Author Archives: srhuston

by srhuston

Monopoly!

Unfortunately, I don’t mean the kind you play with dice, fake money and fighting over who gets to be the car. No, I’m referring to the local phone company (denoted by a large red check mark).

Our new phone service gets hooked up today. That’s good news. The bad news is that if you Google the number, you find a local business. Which may or may not have gone out of business recently, meaning we’ll likely get phone calls for the company. Guess at least it won’t be creditors, like we get with our current number (which we’ve had for almost three years, but the previous owner kept using it on important things – like her kid’s emergency contact forms).

The worse news is that Speakeasy keeps telling me they can’t give me DSL in that area. If you look up the local CO, it says that Covad has a cage in there, so Speakeasy should have no problems. But, it gets more interesting! One of my co-workers lives two blocks farther from the CO than I do, and he has DSL through the local telco. The same local telco that says I can’t get business class DSL (only way they’ll do a static IP), nor can I get home DSL. Uh, hello?

So, that’s part of the reason all this stuff moved to Dreamhost – who knows if I’ll be able to serve my own webpages in another couple weeks. Might have to resort to either dial-up, or just pairing my phone to the laptop to get on teh Intarweb. Goodie.  I’d hoped that since today is the day for the installation, maybe the local telco would’ve updated their database and I could see that I can get DSL at least through them (that’s a start, anyway).  Guess I’ll have to wait until next week.

by srhuston

House Photos

As also promised, photos of the house can be found here.  There’s a few more to put up yet, but I’ll get them when I grab the camera which is now sitting in the new house’s living room 😛

Oh, and the stuff you see in the photos isn’t ours – they were taken shortly after our offer was accepted, so the previous owners hadn’t moved out compltely yet.

by srhuston

All Done!

Well, that’s all finished now. Got an email from Easyspace confirming the transfer away, which I could ignore and it would happen on Sunday, or go to a webpage and it would happen right away. Sure enough, shortly after saying “Yes, I want to do this” on their page I got an email from Dreamhost that the transfer was complete. Excellent! Added a few DNS entries to my domain through Dreamhost so the home network would continue to function as normal (Please, if you’re a DNS admin.. don’t dig the SOA and bitch about what I did. I know it’s wrong, but if someone else routes those packets it’s their problem).

Have to get in the habit that I only need to hit enter once, ’cause I keep hitting it twice to get a line break. Oh well, new things to deal with. Speaking of which, our Polycom MGC was setup and tested today, so we can now host up to 12 videoconference sites at once through it. Very slick system – easy to understand for the end user, powerful, and expensive. Not my moolah.

Stephanie hurt her back recently (we’re not sure when) and ended up staying home today, the last day for staff at school. We’re hoping she doesn’t catch any crap for it, but we’ve got two prescriptions to prove we went to the doctor today. I got off the phone with her a little while ago, and she’s feeling better. She’s not going to the house tonight, and maybe not tomorrow either, though we’re thinking of swinging by there tonight to use the grill :>

by srhuston

The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

Got tired of waiting for my current registrar (Easyspace) to transfer my domain to my new registrar (Dreamhost), especially since they don’t seem to be touching DNS now that I initiated the transfer. So, good old Unix to the rescue:

joshua:~# dig www.srhuston.net @ns1.dreamhost.com
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.srhuston.net. 14400 IN A 208.113.156.214
...
joshua:~# dig gallery.srhuston.net @ns1.dreamhost.com
...
;; ANSWER SECTION:
gallery.srhuston.net. 14400 IN A 64.111.108.163
...
joshua:~# vi /var/named/db.srhuston
[edits]
joshua:~# service named restart

So, the new site is "on the air" now. You probably guessed that, since you're reading it. And this post serves no real purpose then. Oh well.

by srhuston

Second Life, First Post

So I’ve been playing in the game Second Life for a while now, and enjoying it a bit. First got interested because of the TWiT podcast when it was mentioned there, and I thought a 3D realm where you could build stuff and play around seemed interesting. I was right, it can be a lot of fun. As Stephanie pointed out, my last job was at a university, my current job is at a university.. and what do I do in SL? Find the largest university in the game and hang out there. And end up getting a job there as an instructor. Kinda funny actually.

