Brian's Blog

As part of my wife's birthday she got two tickets to The Lord of the Dance playing at the State Theatre in Easton. I'd never been to the State Theatre before, though I'd been to similar ones before such as Allentown's Symphony Hall. Both are nice. I particularly like the intricate carvings and paintings of old style theaters.

Anyway, the show was excellent as one would expect performers of this level to be. My wife especially enjoys Irish music and dance. The show was a good mix of fast and slow dance with instrumental and singing. All enhanced with a nice supportive light show.

There's just something specially about live performances.

In a moment of weakness I've finally given in and ordered an mp3 player. At the recommendation of fellow Linux users I looked into the iAudio M5 20GB player and found very high reviews of it. I had very specific requirements I've been waiting for before I bought a player and this meets, at least on paper, nearly all of them as far as I can tell. Once I get it I'll probably post more about it. Now I just need to wait until it gets here. Why did it have to ship out of California instead of New Jersey? When I order from Newegg and it comes out of NJ it nearly always arrives the next day regardless of the shipping method I choose. Now I have to wait the full 3 business days! Oh the horror...

So, to kill time I decided to check out accessories that could be used with this. I intend to use it to listen to tunes and select podcasts in my car. So I decided to look for a nice FM Transmitter. I also tried to look around for a nice case to protect it and let me clip it to my belt if I chose. Maybe nice portable speakers would be nice too but not a high priority. So, I started Googling around and even stopped at a local store or two. You know what? Judging from the products on the shelf you'd think that iPods are the only darn players in existence! Everything is "name of accessory for iPod". Even if it can be used with different players it's always a side note that you have to read the fine print on the back of the box to find out. iPods are good players from what I hear with a nice full feature set, but it's not the end all be all of players. There are plenty of other players that are of high quality out there. Why are they ignored?

Either way, I did find out some universal accessories. The big concern for me is the case, and the one that Newegg has in their inventory was ugly as sin, didn't protect the screen in anyway, and had no clip. You'd have to take your belt off and feed it through the loop on the back. But, I found zCover has cases for the iAudio. They look pretty sweet.

Well, Service Electric came to my house today and took a good look at my cable connection. The thing is, they really didn't tell me much of anything that I didn't already know. I already knew that the signal was strong, and that the signal to noise ratio was good. But the sent out their techs to check the signal at my modem as well as at the pole. Never mind that, logically, if the signal at the modem is in excellent shape that something upstream by about 100ft has nearly a zero percent chance of being any different. Well, it could be better I guess, but I highly doubt the signal would suddenly jump up in quality on it's way from the pole to my house.

That left me with two other options. One, that their network is bogged down and the need to upgrade and, two, that someone or more than one someones are hogging the bandwidth. As it turns out, from the techs comments, it seems that the area I've chosen to live in has seen a sudden spike in cable modem customers. On top of that they also said that they have been collecting readings every place they have a speed problem and nearly all of them in the area have been the result of the cable growth in the area.

So, at the very least, I know things on my end are working. Now, I either need to find a different service in my area, or wait for them to upgrade their equipment. From what Service Electric has told me the blanket answer is, "We are working on it." As far as alternative service goes Speakeasy is out, I just called them and all I can get is an expensive T1. Leaving me with RCN which, still, only has one-way cable. Supposedly they are doing some serious upgrading with a goal to have 80% of the Lehigh Valley covered for two-way service by the end of spring, but we shall see on that.

Hopefully, Service Electric will just upgrade their stuff.

Well, I just got a big surprise. It seems that the partition of my system root has taken a complete dive and won't mount. As usual this happened without warning. In fact, I was using my system normally, booted into Windows to game a bit, then when getting back into Linux I got a nasty screen full of errors and was told that I had to run fsck.reiserfs --rebuild-tree on the partition due to fatal errors.

Luckily I keep backups. And even more luckily I could still get into the partition and copy off recent changes in single user mode. So, here we go, lets cross our fingers and see what the rebuild-tree options does.

Man this sucks. Wish me luck!

I've replaced the modem with a nice new SURFboard, and the speed is still as slow as ever. Not much to talk about here other than this is very annoying. I used to be able to download a single CD full ISO of Knoppix in about 30 minutes, now it's taking hours. The upside is that they are going to come out and check the wiring and see what the hang up is, the downside is that they are going to do it "sometime Wednesday morning" so I have to take a half a day off from work. When I used to get paid salary this wasn't such a bad thing, but when you get paid hourly and are on a tight budget it's annoying.

