January 2008 Entries
This morning I attempted putting a wireless card into the server hosting the website, so that I could turn off some of my routing hardware (specifically, the Magnum ST80 hub and CompUSA switch) while I'm out of the house. For whatever reason, the machine kept BSODing on startup, which is a development I haven't experienced involving my wireless cards (Lucent Technologies WaveLAN/IEEE PCMCIA cards) since I quit using Windows 98. I pulled the card out, and managed to take part of the bay door with it. I didn't have time to tweezer out the third or so of the door...
Has anybody ever noticed how every small device seems to come with its own space-wasting, low-output AC adapter? They often take up the two adjacent plugs on standard-sized power strips, and sometimes get needlessly hot.
I have an ATX power supply laying around, so I decided to ditch some of the smaller hardware in favor of a larger, more centralized system based around it. Using a pair of scissors, I cut the AC blocks off a few old adapters that were either broken or intended to power hardware that I no longer own, and then stripped the ends of the resulting...
Midyear exams begin (and end) this week, so my schedule's a bit hectic and looks like this:
Tuesday: Calculus AB Honors from 8:30 to 10:00 and Ethics from 11:00 to 12:30
Wednesday: British Literature Honors from 8:30 to 10:00 and Spanish IV Honors from 11:00 to 12:30
Thursday: No exams scheduled (to be read: "Study for Physics the entire day.")
Friday: Physics A from 8:30 to 10:00 and AP European History from 13:15 to 14:45
Saturday: The SAT from 8AM to noon.
Having completed the Calculus...
I just noticed that this blog's RSS feed was pointing to my server's internal IP address, "hh2k.homelinux.org". Apparently it's a bug of some sort in subText's URL processor, so I replaced the dynamic link to the feed with a static one pointing to my DynDNS name. The feed should be working outside of my LAN now.
Has anybody been using the W3C Markup Validator recently? I ran my blog through it and received 24 errors in the output. Upon correcting one of the errors, the error count decreased to thirteen, and the correction of a second error brought the count down...
Back in December I mentioned that I was buying used CDs off Amazon Marketplace. 26 of my CDs showed up within the first full week of January, while the remaining five have apparently been lost in the mail. The great part is that the sellers in question apparently shipped the discs, as each one gave me a full refund upon hearing that I hadn't received them. So what's the problem?
I put those orders on a reloadable cash card, and canceled it after I was finished purchasing items so that I wouldn't have to incur the end-of-the-month cardholder fee. That means...
There was an open parking space at the mall. It's officially a cold day in Hell.
While this is coming from someone that's been using a weak analog network for a few years now, GSM signal strength is quite impressive. I was holding the analog and digital v60 phones next to each other on the way home: as the analog signal faded in and out and occasionally dropped out altogether, the GSM signal stayed fixed with a full signal. Not bad for a fifteen-year-old network. T-Mobile's in-store reps are very friendly: I called in and was greeted by someone at the...
...So why did AT&T turn off my phone today, January 10th? It seems like AT&T has found a loophole of sorts in the FCC's mandate where AMPS will be discontinued on February 18th: the analog cellular towers are still up and running, and I can still dial out, except every call is forwarded to a tape that tells me to upgrade my phone. Anyone attempting to call the number is now presented with a message stating, "This phone has been deactivated." If I were to receive that sort of message with no warning, my first thought would be that the...
Not quite what you were expecting? AT&T's dropping their AMPS service, so I needed to buy a new phone that runs on a digital network. The Motorola v60i came in AMPS (right), GSM (left), and CDMA, so I picked the GSM version up off eBay.
AT&T is the sole analog provider left in the area. Now that I have the option of switching providers, I'm moving to T-Mobile: their prepaid airtime rates are over three times cheaper than AT&T's.
BlogML is a lifesaver. Using Google's cached copies of my blog entries, I constructed a BlogML dump of the pre-crash site and imported it here without many problems. Google unfortunately didn't archive a total of four comments, and the comments I did manage to import are having problems with linebreaks, but the content here should now be the same as what it looked like prior to having the Gericom Hummer's hard drive die.
To prevent this from happening again, I'm going to have to learn to back up my database more often...