Brian's Blog

I'm no photographer by any stretch of the imagination but here's one that turned out pretty cool. Praying mantids are cool looking bugs and I have a knack for seeing them for some reason. This particular one was about 5 inches or so long and was hanging out on my back porch. My kids enjoyed looking at it and watching it turn it's head to track our movements. Of surprising interest, when I was looking up some info on Mantids I found a link with pictures of a praying mantis eating a humming bird. Makes me glad mantids don't get much bigger!

Anyway, there are a few more pictures of the praying mantis in my gallery along with a few other mostly family related updates there.

I currently have Service Electric cable modem which, for the most part, I am happy with. I miss my ADSL and would just love to sign up with Speakeasy if they only had decent service in my area. Sure, I'd be paying more for less bandwidth more than likely when compared to cable modem, but then I'd have an ISP with a clue. Actually, I'm not picking on Service Electric in any way on this one. The situation is that Service works with PenTeleData (PTD) to provide service and that service, of course, includes E-mail. Prior to changing to PTD I had Fastnet, which is now USLEC. And they did zero spam filtering, which is fine by me, as I liked having control of that aspect of my Internet usage and the ability to see just what is being blocked in the event of a false positive.

Oh, as an aside, the reason I changed from Fastnet to Service is because I had to. See, I moved and Fastnet didn't have service at the new place, actually, no DSL service was available here. Even though I moved at tops about a 5 minute drive away. Now, supposedly you can get DSL here but it is slow and expensive.

Anyway, back on topic.

After using PTD for some time I noticed a sever reduction in the amount of spam spamassassin was catching. I called and confirmed that PTD was doing filtering which for the most part is cool. However, after roughly two years I've noticed that I wasn't getting messages that I wanted. For instance, the latest being confirmation/activation messages from forums that I have intentionally signed up for. If these messages were tagged as spam in my own system it would just gotten dumped into the spam directory and I'd still get it. But PTD seems to think it's better to dump things that they think are spam into the void. Knowing how easy it is to adjust spam settings I attempted to find their on line tool to adjust my inbox filter settings only to find none, which prompted a phone call to them. They claim that they can't change the filters at all or turn them off as they apply to everyone. Additionally, they swear up and down they don't dump anything to /dev/null but only tag it as spam for the user to filter. That last part is very obviously a 100% lie because if it was true I would have gotten the tagged messages. I've heard other stories about the same kind of flexibility problems with other ISPs before so I know I'm not unique.

I mean, what the heck is it with these brain dead ISPs? Why is it acceptable for me to loose E-mail because they are over aggressive in their filtration? I'm paying them money to get all of my legitimate E-mail. Depending on the content of the E-mail it could have negative impact if a message is lost. What if I'm corresponding with a potential employer and suddenly a message sent gets dropped? Here I am oblivious to the message and the sender sits around wondering why stupid Brian isn't replying and, oh well, he mustn't want the job anyway. How unprofessional of him.

PTD seems to be OK with this, I mean, it's not screwing them so why bother keeping a customer happy?

A friend of mine, Ricardo works at a company called Pobox which provides some darn cool mail services. I signed up for the basic service for $20 a year, which is essentially a forwarding service which points to my current E-mail address. I found a message sent to my Pobox account and then forwarded to me would get through, while the same message would get dropped when sent directly to my ptd.net address. I'm guessing PTD is dropping a broad range of IP addresses and the forums I've been trying to participate in happen to be caught in the crossfire. It happens, but I should be able to whilelist things that I want. So far Pobox has taken care of my problem and the nice thing is if I change ISPs I can just keep my pobox address and change the forward. No need to inform everyone of the address change. Once I'm on more financially solid ground I may upgrade to the Mailstore service so I can have a separate POP/IMAP/webmail account from my ISP and bypass all the idiotic ISP stupidity completely.

I just wish ISP's would wake up and become a bit more geek friendly. They can fool the average user who doesn't know any better with their bullshit but must start to realize that geeks will call them out on it. And it's not good to piss of the geeks as they are the ones that usually recommend service providers to non-geeks.

With the recent change to my E-mail address I thought it might be a good time to generate a new GPG key and distribute it. I've already sent it up to a key server but it can also be found here and is also linked in the "Links" section on the right as it has always been.

Please update if you are using my old key. Also, anyone who knows me and would like to contact me to verify fingerprints you know how to get in touch with me. I just wish more people would use encryption. It's sad that only two people that I know do.

Success number two for the day. I finally got off my lazy ass and got E-mail notification working so I again know when people leave a comment to a post here. Not that I ever got all that many, and most of the ones I do get are from people I know already, but still. It's nice to know when a comment is made and not find out by chance weeks later when I happen to look.

