Busy working on updated voice modem code, but my brain has been fried since Thursday, so I’m not making much progress, which is bad.
So I took a quiz thingy.
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Have had a lot of stuff going on recently. Last Friday we had a patent
lawyer in at SimPro. We’re thinking of taking patents out of some of
the things we do, which I think would be pretty neat. I stayed up late
the night before to try and get my new call handler software working,
and it mostly works now, but it’s still got so very odd issues that I’m
not sure how to resolve. Should keep me nice and busy for the next
couple of days.
Saturday went rather badly though. I didn’t make it over to the computer
show like I had planned, and I passed up the opportunity to go into
Boston with Andrea because Saturday night is game night. Of course,
jtn didn’t bother to tell me he planned on ditching me, so I
ended up doing more or less nothing all night.
Sunday was a better though. Andrea and I cleaned up the apartment, so
now there are very few boxes left and most of the rooms are nice and
clean. The only room left to clean up is the computer room, which
shouldn’t be too bad, I just need to figure out where to put everything
on my desk. My mom and step-dad came over for dinner, we made them beef
stew, and it turned out pretty well.
I’m thinking of trying out geocaching, it
seems like it would be a fun thing to do, and it would be a hobby that
would get me out of the house on weekends. All I need to do is get a
GPS. cavey recommended the
Garmin eTrex Venture,
which looks pretty good. I have to think about it more I think, since it
is a kind-of expensive investment.
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Well, I finally have broadband Internet access at home. The AT&T install
guy came over on Friday afternoon, did a bunch of work in the wall, gave
me a digital cable box and left. After a little bit of testing, I found
that the cable box didn’t tune above channel 13 and the cable modem
wouldn’t sync. As it turns out, of the 4 cable wall plates in the
apartment, 3 were for the “house” cable only, and only 1 of them was for
outside cable. We switched the digital cable box over to the outside
cable plate and it was happy. After 3 calls to AT&T, they decided to
send somebody out on Saturday to fix things.
That didn’t go much better. He did some more work in the walls, and got
the modem to sync, but couldn’t get my computer to get a DHCP lease.
Eventually he decided to try the USB connection on the modem instead of
the ethernet, and poof, it works, so he left.
I was a little worried at this point, since I had also purchased this
nice Netgear MR314 Wireless Cable/DSL Router, and intended to use it. I
decided to try configuring my laptop’s ethernet port to the same
ethernet address as the USB side of the cable modem, and hooked it up to
the router, telling the router to use that machine’s ethernet id as the
outside link’s id. Then I hooked it up via ethernet to the cable modem,
and unplugged the USB cord. To my amazement, this worked, and
everything’s been nice and happy since.
So far it seems to be pretty good, I haven’t downloaded anything, but I
can get about a 50ms ping in Counterstrike, which is fine by me.
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On this fine April day (a very nice day indeed), I did my first PC
mod-type thingy. I successfully took a power connector from an old bay
cooler and converted it to a 7 volt adapter for my home PC (which is
very loud due to all the fans.) Yes, I know it’s simple and cheesy, but
I thought I’d record it anyway.
Basically, I just used a small screwdriver to get the pins out of the
molex connector, and reconnected the 12V-side ground to the 5V
connector, then removed the original 5V and 5V-ground lines. Nothing
special, but it should reduce noise.
Eventually I plan to replace it with a set of switches so I can switch
each fan between off, 7V and 12V, but that requires soldering, which I’m
not very good at, so it may be a while before I get to it.
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Haven’t been updating this as recently as I used to, which I guess is
another indication that I haven’t been doing anything terrible exciting
recently. Andrea pointed out yesterday that we never really go out and
do anything anymore, which I guess is true, since either I’m working, or
she’s got school, or something. Need to get out more, I think. Perhaps
we’ll go into Boston this weekend or something.
The apartment is slowly getting more home-like. I’ve got most of my
boxes unpacked now, but I still have a car-load of clothes that I need
to do something with. It’s mostly stuff I don’t want anymore, so I think
I’ll donate it. Over the weekend I worked on getting the computer room a
little more picked up. I finally brought my computer home from SimPro,
so it’s all hooked up and happy now. No Internet access yet though, AT&T
is supposed to come on Friday to get that setup.
The entertainment center is working out well, I think. I still need to
snap some pics of it. I may wait until we get the room picked up and the
couch from her parents, then I can take a set of pics of the whole place
all clean and stuff.
At SimPro, we’re working to get the product ready to sell, which mostly
consists of a bunch of little things and a couple big things that need
to get done. Nothing terribly interesting. I did however get my
replacement new laptop in. I think my problems with the first one were
caused by a WinXP patch that I let Windows Update install. I’m going to
avoid it this time and see what happens.
Guess that’s about it. Been playing Final Fantasy X a lot recently,
and played a bit of Total Annihilation against the computer. Need to
get back in practice for when Dave and Matt come back from college. I
hope to get some LAN parties together over the summer.
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Yay! I got my new TV today, and it looks great! I had to skip work for
about half the day because they decided it would be good to deliver it
while Andrea was at class, but it all worked out pretty well. I’ll probably
snap some shots of it over the weekend.
On the downside, I still hate modems. This stupid Zoom PCI voice modem
isn’t changing it’s audio encoding settings when I tell it to, even
though it says ‘OK’. I will smash it good.
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Last weekend was interesting. Saturday night, jtn and I went into
Boston to see Spike and Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation at the
Coolidge Corner cinema. It was an enjoyable show, they showed Rejected and
Ah, L’Amour by Don Hertzfeldt, the latter of which I hadn’t seen before, and
Eat by Bill Plympton. There were a bunch of ones, but those three were
probably the best.
After the show, we had the fun task of getting back to Alewife where my car
was parked. The trains in Boston stop running around 1am, so we had to use
the Night Owl busses. Unfortunately, we messed up and were waiting at the wrong
bus stop (Jason’s fault) and ended up taking a cab back to Alewife after waiting
till about 3:15am for the right bus. I ended up getting home around 5, after
driving Jason home.
On Sunday, Andrea and I went over to one of her aunt and uncle’s house
in Bedford for Easter. Her family was there, and we ate ham. It was
tasty and I had a pretty good time. Andrea seemed to be enjoying
herself, which is always good.