I hang out with quite a few folks there, including Leigh (Keith doesn’t stop by because he doesn’t like what it does to his computer, namely makes it slow), and many I know only by their SL usernames. Asaria, Ipenda, Molten, Theodora, Felanis, Dragon, First, Rini, Jace, Norton, Charlie, Gizmo, Kerhop… the list goes on and on, and if you’re not on that one don’t be offended – it’s late, I’m tired, and this is a flashback :>

Anyway, I’ve been taking snapshots of things going on in SL for a bit now, and would like to share some of them with you. I was about to post them here, when I realized that they’re all bitmap images, and average 1.3MB each. So I thought, there has to be a good way to change them all at once, and I realized there is.. it’s called the gallery that I already setup. So once I get that up and running completely, I’ll post a link to them instead. Yeah, not as cool as some of the others I know who post their pixtures right on their webpages, but it’s how I feel like doing it. So there. *pthbthbthbtht*

EDIT 2006/06/21 11:04EDT – Oh, and those of you whom I have links to, bonus points if you can explain to me how the whole linkback-pingback-trackback BS works.  Would be nice to reference each other, but I’m so stuck in “Web 1.0” that until recently I used Pine for email and tin for Usenet.  And yes, I *read* Usenet too.  That should tell you something :>

by srhuston

As Promised

Well, I did say something about writing soon. And since the last entry before the “Hey, things might be broken while I move” post was dated November 2004, I guess I’ve been a little behind. I won’t bother trying to play catch-up, I doubt I could remember it all :>

We closed on our new house last Thursday. Man, the stress I had building up to that day was immense. I didn’t think I was getting stressed, at least until I realized I had my wonderful eczema on my leg again, and now on my arms too. Sure enough, now almost a week after we had settlement, it’s going away. And some people think that stress is just in ones head. Riiiight…

Anyway, the house is wonderful. Four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, full unfinished basement (two words: Work Shop), one car attached garage (no entry from the house though). Decent sized living room, freakin’ huge kitchen (especially compared to the ones Stephanie has been dealing with for the last six years), dining room, nice sized yard on a corner lot… it’s perfect. At least for now. Of the four bedrooms, one will be ours (upstairs, though the downstairs “should” be the master bedroom we like to go ‘up to bed’ and be able to leave windows open at night), one a spare, one our office space, and… one will be the ham shack. No longer will I be in a corner of the living room, I’ll have a room to myself to spread out :> Also be able to setup some stuff for an electronics workbench, and I plan on getting back into kit building. The last couple times I heated up my soldering iron, I realized how much I missed the smell of burning flux. Ahh, the memories.

The gallery site is up and running, but I’ve yet to put photos in it. I’ll be doing that soon, so that people can see the house (and other things I end up putting in there). Have to import the last of them into iPhoto first. And last, I hope to keep up with posting here again. I’ve said that numerous times, but now I’ll bet I’ll have more fodder (home improvement isn’t just a TV show, folks) and by having my site served somewhere else, keeping up with updates won’t be as big a deal anymore as it used to. Hell, if I find a router/firewall I can actually like and works well, I could even wipe and reinstall Joshua without thinking about it anymore. But first I’d have to find a router/firewall I like…

by srhuston

Coming soon (Yet Again)

Since we’re moving soon (more later), I’m moving my web services off to a dedicated hosting company. Not sure what kind of broadband we’ll get, and if it will be a static IP, plus there’s other things I can do with this that I just don’t feel like doing at home anymore. When you spend a number of hours each day administering machines, you don’t want to do it when you get home – especially when that machine also serves as your firewall and gateway, so taking it down for an upgrade means you’ve got no Intarweb.

Also upgrading to WordPress at the same time, and I’ve imported all the old articles. Will have to go back and edit a few to fix up the links, so bear with me for a bit.

