The FCC monster…
Just a friendly reminder that on 2 June 2003 the FCC proposes to remove laws that prevent any single company from owning every TV channel or newspaper in your city. This is very, very scary. Remember, the mission of the FCC is to regulate the airwaves in the public’s best interest. They must be held to this mission. If the public doesn’t act on this the corporations will get their way. Don’t let one conglomerate control what you and your family can watch, read, or hear. See this or that and contact your representative."
05/20/2003
Silence of the fishes
I’ve decided to take as much of a break from human interactions as I possibly can. How will I accomplish this task? Basically, I’m going to shut the hell up and avoid people. Specifically, I need a break from the people I live with. So, I’ll play hobbit and see how it goes.
I’m just really fucking tired of the folks I live with. I know that sounds harsh but it’s the truth. Sometimes I love them but sometimes I can’t stand the sight of them. The negativity is overwhelming sometimes and fuck, let me tell you how tired I am of certain people’s high and mighty attitude. And I’m sick of people that don’t have any fucking money. Get a fucking job and feed yourself. I know I’m probably not the dream housemate but for fucksake, I generally try to be polite, pleasant, responsible and respectful.
On a positive note, it looks like we’re going to be able to keep the aquarium we recently obtained. It’s a monster: 125 gallons!! I’m slowly buying the supplies we’ll need to set it up as a planted aquarium: 230lbs of gravel and flourite, an expensive ass filter, plants, and light’s. I’m going to build the light hood myself and use standard 30 watt compact flourecents. For a planted tank 2-3 watts of light per gallon are recommended so i’ll need at least 250 watts of light or 9 lights. Hopefully we’ll get it all set up by the end of June then it’s time to add fish. I’ll move the 7 fish (black tail shark, bala shark, various gouramis among others) from their 30 gallon tank to the new one.
I’m looking forward to setting up this aquarium. I have no doubt that it will be beautiful. I think aquariums have an amazing calming effect in a room. We should line all the walls of our house with aquariums!
05/20/2003
Frustrations with BellSouth FastAccess DSL
It’s a real bummer that Directv DSL went out of business this past fall. In one year of service with those folks we had maybe 2 outages for a total of less than 1 hour. An added bonus was a static ip address which made connecting remotely much easier. Their service was the best I’ve had yet.
Enter BellSouth FastAccess which is almast as bad as Road Runner was. For starters, the signal drops out several times a week. These outages usually only last a few minutes but sometimes up to several hours. Very annoying. Another kicker is what they apparently do to discourage do-it-yourself home networking. From the start we’ve had problems posting from certain online forms or email services such as yahoo or hotmail. These problems only occurr when working through our Asante or Linksys router. A direct connection to the modem works fine for all pages and services. Why? Evidently Bellsouth throws a wrench in the works by requiring that data packets be smaller than what the router normally uses in some instances. This is not a problem that can easily be fixed or even discovered by the typical home user. I discovered a solution after many google searches and finally a post to the Asante support forums.
There is a solution though it’s a pain in the ass and I’ve not been able to get it working on all of the computers on our home network which range from Windows XP to Mac OS9 to Mac OSX. Each computer has to be configured to limit the size of it’s MTU (maximum transmission unit). The two machines easiest to configure were running OSX. I did a search for configuring MTU in Apple’s KBase and came up with this article. Pretty straight forward use of the terminal and the pico text editor to create a script and a file as well as altering another. Though it is described as an “advanced procedure” most anyone could do it if they simply follow the directions. Took me about 10 minutes to do both computers.
As of this writing the XP computer is still not properly configured. I downloaded a recommended shareware program, NetTweak Pro, installed and configured it but with no success. In fact I can no longer access the web on that computer. Nor have I found a solution for reconfiguring the OS9 computer.
Seems like Asante and other router manufacturers could allow for this kind of setting in the router? Perhaps future router firmware updates will include this feature.