Category: General

I just got back from… well, let’s just say that it’s the first time this atheist has been in a church for a long time. My sincere condolences to my best friend, Tracy and her family, for the unexpected loss of her father.

On reflection, I just want to state for the record a couple of things.

First, when I go (assuming I don’t live forever, as planned) I don’t want a fancy funeral. I want all my friends and family and anyone who wants to show up to all get together, and get roaring drunk, and sing and dance and laugh, and talk about all the good things I did and all the bad things (as in, “Wow, that was so funny when he screwed up like that!”) and just generally have a good time. I believe that’s called a wake.

Second, for the record, if there’s any gray area, and y’all aren’t sure if I’d have full use of my faculties, just turn off the machine. It’s OK with me. After all, my body is all I am and all I have.

Oh, hell. I can’t talk about this now. Just go read what I wrote the last time I had to think about death.

The fact that when they calculate your FICO score they don’t give a rat’s ass about your income is the most revealing thing I’ve learned today.

It’s taken me 15,411 days to completely understand that the best way to thrive in a capitalist society is to accumulate capital.

I know, I know… duh.

Been collecting all these links. Figured it’s time to post them before they go stale.

• Putting super-accurate cesium clocks in your camping van to demonstrate to your kids how time is affected by gravity… OK. What, no flux capacitor?
• If Apple Stores are so great, why am I not in one right now? Apparently, they’re so great because Apple built prototypes of the stores to try out, before building actual stores. So awesome.
• Another way the Cheney Administration can tell America “Go fuck yourself” – ignoring this little rule when handling convicted felon “Scooter” Libby.
• Wikipedia pre-historic political maps of the world: 2000 BCE, 1000 BCE, 500 BCE, 323 BCE. “BCE” stands for “Before common era“, by the way, since, y’know, if you think to measure based on the birth of Jesus, Christ was actually born anywhere from 8 to 2 years BCE.
• I love rants. I love ranting. About everything. But there’s one thing you just can’t rant about: you can’t rant about other people not shutting up. It’s just stupid.

“Scrubs” has somehow become the most-re-ran (re-runned?) show. I was going to say the most re-ran show ever but that honor still belongs to “Seinfeld” by virtue of it having more seasons.

At any rate, every night I can watch J.D., Turk, Carla, Elliot, and all the others, being funny and then reaching an honest, human emotional moment at the end. I do that a lot now.

Example of a “funny because it’s true” line from one of last night’s re-runs:

“When you’re mad at someone, you tend to talk to everyone else but that person.” – J.D.’s narration.

See? Funny, but so true.

So, don’t do that. And don’t spend a lot of time being mad at someone you love and care about. Honestly, ignoring someone is much more effective at irritating them, and you reap the benefit of not spending a lot of mental energy on them. It’s a lose-win (they lose, you win) which is the bestest.

NOTE: I am explicitly stating that this post is not directed at Tracy or anyone else. It’s just a snarky comment that came to mind. Honest. If anyone thinks I’m ignoring them on purpose, they’re probably wrong.

According to the American Heart Association, ones resting heart rate is best measured first thing in the morning, and varies from 60-80 beats per minute (bpm). It is lower in those who are athletic, and rises with age.

But that above-linked page doesn’t give any indication of how much it lowers with fitness level, nor does it say how much it rises with age.

I’ve been interested lately in my own heart rate, because I think that keeping track of my heart rate during a run can be helpful in structuring my training. Also because I think it would be really cool to have a nifty new gadget like a heart rate monitor. Hey, at least I’m honest – I like gadgets.

So this morning, I kept my watch next to my bed, and first thing after my alarm went off, I grabbed my watch and timed my heart rate. It took me a bit to find my pulse. After the first measurement (12 beats in 15 seconds, which means 48 bpm), I was stunned. That just seemed too low. Did I mis-count? I tried it several times after that, and the numbers came in between 12-14 beats per 15 second period.

Whoa. That means my resting heart rate is anywhere from 48-56 bpm. That seems low for a 42-year old formerly-chubby guy.

I’ve been having problems with my home network. Ugh.

It’s a fairly simple set up: Comcast broadband cable, connected to an AT&T cable modem, piping in whatever speeds Comcast offers.

From there it goes (normally) to a D-Link WiFi router, to which I connect my my new sexy thing, and a wired ethernet 100BaseT connection to my Mac mini, which serves as my media PC (connected to my teevee) and a file server (an additional 380 GB of hard drives hanging off the FireWire connection).

Nothing too radical. I try to keep a VPN from my Mac mini to dante, the server my website is hosted on, so I can get around the stoopid block that Comcast has on running servers on their connection.