It's been a while since I've posted anything. I've been fairly busy. The last week and a half were spent vacationing. Part of the time with my wife and children and the other part with some old friends of mine at our annual fishing trip to the cabin. I updated the picture gallery with the photos taken during the family vacation but I haven't put any picture from the fishing trip up yet if you want to check out what we did.

One of the pictures is shown here in this post. It's a guy riding a motorcycle with the helmet on the back of his seat. Lots of good it does there! I'm rather glad PA dropped that silly law forcing people to wear helmets. Now we can let all the stupid people have just one more avenue to remove themselves from the gene pool.

Like the title says, this is Darwin at work.

Today we went and picked up my wife's new car. Well, it's not 100% new, but it's new to us. It's a Ford Focus ES. Check out the pic.

Also, for those who care, I've finally added some pics to the gallery. I was just a little bit behind.

And, for anyone who may have noticed, my server here was down for a few hours. Not that I get enough traffic for anyone to actually notice but still I thought I'd mention it. I was doing some long overdue backups and general TLC on the web server.

OK, so this morning I'm driving my wife to work and kids to school/daycare. I'm heading down Broad Street towards the Brew Works and I see a green light in front of me. Sunlight was glaring really bad off of a car and all I could see was the green light and that the path in front of me was empty. The entire lane of on coming traffic was in glare and I couldn't make it out which shouldn't matter since I wasn't planning on driving on the wrong side of the road. As I get closer and the glare clears there is this crossing guard on the side of on coming traffic who obviously wanted me to stop. So I did. I didn't lock up the tires or even stop all that hard. In fact, it was only slight harder of a stop than normal. As in, if I had something sitting on my seat it would not have slid off and no tension was on my seat belt that I would expect from a hard stop. Still, trying to be a nice guy, I rolled down the window to apologize and explain that I really didn't see him. Instead I got to listen to this elderly man yell at me and basically give me a high and mighty attitude. All the while I'm trying to explain and apologize. If he had just shut up for 2 seconds he might have actually heard what I was trying to say.

Apparently you have to poses precognitive powers and just intuitively know that, even though you have nothing in your path of travel and a green light that you should stop.

It's not like I went out of the house saying, "I think I'm going to run over some kids today!" Sheesh...

I'd feel utterly horrible if I hurt someone, especially a child. Even if it was a complete accident.

We finally got the word from Erie that the accident was ruled as at fault for the other driver. But that was after I called the adjuster's manager and bitched about how the claim was being handled. Initially the adjuster told us that if the other driver didn't make a statement that they would send her a denial letter and cancel her insurance, but since we didn't have physical damage coverage on the car that we wouldn't get compensated. We asked them about the police report and were told that wasn't good enough to determine fault. To me it sounded like they were trying to get rid of a bad client and not have to pay us, even though we were fully cooperating with the investigation. Funny though, after that call to the manager they had the police report the next morning and it was suddenly good enough to make a decision by. They jerked us around for about two weeks and increased the stress in an already stressful situation. For that, they have lost our business. Even though it ultimately worked out well we shouldn't have had to jump through all these hoops to get the protection that we were paying for.

Why do companies look in so much of the short term? If they got away with what they were initially trying to pull they would have had a double win for them. Getting rid of the bad client and not having to pay out for the other. But to what end? Pissing off a good client for the sake of short term gain doesn't seem like the bright thing to do. I'd want to keep the good client because in the long run the sum of the premiums they pay should be greater than the expense of the few claims they make.

So, now it's feedback time. What insurance companies do you use and what do you like and/or dislike about them? What kind of experiences have you had when making a claim?

Inquiring minds want to know.

It's been a while since I actually posted anything. It has been busy over the past couple of weeks. And the need for a new car for the wife has increased the urgency for upgrading the MCSE. So I've been spending time reading and playing about with that instead of learning Linux and FOSS related things. Still, M$ pays the bills for now. At least I'll be ready when the times comes that I need to work with FOSS.

But, I digress some here. I just thought I'd mention that my wife's car has been ruled a total loss. It's not worth fixing it since the value of the car is about half of what it would cost to fix the thing. Actually, it's worth less than half. So, now we get to shop for a car about 3 years earlier than we planned. Understandably Cindy isn't happy because we can't go shopping and get what she wants and instead have to get what we can afford. I understand how she feels, before my Impala every single car I ever owned was because I needed a car now. I was hoping to give her the chance to shop around and have fun. But, live throws ya curve balls sometimes and you just have to deal.

Oh, and here we are. It's a little over 1.5 weeks since the accident and the girl who blew the stop and hit Cindy still hasn't filed here version of what happened. Thus holding up the fault ruling and delaying our recovery. To be fair, supposedly she had just gotten her wisdom teeth removed a day or two after the accident and couldn't' talk but still. That doesn't mean she can't type, or write.

So, that's the way of things.

