Saturday afternoon, while Finn was down for a nap, I decided to try something I’ve meant to do for months. After having left it alone in disgust since early January, I finally went back out and straightened up the side porch last weekend. All of the extra bales of pink fiberglas got stacked in one pile, the clouds of blown fiber were swept up, and I filled two contractor’s bags full of assorted garbage to be hauled away. This past Saturday afternoon, in one last-ditch effort, I went back out and screwed three sheets of plywood and a bit of drywall over the open area between the front porch roof and the side room, sealing off the area above the porch into a closed cavity. I also adjusted the relief valve on the radiator closest to the front door and made sure the shutoff valve was open (it wasn’t).
The difference in the new office has been dramatic and astounding. I left the french doors closed Saturday night, as we always do, and when I stepped out there Sunday morning the front porch was warmer than the living room. It stayed like that for the rest of the day. Sunday night it got down to about 30° outside, and as I sat in the office typing, my hands were warm—and I didn’t need to wear fleece. It was more comfortable out there than sitting in the dining room, as a matter of fact. Opening the door between the front office and side porch produces a noticeable outrush of air, which confirms my suspicion that the area above the porch was subject to constant airflow, negating any heat-retaining properties of the insulation above.
After some sweat, cursing, and great exertion, we have the new laser printer sitting between our desks in the office. It’s literally a tank—I’d say over 200 lbs., and not small enough to jockey around with only two people. We had some very appreciated help from Aunt C. and Dr. G., who were gracious and kind enough, after humping the new one inside, to help me get the old one out to the Jeep. I hooked everything up, fired off a few test prints, and got the seal of approval from Mama. It’s loud, there’s no powersave mode, and the fan stays on constantly, which means it’s really better suited in a side office or well-ventilated closet, but that’s an inconvenience I’m willing to put up with for the sheer utility and flexibility of this thing. We’ll just keep it turned off when we don’t need it. Meanwhile, I brought the Xerox in to work this morning, got it set up and tested in a mixed-OS environment, and everything seems to be working as advertised.
Finn used her potty for the fourth time this evening. Sitting in her highchair, watching us as we made dinner, and eating vegetables, she got the worried look on her face and made a preliminary grunt. Jen asked her if she needed to use the potty, and she replied simply, “Potty.” We all sat down and read a book together, and the distraction made for a satisfying and successful outcome. We harbor no illusion that she will be trained by age 2, but if she continues asking for it, we’re going to keep offering it.
All of this really couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I’ve been battling a debilitating feeling of ennui the last couple of weeks, in part because I don’t feel like I’ve made many advances lately. Work has been relatively constant, my family is healthy and happy, and we are blessed with a daughter who is whip-smart and surprising us with new discoveries every day, but for me personally, I’ve been in a bit of a rut with projects here at the house and at work. These small things have got me motivated to start pushing forward again, and that’s a feeling I like to have.
Step 1: Start carrying the camera everywhere again, and take pictures.
I answered another Craigslist ad this morning, for a piece of hardware we’ve been dreaming about for years: a tabloid-sized color laser printer. Now, some of you may recall an earlier post where I’d bartered some services for just such a beast, and you’re thinking, doesn’t he have one of these already? What an idiot. Well, we do have one of these, but it’s not as good as the one I just bought.
This one is a Color LaserJet 8550DN, which is the top-of-the-line circa 2001 or so. What makes it better than the Xerox we’ve got is duplex printing, IP-based networking (as opposed to AppleTalk only), and three extra pickup trays for various sized media. It even came with its own stand. The consumables are about the same price, and this unit actually prints out an estimate of remaining consumable life. We could conceivably retire our B/W printer and use this one by itself.
Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it out of the car.
Wow. We had FIOS installed this afternoon, and at first blush, I’d say it’s faster than my connection at work 7 times faster than my work connection. Speedtest says we’re rocking 15mbps download and 5 mbps upload—roughly three times as fast as our old DSL connection. I poked around through the router settings and found that there’s a DYNDNS setup page, so I created a new account (my third in seven years) and set up the router to test at work tomorrow. Online, some people say that non-static IP FIOS accounts are blocked outbound, but I’m not sure yet.
Tomorrow, I have to lock the wireless network down tighter (WEP to WPA2, turn SSID broadcast off) and tweak out some settings, but so far I’m digging this.
Update 2.17: the IP address resolves but I can’t ping the router, most likely because all inbound connections are turned off. I’ll have to dig into the settings a bit further to investigate.
We’ve been getting mail from the phone company for the past year offering an upgrade to FIOS, and the idea of paying for it didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense until our cable signal went completely digital and everything dropped out except for all of the local channels.
