Brian's Blog

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For years I've been referring to Thanksgiving as "Happy Kill and Indian Day" but today I stumbled on someone who's much more over the top than I am. Here is what he said (sorry, don't remember the name):

Happy White Man's Manifest Destiny Used To Attempt Justifying Religious Persecution And False Divine Mandates, In The Process Of Raping, Enslaving and Murdering The Indigenous People of North America Along With Other Sordid Acts And Turkey Devouring Day to everyone!

The sad thing is there is a significant measure of truth in his statement. This is one of those things from American history that I am not proud of in the slightest. The sad thing is we actually celebrate it!

Now, I know Thanksgiving is about giving thanks to God for our harvest, but we need to all remember that if the American Indians didn't help the first settlers they would have stood a good chance of dieing of starvation in their first winter. And our way of thanking the American Indians for their selfless act of generosity was to kill them, destroy much of their culture, and take their land.

Anyway, after that fun dose of reality I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

It seems my wife is putting in a subtle bid for becoming a say home mom. Normally the end of the day is ultra-crazy with us both getting home around 6pm and still having to do things like make dinner, spend time with kids, etc etc. By the time all that is done and they are all in bed it's close to 8:30 to 9pm and my wife and I are both tired. Only after this do I get a chance to sit and read and try to cram this MCSE stuff into my head.

Today I walked up to the door, my oldest daughter opened the door for me, both kids and the wife had a hug and kiss for me, a fire was already burning in the fireplace, and dinner was moments away from being done. On top of that both kids have been well behaved for a change (so far).

One day Cindy will be able to stay home I hope and make every day similar to this. The nice thing is Cindy actually wants to stay home and be a house wife. Sometimes it's nice having a wife with old fashioned ideals.

Well, the PFX concert was last night and I have to say I am totally impressed. These guys had it down nearly 100%. I think their keyboardist was having a bit of an off day with his solo in the beginning but after that it was very tight. They started out pretty darn good and got better as they played through the evening. I mean significantly better. Such that by the end the only reason I knew it wasn't the real Pink Floyd was because the guys on stage looked nothing like actual members of Floyd. Of course, the light show was great too. They played a perfect Arnold Layne and dedicated it to Sid who recently passed way which was a nice touch. I'd recommend any Floyd fan to go see PFX and would be happy to see them again next time they come to town.

RCN game by this weekend and hooked up the new cable modem. To save us all a bunch of grief I simply had them set up the modem on my work laptop to test because it's Windows and decided to do the rest of the stuff myself. No offense to the RCN guys, but from the little I talked to them it was clear they didn't know much about that "Linux thing". I can't blame them though as I'm sure they run into if very rarely.

With my laptop connected directly to the cable modem I was blown away to see I was getting actually above the 10Mbits that I has signed up for! I don't know how long that will last, but maybe they won't notice. Or read my blog. So then I connected the new service up to my IPcop box and ran another speed test getting only about 2.5 MBits. WTF! After much poking around I noticed I had my traffic shaping set with a max speed of 3Mbits causing it to throttle back. I figured I'd turn it off and all would be golden but with traffic shaping off I only got 8Mbit. Much better, but not what I was expecting. I went crazy and mostly gave up on it but then I realized today that my WAN side had a 10BaseT NIC in it! Well, DUH. THAT'S what my problem was! Some switching of NICs and a bit of configuration later I was running full speed.

So, I guess the speed problem I had with SECTV wasn't actually their fault but rather mine. I wonder what speed I'd get back on the old service with the traffic shaping off? Still, I'm not going back. They had to many other things that pissed me off. So far RCN has been sufficient. Their tech support isn't Speakeasy but they aren't as brain dead as SECTV. I had to buy a static IP to make sure all inbound ports weren't blocked and RCN assures me they don't filter any spam unless you ask them to leaving it up to me.

Keep the power of control in the users hands...Just the way I like it.