So, I'm having a hard time believing though that it is wiring. We (tech support) went the web interface of the modem and the signal strength was about as good as it gets, and the signal to noise ratio was supposedly excellent. Other than wiring the only thing I can think of it someone is hogging the bandwidth on my cable segment. Hopefully it's just wiring.

As far as buying a cable modem goes, I finally got the answer on why they don't give you a discount for owning one. The service comes with "free cable modem rental". I'm sure I'm paying for it in the cost of the service anyway though.

I did learn though that, supposedly, I could get 768k/128k ADSL from Speakeasy which is an improvement. I'd much rather have 1.5M/384k if I had a choice. Maybe I'll call them up and see since they are more friendly to us tech types than the average ISP. I shouldn't be to hasty though and give Service Electric a chance to work through the problem. All in all the service has been satisfactory.

I just discovered this evening that my supposedly 7Mbit cable modem, which historically never made it about 2.5 Mbit, has suddenly decided to go no faster than about 500k. Of course, they want you to take a day off from work and sit around, not making any money, so they can come around "some time Thursday". So, either tomorrow I'm off to their office to see swap modems and then hope it "just works" when I get it home. That is, if I can get away from work to do it. They have Saturday hours, but I don't want to wait that long.

So, I looked into just buying a cable modem instead of renting it from Service Electric. The price of a new SURFboard modem at Bestbuy is $80 So I called up the tech support line only to learn that you pay the rental fee regardless of if you own your modem or not. Owning your own does not reduce the price you pay at all. Talk about complete bull.

I wish so much I could get Speakeasy here.

I saw this over at Linc's Blog and had to give it a try. I'm pretty geeky according to this, but not as geeky as you Linc!

I've been itching to give The Lord of the Rings yet another read. After watching the movies so many times I'm loosing touch with the original work and can't remember what happened in the book vs. what happened in the movies which are both different. So, I'm just starting chapter 4 of Fellowship (A Shortcut to Mushrooms) and am surprised just how much I had forgotten from the original work. For instance, I totally forgot that Frodo actually sells Bag End and moves to Buckland.

On another note I've already recognized many lines in the dialog as being taken and directly put into the movie somewhere. Maybe not in the exact same place, or even within the same context, but still in there. I even noticed the lines of the song that Pippin sings for Denethor in Gondor as Faramir rides to try and take back Osgiliath are part of a song sung by Frodo while he's on his way to Buckland. I don't know, I just think it's nice that they took thing directly from the books and put them together in creative ways to fit their adaptation.

Also, this is the first time I'm reading it after reading the Silmarillion, so I'm curious how much background I'll see mentioned in passing in relation to historical events.

Eventually I want to read the Silmarillion again. It was good the first time, if difficult to read. I'm sure I'll pick up much more on subsequent readings.

This weekend should prove to be enjoyable. I'll be playing my regular D&D game with Ricardo, Steve, and Dann this weekend, then after that game I get to hang out with my friend Chris where we talk about various political and technical subjects and even sometimes play a game of some sort.

Cindy informed me that one of her coworkers and her husband are also into D&D, Lord of the Rings, Computers, etc etc. Essentially everything I'm into so they arranged for us to gather on Sunday to start a game of sorts with them since they've been looking for people to play with.

I'm going to be all gamed out and will have to go back to work on Monday to recover! What a tragedy...

Last night my wife and I celebrated our 8th year of marriage. We shipped the kids off the the in-laws over night and enjoyed a quite night at home with a nice fire in the fireplace and a movie. I made some lasagna and garlic bread that turned out really good (the wife's recipe) and some garlic bread (frozen from the supermarket). It was nice to just have some time to talk with out kids screaming for something.

So, before all of this we went and spent some of our gift money from Christmas at the mall. For my part, I was looking for The Lord of the Rings Trivial Pursuit DVD Edition. I found it at a place called The Game Store for $60 and thought that was kind of expensive. I shopped around a while and found it at KB Toys marked for $15. Once at the register it rang up for $10.60! Sweet! Talk about a huge price difference!

So, after our movie Cindy and I played a game and it was confirmed that I'm more of a geek than I thought. Or, at least that's what she says. The questions are mostly based on the movies but there were a few that are based on the Lord of the Rings books and a little bit I saw from the Silmarillion. The game pieces are cool too, they are little miniatures of movie characters. I don't know if all boxes are the same but mine came with Frodo, Aragorn, Galadriel, and Gandalf. Pretty nice game, and probably the only Trivial Pursuit I can actually have a chance at winning at.

Anyway, was a fun, relaxing night. I love my kids but sometimes it's nice to get away for a few hours of peace and quiet.