Today turned out to be a bad day. I got a call today while paying bills that my wife was in a car accident. She and the kids are fine. No one was hurt. But, the car is in a bad way. Being it's age and the damage I'd be very surprised if it's not ruled a total loss, leaving us with one car to get both my wife and I to work and the kids to and from daycare. This should get interesting since Cindy just took on a job that has longer hours and, of course, I just changed to a job with longer hour expectations.

Here's the part where I put on the sob story, but I just have to vent a bit. In addition to this we need about $2500 to $3000 of brick pointing work done on our house and Cindy's crappy insurance hardly covers anything as far as dental work goes. I'm looking at another $800 for dental work. Now we need a car. Great... Time to accelerate that MCSE upgrade even more I guess! :/

So, the specifics as far as I can tell are that Cindy was driving straight on Linden in Bethlehem heading home from shopping. And the other driver blew through a stop sign and hit here in the driver side door. From what Cindy says the other driver was very young. I only saw a glimpse of her as she was leaving when I got there. Both her and her passenger were, I'd guess, not much more than 18. Plus, supposedly, this is her 3rd accident. Her claim was that she slid through the stop sign on the wet road and tried to accelerate to get though the intersection so as to not block traffic on the busy road. And it is very busy at that spot.

I took my digital camera and snapped some pictures just in case the insurance gets difficult. I blew them up on my screen and looked for any skid marks other than my wife's as she was pushed off the side of the road and almost into a power pole and found none. It sure look to me, like I said before, that she just blew through.

I'm paranoid now too about the insurance company. The last time we had any kind of accident the cop wrote up an ambiguous report and the other operator lied. So, Erie did nothing. I won't go into the specifics on that was, but it boiled down to the fact that you can, under the correct conditions, just lie your way out of being at fault. I'm hoping that the officer wrote up a decent report, I'll check when I can get the report at the station. Still, I'd been paying Erie to protect my family for years without a claim and they didn't deliver. I payed them for a service I didn't get. At least this time we have witnesses and pictures. We'll see. This one should be more clean cut just by the nature of it.

I may or may not toss the pics up in a gallery, it's not exactly something that one usually sticks in the family album. But the pic up there gives an idea of the damage. It looks worse in person though. The alignment is way off and you can see caps between the fenders and the hood. I'm no car expert but I won't be surprised if there is a lot of hidden internal damage. It was barely drivable to get home after I put the spare on.

This sucks, no matter how hard you try it's impossible to get a head it seems. Still, I'm so glad Cindy and the kids are OK. It's amazing the things you take for granted until something happens that has the potential to take them way.

Enough of my venting for the moment. Time to go do something that doesn't make me angry.

Tonight I spent a little time with my oldest daughter. We found a recipe for making home made play dough which I thought was cool. I knew it couldn't be hard to make but never knew just how to make the stuff. Here's the recipe we used:

1 cup flour
1 cup water
1/4 cup salt
2 teaspoons Cream of Tartar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Food Coloring (leave this out to make white)

Just put all this into a pot and cook it over medium heat while constantly stirring it until it gets thick. Then plop the glob of dough on some wax paper, let it cool some, and kneed it until it's smooth. It's amazingly like the stuff from the store. It even smells like it a little. Supposedly it doesn't need to be refrigerated or anything. Just store it in a sealed container or Ziploc bag.

Pretty fun for the 4 to 6 year old crowd.

I got my iAudio back today from being sent back for repair. So, here we are nearly a month after I bought it and I'm actually getting to use the thing! I've been listening while studying for my MCSE Upgrade for work. (Yeah, I know. Don't say it.) This time I used the cable that came with it and filled nearly all of its 20GB up with tunes. I haven't fully read the manual but the controls are pretty easy and fairly intuitive. And even with the default ear buds it sound great. There is one very odd thing about the ear buds though. The right side lead is maybe about 10 inches longer than the right. A rather odd way to differentiate between left and right and it makes the wire a little short for wearing the player on the right hip unless you swap the ear buds.

Just as before the M5 was recognized as a USB Mass Storage device by Linux and was easily mounted. I went a little further and created a udev rule to give it a constant symlink of /dev/iaudio and modified my fstab to let me running as a regular user mount it without having to su to root. Just for kicks I rebooted into Windows and it also showed up as a new drive letter.

This thing, as far as I can tell, is 100% platform independent on the hardware side. Obviously being a USB Mass Storage device is a big plus, but you can even flash the firmware without any special programs. I just grabbed the latest firmware off of iAudio's site, unzipped it, and dropped the .bin file in the players firmware directory. Once that's done I turned it off, plugged in the charger, and turned it back on. Instead of the normal boot up screen I got an "Upgrading Firmware..." message and a progress bar. In about 1 minute it was done. Of course, the software that the player comes with runs only in Windows based on the documentation it really doesn't do much of anything that can't be done with other programs in Linux. The only feature of the software that seems unique is it's ability to grab lyrics and associate them with the song such that the lyrics scroll on the players screen in sync with the song. That's cool but not something I'd really get into except for a small handful of bands that I'm a fanatical fan of. Though I could see it as a nice thing if you could find a transcript to a speech or lecture you wanted to listen to and read at the same time. But how often does that need arise really?

