That deserves a link.
Archive for February, 2007
Ode to a Canadian FedEx Lady
Sunday, February 25th, 2007Flat on my Facebook.com
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007Oy.
I signed up on Facebook.com the other day. And boy do I regret it. You’re auto-added to some groups depending on home town and schools you attended. Which is all fine, except that for the most part, when I check out my old schools….. I am quite possibly the oldest person registered.
That’s a depressing blow to the ego. Most of the members have graduation “dates” set in the future!
I can’t seem to find anyone from back home that I know.
<Old Age Alert – You have been warned!>
Back in my day. I knew lots of people. Now I know a precious few and gatherings have to be arranged ahead of time. Back then I thought it was sad that anyone could consider High School “the best days of my life” but now I have to say I agree with them. The very concept of dropping by a friends house and hanging out for a while seems strange and foreign to me.
When exactly did this happen?
I’m not looking forward to the rest of my 30′s (which are the new 20′s, haven’t you heard?) and after that things just get bleak.
Is it possible to have a mid-life crisis at 31?
Monobrow
Sunday, February 18th, 2007Well I went to Lisa’s house warming tonight. And she has some really tall and thick drinking glasses.
We were also watching the NBA All Star show. With all the various skills competitions. The only thing anyone ever really cares about with this is the Slam Dunk. It’s the highlight, really.
To make this short because I’m tired, the second last dunk the guy had trouble pulling it off. He kept getting so close and then missing. One failed attemp had me close my eyes and drop my head in frustration.
Only I was sitting at the table.
With one of those tall and thick drinking glasses.
In essence, I pwned myself.
I cracked my head off of the edge of the glass and drove my glasses into my face. The bridge of my frames cut a small straight line.
I think it’s gonna scar.
And I missed the last two dunks ’cause I was holding a paper tower to my face to try and stop the bleeding. Head wounds just gush.
Felt like I got hit with a baseball or something. We’ll just have to see how it looks tomorrow.
Saturated Audio
Monday, February 12th, 2007Since I moved in I had a Creative Inspire 5300 5.1 speaker system divided up between my living room and dinning room/den. Which, if you saw how my “rooms” are separated wouldn’t sound so odd. They are, for the most part, a single room with some dividers.
This was made easy since I added connectors in the walls and ran wires under the baseboards so everything connected in just one spot.
Yay me.
My ultimate goal was, however, to have the speakers wall mounted near the ceiling to get rid of pretty much all visible wires. Also, I planned for a total of 8 speakers, 4 per room so the sound would be very disperse and you wouldn’t have to crank it to hear it on the opposite side of the floor. I call this, for lack of a proper term, Saturated Audio, as the sound is everywhere without being deafening.
For a bonus, I even wired the 4 speakers of the living room separately so that if I ever wanted to have a TV/Projector in it I could easily add in a 5th speaker. I purposely didn’t wire number 5 ’cause I didn’t want to limit my options when/if the time came.
Those of you with degrees in higher order mathematics will probably note that:
8 – 5 = 3
And you wouldn’t be wrong. So… I have 5 identical speakers powered by a sub which they’ve been matched with. Can I get 3 more?
I’ve been trolling UsedOttawa and Kijiji for people selling Creative speakers for months and no luck. Having reached the limits of my patience I hit PCCyber on Saturday for their Creative SBS 450 which was on clearance.
These pretty much fit the bill. They have the exact same specifications plus they’re smaller. And to the casual observer you might not even notice that they’re different. Brilliant!
Now that I have the speakers, I now need wall mounts. The best priced (and for a change, the nicest looking) were these little B-Tech units from FutureShop. But they still weren’t priced that well… a set of two mounts cost just less then the 450′s themselves. So I only bought 4 of the 8 mounts I’ll eventually need. Spread the hit to the pocketbook over a month or two.
I currently have 3 speakers mounted. I had to drill holes in the plastic enclosure to secure the satellites to the mount. Two went up really easy because they went on either side of the cold air return for the furnace and the wire just had to drop down inside. (Easy if you don’t count having to strip the wire and twist them together blind ’cause it was just out of sight.)
But the 3rd was a pain in the ass. All told I must have spent an hour and a half trying to get the fish-tape to reach the wallplate. And I tore out a few fistfuls of insulation along the way. Woo.