It’s a symbol of just how much things have changed in the last six years—when we moved into the house, local TV was still somewhat watchable. In 2010, however, the floundering networks have programmed infomercial after testimonial after courtroom show, making the local service useless to us. We don’t watch a lot of TV now that Finn is here, and the fact that she has mastered all three remotes in a never-ending quest for MORE MELMO means we will be an ever more vigilant and idiot-box free household.
I was shocked, then, to read just how cheap they were offering the local FIOS “triple play” for: monthly around $30 less for basic TV, high-speed internet, and phone service than we are currently paying for just DSL and phone combined. I’ve read nothing but glowing reviews about FIOS from friends, and the idea that we might get some decent programming to watch again is exciting. The thing that gets me, though, is the price they charge for basic phone service: ±$60 for a number and a bunch of worthless services we don’t use—call waiting, voicemail, etc. As far as I can tell, there’s no way to reduce the service to a simple land line connection, although there was some talk about providing a cheap ±$10 incoming line/outgoing 911 hookup, which would be PERFECT.
So the guy will be here next Monday to rip out the old DSL modem and install a bunch of other shit in the basement. We are still rocking the analog TV set I bought as a bachelor in 1994, so we don’t need to rent their stupid set-top box, but we have to rent some $6 dongle to get the digital service to talk to the TV. At this point, there are several reasons I can’t wait for a new LCD, one of them being a built-in signal converter: the idea that I need to rent another dumb box to stack on top of all the other boxes annoys the hell out of me.
Longtime readers (all four of you) might notice some changes around here, and that’s because the gasping, wheezing hamster that once powered this site has been transplanted by a sleek new robot called WordPress. The content is all the same; some of the permalinks from the old site may not work, and some of the pictures may be wonky in size or format. I’m doing a lot of housecleaning in the backend to make things better, but one of the best new improvements is a world-class comment spam system, which means registration and login and all of that other crap is no longer needed.
The new look of this site is by no means set in stone, so expect some major tinkering around here in the future. What you see before you is a placeholder until I can get some more dedicated time devoted to a sparkly new design; the beauty of WordPress is that it’s a breeze to edit and tweak, as opposed to the 3.3 version of MovableType, which was equal parts black magic, particle physics, detective work, cursing, and blind luck.
The sidebar links archive does still exist (and shows up inline with all the other content, currently) and will be integrated into the site like it was before; I had to do some database reorganization and add it as a new category in order to work within WordPress.
The humorous part about all of this is that I actually had WordPress installed, updated, and running a current import copy of the original Idiotking site back in July of 2009, but I didn’t have the time to fool with it further.
$40, an eBay order from England, and 30 minutes of wrenching time later, I have a functioning screen on my MacBook Pro again. The inverter board, a tiny little slice of silicon hidden inside the clutch cover of my expensive laptop, which controls the backlight on my LCD, had decided to die last fall. I’ve just now been able to get a replacement ordered and installed, and life is good again.
I did a bunch of research this evening on MacBook Pro displays and found that the issue I’m having might not be with the entire LCD itself (an image on which is faintly visible) but with the inverter board, which powers the backlights. In a $40 experiment, I ordered one on eBay from a reseller in England (there was nobody here in the states with the model number I need), and when it comes in I’ll finally crack the case and see if that’s the issue.
I spent a good portion of this morning in a creaky, drafty garage, attempting to make one good laser printer out of three. You never know what you’ll find when answering a Craigslist ad, which is why I always travel with tools, flashlight, cellphone, and the minimum amount of cash possible to hold an item until I’ve taken stock of the situation. These printers were three Phaser 7700 models, big tabloid-sized laser printers bought at a GSA auction and stored for several years behind a surplus hospital gurney covered in books and old Silicon Graphics workstations. Between the three of them there were two full sets of ink cartridges, one set of fusers, and one working hard drive (the other two had been pulled as per government regulations), and after swapping parts around, finagling balky fusers into place and doing delicate transplant surgery on the motherboards, we got one to power up and make it to the “print test page” step before paper jams and my ice-cold feet brought us to a halt. I don’t think these three machines were worth purchasing, but I’m still keeping my eyes open.
Six dropped calls in the last two weeks means your network, while fast, sucks. While talking on the phone with my sister this evening, I got dropped twice. WTF? The church steeple across the street from my house is built out of cellular repeaters. Your responses to customer complaints about the quality and coverage of your network leave much to be desired; in fact, they are the reason I will be dropping your service as soon as your iPhone exclusivity contract expires with Apple. Get bent.
I only just got Snow Leopard from Santa over the holidays (thanks, Santa!), so I’m behind the curve as far as what’s new and what it does. One thing I was not aware of was that Apple was removing Appletalk support altogether, which means no more direct printing to either of our printers—something I wasn’t aware of when I upgraded my laptop last week. Thankfully, it’s an easy fix: I set up Shared Printing on our G5 server (which can’t run Snow Leopard anyway) and all was right again.