I store all of my application, utilities, and game CDs (along with manuals) within a small shelf built into the right-side of my desk.  My daughter Lily enjoys walking over, grabbing and knocking over all of the carefully arranged CDs and manuals.  One of my key CDs is the Windows XP Home CD that came with my Dell back in 2005, and I would need if I ever wanted to rebuild my PC. I often find a trail of CDs and manuals strewn around the upstairs, often outside of their protective jewel cases.  I’m worried she’s going to lose or ruin the CDs.

Such as tonight.  Yes, that’s right.  I am finally ready to rebuild my PC.  For months, it’s been slowing down, hanging up, crashing.  I recommend to folks to rebuild their PC every 2-3 years, but this one has been running since 2005. I’ve been prepping and now I was ready to rebuild my machine after I got home from work Friday night.  Lo and behold, I can’t find my XP CD.  After a fruitless search, I’m annoyed at my 17-month old daughter.  When she gets a job, she owes me a new PC.

It has been almost 2 months living with Verizon’s FiOS service.  Two months since I kicked Comcast to the curb, and used the power of the free market to let another company offer me a better product. If you remember, I suffered many a slight from Verizon has they struggled to get my service up and running over the initial two weeks, finally resolving it on July 14th.

In the past 5 weeks or so, the service has been uninterrupted, and working well.  Here are my thoughts so far, in no particular order:

Television

• The television is so much clearer than what we were getting with Comcast.  It may very likely be due to the unexplained interference coming from the Tivo DVR being in the mix (last Comcast cable tech’s assessment), but it didn’t make much sense to me. Now that we’re using the Verizon DVR, the mystery Tivo interference is moot.
• Speaking of the DVR, it is no Tivo.  It’s not as intuitive to use as the Tivo interface, nor does it have all the cool capabilities like Tivo Desktop, streaming Netflix, etc. However, using the Verizon DVR service is cheaper (by $2.) The Verizon DVR isn’t terrible, but it’s “good enough” for us to get by.  I like having the combined box and DVR.  The less components and wires, the better we are off.
• I like all the channels, but Bruce Springsteen is right.  500 channels, and there isn’t much on. There are a lot of channels in the 20s-40′s that are just “local programming”, and unwatchable.  Use the DVR to find what you want, and live with your recorded programs.
• We’re almost at the end of our 3-month free trial of HBO and Cinemax.  It’s nice, but not all that necessary. I’ll miss Entourage and the occasional stupid movie playing at the moment.
• Oh, on a tv-Tivo-related-to-the-network note, since I got rid of the Tivo, I don’t need to support the accompanying 802.11b USB wireless adapter that I was using all these years.  It slowed the entire wireless network down to mixed b/g, and prevented me from using a stronger encryption, such as WPA2.

Internet

• I still don’t like this Actiontec router you are forced to use.  While it’s a benefit to have one less device plugged in, I still prefer the flexibility of choosing and using your own hardware. The wireless range is not as good as my old Linksys WRT54 — I used to be able to check the weather on my iPod while parked outside.  Now I can’t even get decent signal  strength in the backyard.
• The NAT table in the router is tiny, which fills up quickly, and requires a cold reboot of the router every few days. I’ve been doing it every 3 days or so.  Not a tragedy in any sense, but argh.
• I’ve got the 10 Mbps downstream, 2 Mbps upstream service.  When you browse, it’s the same perceived speed as before, but the service is noticibly faster when downloading large files or uploading photos.  Most of the time, in any rate.  There have been a few instances where you wonder, “Uh, where did the fast internet speeds go?”

Phone

• We get free local and long distance, including Canada.  We could have used this back when I was spending my time in Canada all those weeks. The phone service is about the same, except we’re saving the most by getting the local and long distance for one low price.
• I wish there were other benefits to having the phone service over network, like the ability to get cooler, newer VOIP phones or something like Cablevision when Caller ID details flash on the tv, but I guess not.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Vijay's birthday dinner

A group of us had plans tonight to meet up at the Macaroni Grill close to the Menlo Park mall in Menlo Park, NJ (or is it Edison NJ?)  My wife also wanted to stop by the shops in Edison beforehand.  To make these great plans happen, I had to get there. Instead of catching the bus home from NYC as usual, I used a one-way bus ticket in the AM, and I took a train from NY Penn Station in the evening to the Metropark station in Edison NJ.

It has certainly been a while since I rode NJ Transit, but it was a pleasant trip down memory lane — all those times years ago of running to Penn station, missing my train by 5 seconds, waiting another hour for the next train.   Today was one of the pleasant trips.  No running, plenty of time, and I rode in one of the new Northeast Corridor double-decker cars.

My wife picked me up at Metropark with kids in town, we hit a shop, then drove to Macaroni Grill, where everyone eventually showed up.  Kids were behaved, only one diaper that required changing, and the food was actually quite good.  I’m not a fan of Macaroni Grill, but they changed the menu, and the quality has improved. I was pleasantly surprised. The appetizers were good, my chicken parmigiana was excellent, and good wine.

It was a win for everyone.

Hot town, summer in the city.
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.
Been down, isn’t it a pity.
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city.
All around, people looking half-dead.
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.

Dang, it has been HOT this week. I’ve been in NY, and man, it is hot, humid, sticky, you name it. On Tuesday, there was no A/C on the morning bus.  It felt like we were in a steam-cooker. If the A/C is not working, why would the bus dispatch send it out anyway? That’s not right, and it’s not fair. Don’t do that, Mr. Coach USA.

I’ve noticed in the past 6-12 months (not exactly sure of timeline) that my AT&T wireless service has been getting very hinkey.  When I say “hinkey”, I mean you can have a full set of bars, but no response or very slow.  In the past two months, a number of bloggers are complaining about their 3G coverage, especially while using their respective iPhone 3Gs. If you’re trying to make a phone call, browse the internet, or attemping to download updates (a la Facebook), you could be fine one second, and then kaput.

