I’ve gone ahead and downloaded the netbook remix of Ubuntu and installed it on a 2gb micro flash card that I had lying around. With this, I’ve gone ahead and booted directly to the card and am currently trying the live version of it. I may eventually partition the hard drive and install directly on there, but for now this flash chip is working just fine.

While downloading the netbook remix, I also came across the .torrent file for the desktop version, and that got me curious to install a torrent client I had onced used with Ray, torrentflux. I’ve installed that on my web server and downloaded the Ubuntu desktop image with it. It’s a brilliant program, and horribly convenient.

I guess that is enough nerdyness for now, so I’m going to get back to working on the website for my band, which I am trying to help redesign.

Tara and David came into town this weekend to visit and check out Dallas with me. They had been planning to do this trip for over a year now, and finally got around to actually doing it. I’m disappointed that they couldn’t stay longer, but it was SWEEEET to have them here.

They both flew in on Friday around noon, so I took an extreme lunch break to go pick them up. Instead of going back at some point, I decided that I would just play catch up at some point for the lost afternoon. Instead of working, I took them to the 6th floor museum at the Dallas book depository building. This is the location where president Kennedy was shot, and where I had the opportunity to first visit when Jeff was here last year. They had made some changes to part of the museum so I had some new stuff to learn. We then went and ate in the West End at a Sonny Brian’s for some tasty bbq. We ended the first day by heading to Addison and checking out the Flying Saucer bar that keeps about 80 different beers on tap (yes, on tap… you read that right).

Saturday, we hit up the Dallas Aquarium which I had heard mixed reports about. It wasn’t a great aquarium in terms of water exhibits, however it did have all manner of jungle life around. There were all kinds of birds and monkeys and turkeys. They also had aquatic exhibits and the building itself was rather neat, so it was pretty cool. We also hit up Billy Bobs pub over in the Ft. Worth Stockyards that night. I’d never been to Billy Bob’s so that was a neat culture shock for us. Cowboys and shorts shorts abound. It was a pretty good time. We ended the night with a 3am hike around Breckinnridge park. Having all been staff out at Camp Cross, We were all very familiar with late night walks through dark places. It was weird, but fun.

Sunday was a lazy day. Woke up and hit up the local Starbucks before they packed everything up and we slowly made our way out to the airport.

I’m definitely going to have to plan a trip out to San Francisco to visit David in his native habitat out there. It’ll be good times. Was a random weekend but a hell of a lot of fun. I’m glad that they made it out finally.