And while I’m pretty happy with what I have accomplished so far. I have at least 3 more which will involve fishing through insulation again (2 will have vapor barrier which might make it easier, but I’m concerned about puncturing it with the drill/screws) which I doubt will be any more fun.
And just for kicks, what do I see on UsedOttawa after I’ve already bought the 450′s???
Somebody selling Inspire 5200′s. Almost identical to my 5300′s! I believe the proper term here is: typicial!
She works hard for the money.
Saturday, February 10th, 2007Straight up: Anna Nicole Smith deserved every penny.
You don’t become a self made billionaire and not know exactly what you’re doing when you marry a working Playboy model in your 90′s.
Someone here was being a jerk and I prefer to think it wasn’t an old man.
But I could be wrong.
Hubbub
Thursday, February 8th, 2007I picked up a hub for $20 off of Used Ottawa today. It’s a Bay Networks BayStack 255: 24 ports, 10/100 auto-sensing and even manageable. If you have a BayStack 253 as well, that is.
This should be more then enough to power every wall jack I have installed so far and leave plenty for any file servers I want to keep in the basement.
I’m going to have to get a little creative with the mounting as my mini-rack (with patch panel) is only 4 inches deep and the hub is 6. I’ve got some ideas tho. 
Ideally, I’d prefer a switch but really – just how much data am I expecting to push across my home network? And it’s hard to beat the price!
Fontastic
Thursday, February 8th, 2007I was catching up on Gizmodo today (you are using RSS, right?) and there was post about a free WiFi access point.
Never turn down free hardware.
It was even available in Canada too!
The company behind this is called Fon. The idea is you have broadband – you can’t be using all of it all of the time. So buy a access point from Fon and let people connect to it and use your connection.
Why would you want to do this?? Well, one reason might be if you were enough of a dirty hippy to believe in share and share alike but you wanted to make sure no one could get to the rest of your network – this is a simple plug-in solution.
But a better reason is that once you’re part of the Fon network, you can connect to any other Fon WiFi point. They even list them on a map so if you know where you’re going, you’ll know if you can connect there. Cool.
But cooler yet is that you might even be able to get paid for it. Kinda.
To Fon, there are three types of people. You’re either a Bill, a Linus, or an Alien.
If you’re a Bill, people can use you’re connection if they pay a $3 charge. And Fon will give you half of that. If you’re a Linus, you give it away, but can connect to other Fon’s for free. If you’re an Alien, you’re going to have to pay no matter what. But hey, it’s only $3 a day, right?
The idea of getting paid for something like this is mostly open only to businesses and people who might happen to live in high traffic areas, but it’s still there.
I like the idea of being able to help someone out and I like not having to mess around with firewalls and anything else to keep them from causing me trouble. And I have an extra access point which can cover any dead zones.
There’s also a chance that in the future you’ll be able to hack the device with a custom firmware to make it do God-knows-what. That’s a lot of fun to play with.
And you never turn down free hardware.
“Awwww… damn.”
Monday, February 5th, 2007“What?” said Anita from the other room.
“Oh, the Bears are falling apart in the 4th“, I replied.
Anita immediately appeared in the doorway staring at me.
“What?”
“You’ve never said anything like that before.”
I’m not exactly a sports guy if you couldn’t have guessed. The only reason I’d watch the Super Bowl is to see the ads, but we don’t even get that here in Canada.
So why was I watching XLI? One reason: Da Bears.
Jeff Mouland (That’s “Mou” as in mow your lawn.), my next door neighbor growing up, has been a HUGE Bears fan since the beginning of time. He was a Bears fan before SNL made being a Bears fan cool.
Back in the day he asked me to make him a Bears poster. Now I can’t draw, never could, but there was a point where I could made a better then average copy of something. (As long as it didn’t need shading!) And I remember trying to draw all the funny shapes of blue and orange in the logo.
So when I think of the Bears, I think of Jeff. And I don’t know anyone who would have wanted a Super Bowl victory for the Bears more.
Damn.
One day Jeff, one day.
I leave you with Bill Swerski’s Superfans mantra:
Da Bears, Da Bears, Da Bears, Da Bears,
Da Bears, Da Bears, Da Bears, Da Bears,
Da Bears, Da Bears, Da Bears, Da Bears…..