I’ve wanted DSL so I can maintain my own home server, but since Qworst and I have done battle, that’s not likely to happen. Technically, DSL is available in my area but, strangely, and without any documentation that might bite their ass in court, they claim that “technical difficulties” prevent them from providing this address with DSL broadband.

At any rate, I’ve been having problems. On a random basis, all of a sudden my router will stop getting an IP from Comcast. My internal network still works – I can see and get to all my shared drives – but my connection to the larger tubes of the internets ceases and desists. The only thing I’ve found to restore the connection is to unplug and reboot the cable modem.

This had happened about a year ago, and I got so frustrated that I called Comcast and had them send out a technician. When he showed up, he pissed me off by remarking on how messy my apartment was, to which I snapped “Why don’t you just focus on diagnosing the problem?”… not a good friendly basis. So when he told me that my WiFi router was causing radio interference with my cable modem, he didn’t take the next step of, y’know, replacing the cable modem, which at that point was at least 4 years old.

I’ve been paying a small fee every month to “lease” the cable modem, and I’d long ago passed the point where I could have just purchased a new one. I just put up with it, even though I was within my rights to ask Comcast to replace this one.

I tried to build a Faraday cage out of aluminum foil and a cardboard box. That seemed to work for a while, but then the problem returned. I limped along from that point on, either forgoing the use of WiFi and just plugging my laptop in directly, or living with having to reboot the cable modem, but in the last several weeks the problem has gotten progressively worse, resulting in my having to reboot the cable modem every couple of days, then every day, then every couple of hours… and the more often it occurred, the longer it seemed I had to leave it powered off before it would start passing packets again.

I wasn’t sure at this point if the problem was radio interference, or an overheating problem, maybe exaggerated by the additional heat caused by my enclosure. Argh.

So this weekend I decided to do something about it. Comcast listed all the “Comcast certified cable modems” that would work with their service – the common denominator seemed to be that the units all supported DOCSIS 1.1 or greater. Easy enough. I headed out to Stuff, a pawn shop that specializes in electronic equipment and goodies, and there on their shelf was a Toshiba PCX2600 cable modem, for just $14.95. I thought that the model number was a good omen…

I found that I couldn’t just plug in the new cable modem and have it “just work”. Comcast needed to authorize the MAC address on their network. I called Comcast, and after an hour-long call to Paul in Winnipeg, Canada, where he kept me on hold for a long time, returning only to assure me that the problem wasn’t something I had done, that he was working on it, and that he would get it fixed… finally he came back online and explained that he could not get my service working. He had to “escalate” the call and that it would be working within the next 24 hours. Probably.

Fine. I was done for the night, anyway. I went to work the next day (yesterday), came home… and found it still wasn’t quite working. Well, it hadn’t been 24 hours yet…

But I tried one last thing. When I had called Comcast, I had had my laptop plugged directly into the cable modem, since they don’t service, or even troubleshoot, WiFi or home networks. I thought that maybe they had only “authorized” the MAC address for my laptop. I cloned that address to my WiFi router, plugged it all in… and presto, it worked.

Except… now I’ve discovered that the power plug for my WiFi router is loose. If I jiggle it, it will power off. I now wonder if that was causing the original problem – if it loses connection with the cable modem, that would cause the symptoms I was seeing before. I would still “see” my shared drives because AppleTalk will cache network shares for a certain amount of time, long enough for the router to reconnect my Mac mini and my new sexy thing. Argh.

Oh, well, at least it’s all working now. But maybe I’ll save up and replace my $30 WiFi router with a sexy AirPort Extreme Base Station… that way I can just plug the external backup drives directly into the router…

Why is white plastic so damned sexy, anyway?

Twenty-five years ago today, he OD’ed on drugs. I know that’s not something of which to be proud, and that’s not why I admired John Belushi.

I just thought he was funny. He made me laugh, and smile, and even sing and dance.

I miss him.

When stepping outside of my normal path, it’s supposed to feel a bit scary, right?

At least part of that fear is because I’m on unrecognized ground… isn’t it?

I shouldn’t expect to feel “normal” when doing something rare. Should I?

I’m going to go with “yes” to all those questions. For now.

I just wanted to point out that I’m not the only one who finds political trolls hard to ignore. Even Kari Chisholm of Blue Oregon, who had earlier pointed out that feeding the trolls was counter-productive, sometimes feels compelled to speak up.

All I can say is: SEE?!

But no matter how you approach it, either with rational, logical arguments or with smack-downs, trolls win, because all they want is attention. It’s a lesson that’s as old as the internets.