by srhuston

It’s Electrifying

Today’s plan is to rewire the basement lights so that 1) They all come on with the switch at the top of the stairs, and 2) There’s more of them. Getting a later start on things this weekend, because we both slept in until 11:30 (which felt damn good to do) but I’m confident that I can get everything together, and probably start on the work today and finish it tomorrow. Using flourescent “shop lights” so it won’t be a big deal to wire them up, and since I already know that two lights in the basement turn on with that switch it should be fairly simple to wire up everything else off of them.

Might even take the time to trace out the remaining breakers in the house, and see where things go. But that could be a while to do, unless I find the circuit tracer at Sears that I want (Home DePoe and Lowes both don’t have it in the store, though the former lists one I want on their website).

by srhuston

One down…

Well, ran the lawnmower and string trimmer for the first time yesterday evening.  Did all of the front yard, and it came out nice.  Only problem was I didn’t have time to do the back, but since that’s behind a fence and people can’t see it I was less concerned.  At least nobody will complain about the front looking bad :>  Mower works very well, and the trimmer does too once it gets started.  My only issue today is that my hands hurt from holding the handle, and the arms are a little sore.  Hey, maybe I’ll finally lose some weight doing yardwork…

In other news, ARRL Field Day is this weekend, and our plan was to setup in Mercer County Park.  Unfortunately, the weather may not cooperate – currently calling for an 80% chance of rain and thunderstorms all weekend, with a total rainfall between 3 and 6 inches.  So we’re going to setup at the club shack, and run a smaller Field Day operation there.  Also planning on setting up at the Mercer County Emergency Operations Center (EOC), and I’m trying to get in touch with N2HX about opening up the State EOC for a little bit too.  So if you’ve got a shortwave radio, tune around 20m (14MHz) and give a listen for Whiskey Two Zulu Quebec, Whiskey Two Mike Echo Romeo, and maybe November Juliet Two Echo Mike (though the latter two will probably only be on 80m, 3.5-4MHz)

by srhuston

But Wait, There’s More

Last, but not least, something I read on the ARRL website today made me smile.  Seems the FCC is looking to make a few changes post-Katrina, and the outlook is good for hams.  Would be nice if they made it “official” to do what many of us do already (setup stations at shelters, Red Cross locations, EOCs at local and state level) especially if they offer to foot the bill for some of the equipment.  Most of it has to come out of local budgets, and places just don’t budget for it – so I guess another good possibility is if they require the served agencies budget for it.  At least then we might not have to scrounge to get parts for an old radio, because nobody wants to buy a replacement.

by srhuston

2-Man Pipeline

I found this a little while ago, after years of searching… still want it on DVD though.

Feast your eyes on this… absolutely amazing.

Oh, in other news, I’m not so sure what I think about this theme now.. have to see if I can edit the text for links, ’cause I realized today they are kinda hard to see in there. Just about the same color as the other text. We’ll see what happens.

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…