SRHuston Dot Net

No, really, that’s the site name.  My friend and co-worker (okay, technically “employee”, though I do very little bossing around I think) setup a website to track his and our other friend’s new car stories.  Especially timely since they both bought their cars within a week of each other, and they’re identical.  Not perfectly identical, though – Keith had the pinstripe removed from his.  Yes, that’s the only difference.  For now anyway – Leigh is a performance monger, and doing things to get a few more HP out of the engine wouldn’t surprise me.

No, that doesn’t mean “hit points” either.

Well, our new upright freezer is installed and running.  Instead of me talking about it however, here’s an album of photos that Stephanie took while I did the electrical work.  Enjoy.

Well, the red-checked telco monopoly has already pissed me off.  Yes, it’s 2:20 in the morning, and I was going to go to bed an hour and a half ago.  But I wanted to login to my account and file a support ticket to fix my PTR record.  Only problem is, I have no user name to use to login.  Ask for help on it, and am told it’s the user name I chose when I “installed my DSL software.”  What software?  I don’t need any software, and even looking through the stuff they sent me, there’s no software to install.  There isn’t even a CD.  I tell them that, they ask me if I’m using the right user name.  How the HELL would I know, when you never told me one to use?  Oh, the one when I signed up for my account.  Problem there, I don’t recall being asked for one.  I also don’t have any email from them that mentions what it might be.  And the “forgot your password?” page that asks for a username, when I give it any of the few that I would have chosen, it says the username is invalid (all but one, and I’m sure I’m not the first person to chose the name ‘huston’, let alone the fact that they then tell me the security question is wrong).

So I haven’t had working DSL for more than a day, and already they’ve got me pissed off.  Just counting off the days until Covad says they service this area, and this shit is going out the window.

Last Result:
Download Speed: 2684 kbps (335.5 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 711 kbps (88.9 KB/sec transfer rate)

It may be the local telco monopoly.. but damn that’s nice to see.  I’ll post more tomorrow probably – much catching up to do.  Right now, much sleeping to do.

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.

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 :>

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.

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?

Here is Steph and I with Alton.

Here’s one of Leigh

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.

[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.