EDIT 2006/06/20 1240: I’ve fixed all the links I think – if you find a broken one then let me know.

by srhuston

What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been

Went to the Great Big Food Show this weekend, and saw lots of neat stuff. Sampled some wares and a good time was had by all. One of the gadgets that Steph had seen before (from Soda Club) I got to see in action, and we ended up getting one. What the hell, with the amount of soda we both drink, this could be better for us and cheaper in the long run – plus it just looks neat. Picked up Alton Brown‘s new book “I’m Just Here For More Food”, saw a live show that he did there (which was on how different methods can make the same ingredients into two completely different things, in this case egg nog vs. ice cream, and how both are all about bubbles), and then met him in person. Got our book autographed and a picture too! Okay, you want proof?

Steph & I with Alton Brown

Here is Steph and I with Alton.

Leigh & Alton

Here’s one of Leigh

Keith & Alton

And here’s one of Keith.
I’ve a feeling that the last shot is a little off because when Alton turned around for the photo, he smiled for a second and then exclaimed, “Wait a minute… that’s the same camera as the last two! What, are you all in some kind of commune or something?” Definitely neat, he was good natured about the whole thing, and one of the most approachable people I’ve met. While some of the celebs there were sitting happily behind a desk and signing books away, Alton refused to get “behind” the desk, instead shaking everyone’s hand, signing whatever they wanted (one girl I saw had brought a picture of the two of them from another event, and he signed that for her), and happy to get a photo with everyone. Definitely the kind of person that, if you met him in a bar somewhere and offered to buy him a drink, he’d not only say thanks but would actually talk with you instead of run in the other direction.

by srhuston

And There Was Much Rejoicing

So Leigh and I, in our messing around with various stuff, now have two linked IRC servers (well, he had one, but now I’m running one too). If you’re interested in a chat, and know what IRC is, point to irc.srhuston.net 6667 (or irc.srhuston.net:9999 if you want to use SSL) and find me. There’s a few of us on at various hours :>

by srhuston

A Lesson in Physics

[Note – there’s a lot of other stuff I’d been meaning to put here before now, mostly a rehash of things of late. But this particular item pissed me off enough to just put this here instead.]

So we recently had a physics lesson about inertia, and how a moving vehicle cannot stop within 30 feet just because you stepped out in front of it into a crosswalk. Now, it’s time for another one.

We’ll start with the basics. A standard vehicle, manufactured since 1988, is likely capable of speeds up to around 80-90 miles per hour (MPH). Now, some vehicles are more “performance oriented” and capable of speeds higher than that, and others still have been tweaked and tuned to get upwards of 150MPH and more for specialized operations such as racing. That’s pretty fast. 150MPH means you could traverse from the northern tip of New Jersey to the southern tip in about two hours (not accounting for our lovely traffic and highway systems, of course). You could get from Philadelphia to Atlantic City in about 25 minutes. Not bad at all, if you ask me.

Now, for the next part. The speed of light in a vacuum is 670.76 MILLION miles per hour. So it would take the aforementioned car one hour to travel 150 miles, while light could make the trip in about .0008 seconds. That’s 800 microseconds. It took me longer to type this period from the time my brain told my finger to do it: . That’s really fast, and even better than the previous 150MPH.

Now, what is the point of this lesson? Very simple. Light is basically electromagnetic waves. Now waves can be slowed down by other factors, such as the medium through which they travel (note the speed above is light “in a vacuum” – through the atmosphere is slightly slower, and through things like glass and water is slower yet). Radio waves are also in the electromagnetic spectrum, and follow similar rules. This means that, if you try to cut someone off by lagging behind them at a traffic light, and as the light turns green swerve around them into the left-turn-only lane, and fail to pass them, and then proceed to tailgate, swerve, narrowly avoid hitting them, try two times on a winding road to pass in a no-passing zone, and finally pass them anyway on another stretch of road where you continue on to pass 4 other cars (all in a no-passing zone) and almost cause 3 accidents in doing so, your car’s speed still won’t match the speed at which I can relay to the local 911 dispatch that you’re driving like a #&^(ING MORON, tell them your license plate, and watch the kind officer pulling you over about a mile down the road as I stop behind you to relay my witness account to him.

In short, you may be able to outrun me and my car, but you can’t outrun radio waves. Dipshit.