Related to the player I also put on the zCover I bought. It's a molded silicon case with a hard plastic clear scratch guard for the display and a belt clip. All the holes for the various bits are molted exactly, and I mean exactly, where they need to be. There is even a hole for the built in mic for voice recording and a flap to cover the subpack/cradle port on the bottom. I don't think you could cradle the device with the cover on but I'm not sure since I don't have a cradle to try it in. The only two minor annoyances with the cover are the hole for the sliding power switch is a little deep making it a little harder to get at and the silicon seems to attract dust and hair a little. The switch even so isn't terrible to get at and I think will became easy and second nature after enough use. And the dust thing is kind of to be expected a little since the cover is made of silicone. It could also be the fact that I got the original black cover instead of the newer grayish one which would probably hide the dust much better.

I love the fact that it works in Linux and it even plays my OGG files too! No need to re-encode everything. Just for the record it supports MP3, WMA, OGG, ASF, WAV, and FLAC formats. The USB interface is 2.0 so transfers were fast. The battery is Lithium-Ion so it should last a good long time and have minimal memory effect. In addition to Windows and Linux support it claims to also support OS X. Both Linux and OS X are listed as data transfer only support. And the box claims up to 14 hours of continuous play on a full charge. I don't' know about that but I'm sure I'll find out over the next couple of days.

Time will tell if any annoyances creep up on me as I use this but so far I think it's an awesome player!

Well, it looks like I don't need to hug a porcupine after all. My dead player arrived and is in process. I should have it back in a week or two. Then I'll hopefully get to play around with it for more than 30 minutes before I kill it again.

I need to look into getting a FM Transmitter for the car. It seems, based on Amazon reviews, that not all transmitters are the same. What's a good one to get? I'll have to research it I guess. Or wait for someone to make a suggestion.

HINT, HINT.

I finally got my much anticipated iAudio M5 20GB player a couple of days ago and excitedly unpacked it to play. Following the instruction manual I charged it and listened to the sample track. It sounded damn good! To bad that was the only song I got to listen to before it died.

Here's the story. I connected the player up to my PC and it detected as a USB mass storage device perfectly and showed up as /dev/sdb1. So I mounted the device, browsed the directory structure, and found a Music directory. I selected about 17GB of my music and started dumping it over. At around 14GB the copy process hung and I was forced to disconnect the drive without properly unmounting it. After several resets of the player and power cycling it a few times I was finally able to see the device and mount it again, except this time some of the directories were gone and others were garbled up. I figured it was a corrupt file system so I disconnected with the idea that I'd plug it into a my windows system, chkdsk it, and maybe reformat it. Well, it wouldn't recognize as a drive letter, and it wouldn't show up as a device again in Linux either. Now, when I turn it on it simply shows a "HDD Error" and shuts off.

I'm not 100% sure what happened. I didn't use the USB cable that came with it and I'm suspecting that the cable may not have been shielded properly causing severe file system corruption. You would think all USB cables would be the same though. Either that or I just had bad luck and got the 1 in 10000 or so bad units that slip past QC.

Either way, it's on its way back to iAudio for warranty repair or replacement. Their tech support was fast and efficient and I had an RMA number in short order. Support is only available 9AM to 5PM Pacific time though which is annoying. Being on the East Coast that means I have to wait until 12-noon to get support! Also, support is only available via online chat which worried me at first. But it worked out well enough.

Unfortunately they don't do advanced replacement so now I have to wait for them to get the player, fix it, and send it back. So, I'm thinking I'll be waiting until almost the end of April before I get it back.

Man! What a tease!

After 2 or so years at Inova Technologies I'm moving on. My old employer, IQE has called me back to work in the IT department there, essentially getting my old job back. It wasn't a very easy decision to make to go back. I was laid off after working there for nearly 8 years, and as they say, once bitten twice shy. But time will tell how things work out. Working for Inova has been a pleasure for the most part, and I don't think any one else can beat their flexibility when it comes to family matters. That's part of the reason the decision was so hard to make.

The work itself should certainly be more interesting, being a significantly larger network than I'd ever see at Inova. Not that the work at Inova wasn't interesting. It was just on a smaller scale. I'm glad I got to work for a while in a Systems Integrator/Consulting environment. It was educational, but I hope ultimately I'll be better off both financially, and professional development wise at a larger company.

So, my first day on the New/Old job is April 12th. Wish me luck. I'm looking forward to seeing some old acquaintances and to sharpen up my skills.