The blogosphere (the bloggerati?) are pointing the finger at all the iPhone 3G phones (with all the other 3G phones) eating up so much AT&T network bandwith, it’s effectively creating a network slowdown.  It would certainly explain a lot.  I remember way back in the 1998 – 2001 time period, I signed up for my first cell phone (a Nokia) through AT&T Wireless.  The service was acceptable initially, but a few years later, the reliability of their analog service degraded.  Funny, that was the problem back then, and it was just analog for phone calls. 

Back then, one of my cousins told me to stick with AT&T Wireless, as he heard they were going to build new towers, but it never improved over the next few months.  Eventually, that prompted me to first move to T-Mobile, then Verizon Wireless a few years after that.  In 2007, I came back to AT&T for the nice selection of BlackBerry smartphones.  Unfortunately, I have come back full circle, and am now experiencing data network issues. Where am I going after this?  Nowhere. I’m here with AT&T for the long-term.

BTW, this is interesting. What with all the different cellular communications technologies we’ve had, check out this graph with how the technologies have converged so far, and will continue to converge in the U.S. towards this LTE-A standard.  Neat.  Does that mean all of our cell phones will be interchangeable between carriers in a few years?

Whoa. Now that’s what I call good sci-fi.

Over the weekend, my wife and I went to see District 9. I’m not sure why my wife agreed to see it, but I suppose she realized we’ve seen a number of rom-com movies. She doesn’t like sci-fi or action, so she really took one for the team here.

This movie had a lot of what love about good sci-fi.  Using a backdrop of science-fiction, you can explore important themes with a “what if?”  For just $30 million, you touch upon themes related to what it means to be human and how we treat others and discrimination.  It also had great (and believable special effects), and some very good action. The exploding bodies was a nice touch. I love when a sci-fi story does a great job with social satire.

$30 million. A complete cast of unknowns. Good special effects.  Great themes. Good action. What more do you want?

This was a good sci-fi movie. Director Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson did good.

District 9 (2009)

A few weeks ago, I realized that I was in a funk in a number of aspects of my life, but I had an epiphany, and I woke up. Actually, someone in the office took advantage of my good nature, and I got metaphorically screwed.  It resulted in the aforementioned epiphany. It was time to get out of the funk, and change my life. Get back to being me — the real me. The real “kick-yer-ass-and-take-names” me.

One aspect relates to me and my fat ass.  We’re all getting fatter, and I feel ashamed. If you look back at photos of when us folks were younger, we were so thin back then.  I look at photos of people I know nowadays, and we’ve all become fat. I saw a photo of someone I know (who shall remain nameless) who was this thin teenager.  Now, the kid is in his late twenties, married, and looks bloated. Oh, I’m not excluding myself in all this finger-pointing.  I’m heavier than ever.  Sure, some of it is a function of us getting older, and our metabolisms slowing down.  We’re so busy with kids and work, that we don’t have time for a more active lifestyle.  Still, we should be ashamed of ourselves.  It’s enough.

I started back at the gym on Monday, which was the first time since April 6th.  The real me shouldn’t have this sedentary lifestyle.  The real me shouldn’t be this fat.  How is this going to be different?  I’m committed.  Seriously though, how is this going to be different?  Because I’m changing my diet too.  I’ve started eating smaller portions, and more fruit.  What’s the big deal about fruit?  I hate fruit, but I’m eating it. If I hate fruit this much, and I’m eating it willingly, that means I’m serious.

It’s all about motivation. Sometimes, looking yourself in the mirror and being fed up is enough motivation to change yourself.  At this point in my life, it feels good to feel driven again.  Somewhere along the way, I stagnated.  I was holding the line, and nothing more.  No more. I can see this at the office already. Now’s it’s time to get my body back too.  I’m turning things around, getting back on track, and changing my life.

You want to know how determined I am?  I want to tell my childhood hero Col. Steve Austin to move over, and watch someone really become better, stronger, faster.

Weeeiird. In my AP Biology textbook from high school, I remember learning and reading about this fungus that attacked ants.  The ants would unwittingly ingest the fungal spores, and the spores would grow, bursting out of the ant, and using the corpse as nourishment.  There was even this picture of the fungus stalk breaking through the dead ant. Thanks to the Internet, I found the same photo online.

Scientists have discovered a fungus in Thailand that takes over ant brains, and forces them to stay low to the ground, find locations suitable for the fungus, and wait to die there. It literally takes control of their brains. That. Is. Crazy.

This was an interesting article. The Chicago Tribune wrote a lengthy article about how Netflix works.  As a self-avowed geek, I love finding out how this stuff really works.  Come on, it’s cool.  Don’t you ever wonder?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-0804-netflixaug04,0,6424990.story

Show of hands –> Who has a webcam?

We received our webcam as a gift way back in August 2005 from my sister-in-law.  Unfortunately, we’ve never had much use for it.  Why? Not that many people have one.  You would think in this day and age of widespread availability of hi-speed broadband internet coming into the house, more people would be using video chat applications, and frequently too.  Instead, we know maybe three other people besides us. Furthermore, your options to connect with someone is limited to using an IM client, such as MSN Messenger, AOL Messenger, or Yahoo Messenger.  Even then, AOL and Yahoo display only choppy video, and while MSN is lesser of the three evils, no one uses it.

Logitech released a new (and free to download) video chatting application called Vid.  I think it’s less altruism, and more “we can sell more webcams.”  I tried it out with my Dad this evening, but the quality is….. well, piss poor.  Choppy video and audio that cut in and out.  Sigh. I’ve already uninstalled it. Better luck next time.