New toys
I couldn’t resist. The prices were just too low and wimax too sexy. Clear (or Clearwire) is the wimax provider that is rolling out service far and wide across our vast US land. They had to start somewhere though and for some reason I don’t get, Vegas was one of the first 3 cities to get it. That is -awesome-, we never get stuff first! Our time has finally come though. With this bad boy (known as the Cradlepoint PHS300) I can go anywhere in the city and have a wifi connection to the Internet for me and 16 of my closest friends (within 100 ft of me). No looking around for a Coffee Bean or unsuspecting homeowners open wireless connection when I’m dragging a laptop and looking for a place to kill some time. My wireless connection goes where I do and is way faster than using a tethered phone. Especially with the truly ridiculously bad 3G speeds I’ve been getting lately. I just picked it up today but in initial testing it has been extremely positive. Not so well right at my house (I’m in an edge zone) but I watched youtube vids in Hawkins car all the way from lunch back to the office and it totally worked. Hey, why unplug if you don’t have to?
Computer rehab, ready for therapy
I finally got all my pieces and parts fixed, swapped, retrofitted and I am read to rebuild. The picture is of my new and improved, no longer old and inferior, power supply. This part was the root of my old problems so hopefuly this will take care of it. I also bought a battery backup which should fix any other random power outages. At $120 it’s cheap insurance. Wish me luck.
A very sad day
We had the most amazing thunder and lightening last night. At one point we lost power so I had to reset a bunch of clocks this morning and found out that it fried my power supply and one of my disk controllers. This is my terabyte machine. The one housing 4 or 5 hundred gigs of movies, music, programs, tv shows, comedy and unarchived things I had saved off of the Tivo but not re-encoded yet. If I can’t get it back be prepared for depressed Todd.
MSI motherboard take 2
I’m helping Justin with some moral support while he puts his new computer together…again. The first motherboad he bought was broken so he sent it back. The new one? Broken as well. Had to make a Frys run and now all is well. Let this be a lesson to you, just buy your PC’s off the shelf, i.e. Gateway or Dell, otherwise the hassle is enough to put you in an early grave.
Meet the phidget
What, you may ask, is a phidget? These are a class of USB controllable servos, motors, switches and various other robotic parts. Why, you may also ask. I’m not sure, but rodric bought a couple and they are really fun to play with. Slide the mouse, watch the servo spin…that’s just cool
Where’s George?
I’m working late but took some time to enter all my $1 bills into wheresgeorge.com. This is the current geek obsession at my work. We even got fancy and got some stamps to stamp the bills with the website url. It’s cool to see where your money goes after you spend it.
Coding coding coding
I’m doing some personal programming today, specifically I’m prgramming an irc bot. IRC is like instant messaging with a whole roomful of people at once. We used to say IM was like IRC but you were always in a private room with only one other person…times have changed. Anyway, I’m programming a bot for the room that the geeQsQuad hangs out in. His name is Daneel (points to whomever gets that reference) He will pass messages to the other people when they aren’t around, think answering machine or secretary. You can also privately message him and he will say these things to the room at large, we use this facility to make him say the filthiest thing imaginable. And last but not least he saves everything ever said in the room to a database which we then preserve for later viewing pleasure. Individualy we are all funny, together we are comedy gold. Someday I’ll have to publish the chatlogs on a website so the world can laugh with us.
