Archive for November, 2007

Through some act of God or maybe just a certain person I know in the North Central division, the Internet has returned here. I used to have two Internet connections, one for the server, one for personal use. But now it’s just one, so if things go down, there’s a total feeling of disconnection. Oddly, despite things being down for 2 weeks I’ve not been too bothered, though I think that’s partly because I’ve barely been on anyway.

Anywho, the problems started (again) on the 8th, when the web just died, the crappy SMC business gateway reported the upstream ranging was in progress and just sat there. Comcast sent a guy out the next morning but things were back up when he got here. Then a week later it goes down again the same exact problem. I call once more and the Comcast person says they’re having problems with the headend, I think maybe she meant CMTS, but who knows, she says to give it 24-48 hours. Things come back up shortly a couple days later and go down again, this time the upstream ranging is fine but I can’t ping the Comcast DNS servers I’ve been given. So I call once more, now they’re saying they’re having DNS issues. The weird thing though is that apparently incoming traffic is still working fine, but I can’t ping jack on the outbound. I can’t even get into the internal customer admin pages on the modem either, even when I plug directly into the server.

At this point they’ve already said they’re going to give me a week free, now she’s saying a month since it’s been down for over a week. I keep asking if they should just send someone out to replace the modem but this guy is saying to just give it time for the DNS stuff to be sorted. “Fine whatever, I give up, I don’t care, just sort this out and give me the credit”, that’s about all I say. I’ve already been on the phone with them for at least 2 hours to get this stuff sorted and it’s been too long for it to be down. Topping it off the service didn’t work well at all from day one, I had the modem replaced twice, and the current one is only working well because I got some “special” firmware running on it. Before the firmware the modem had to be logged onto and the firewall reset once a week.

Finally, Julie calls Comcast today hoping that the feminine touch will do the trick. After a bit she hands the phone to me and this guy isn’t any more helpful. The entire problem I’ve been having is that I can’t log onto the modem as a cusadmin to see anything, I can’t tell what he’s doing remotely or anything. But he’s telling me the settings are fine except the subnet mask, it should be .252 not .0, uh, err, wrong. I keep asking about the DNS but he says it’s fine, and there’s no issues. The issues with the DNS and the other crap were apparently resolved already so there’s no reason why our Internet shouldn’t be working. I still can’t ping jack from the router, and I plug the server directly into the modem. Whatever he did though made it so the cable and traffic lights wouldn’t even come on after power cycling the gateway and such. He ends up just giving up and sending someone out tomorrow morning.

Fed up, I give in, call the real help. After about 20 minutes of digging, we finally get the modem back online, she gets in remotely and we get it going again so I can log on as cusadmin. Turns out that Comcast had turned on DHCP even though we’re static, had the subnet wrong, and had disabled the manual DNS entries. She also switched the port to half duplex since apparently the SMC has issues with auto detection. After all that I can finally log into the modem, can see everything. She mentions something about some work being done switching the rules in the RIP to force business customers to use the business DNS not the residential, so we switch to those DNS servers and everything magically works again, switch back to the residential just as a check and stuff stops again.

This is a huge rant for no purpose, but I just don’t get why someone in a completely different division without complete access to my modem can sort stuff out in 20 minutes but it takes the Northwest Comcast people 2 weeks, and 3 service calls and they still couldn’t do it. I guess their solution to everything is not bother on the phone and just replace the modem regularly.

Now I just have to call up and cancel the service call and make sure they give us that month free that they promised. Hopefully it doesn’t go down again after I call.

Okay, so Comcast has been giving me the runaround with getting my business Internet connection back up and running correctly but one of the upsides of running your own server with DHCP, DNS, Active Directory and all the other overly complicated things is that I can still access all of my own content since it’s local and can write this right now.

I’ve decided to take this time “off the net” to go through and organize the terabyte or so of data I’ve got sitting around including the 500GB+ worth of music. Now there’s this one folder though, that’s only like 60GB but is completely filled with various file formats and bit rates of individual tracks that I eventually wanted to complete and sort.

What an eclectic set of music. It’s got everything, even stuff that I would dare say shouldn’t even be called music. But I love it. I love it all. Even the cheese, since even after only sampling a 30 second clip of the music it brings a smile to my face.

For example I’m listening to We All Die Young from the Rock Star soundtrack, just seconds before I was listening to a Phish cover of the Cheers theme. This random assortment of tracks is totally bringing back to my days of spending all day and night on the Internet and on Messenger just fiddling, talking, and listening to music, and laughing my ass off.

That brings me to listening to the I AM advert song, Kazachok, Protest the Right Way, and all the other gold from back in the day. Sure this stuff is close to trash, but at the right moments it’s also a treasure.

So not really sure where I’m heading with this other than to say I miss the days of having music playing all the time, even while I slept. Music really does get every bit of me, the best and the worst. Right now it’s just putting a huge smile on my face though.

I think this is pretty cool considering the number of times I’ve accidentally clicked an AdSense ad during fast web browsing. Smaller clickable ad area is a good thing.

Through years of computer usage I’ve formed this habit of clicking in advance of object appearance on the screen. Back in the days of my 100Mhz Pentium with 8MB RAM, the system would take so long to do things that it got to the point where I was clicking on the Start menu, going to Shutdown, then clicking Reboot even before the Start Menu had time to come up. These days I find myself still doing the same thing but now in IE, when loading web pages and sometimes, I end up clicking a stupid Ad. Come to think of it though, with the speed of the PC and the efficiency of the OS and the apps, I don’t seem to notice myself having to click ahead anymore.

Maybe it’s a sign that computers for me have breached that point of price and performance where no matter what I buy above $500 will do me just fine. Well, okay, as long as it has two cores… What does any of this have to do with Google decreasing the size of the AdSense area? Absolutely nothing, but it’s the back story to why I appreciate it regardless of what Google’s intentions are.

This is something I’d not normally post here but I feel compelled to do so to hopefully gain some outside perspective. Basically, I feel like I’m going through a quarter life crisis, but a year or so early. Ever since I got into geekdom my first PC in December ‘95 and later got into beta testing Windows just a bit after that, I’ve been pretty set on what I wanted. I didn’t go to high school and instead got my GED at 16, I went to college for a year in England, then for a bit in San Jose, but then I got what I was working for all that time and got a job at Microsoft (and yeah this is the first time I’ve literally said I work there on this site).

For the last year or so I’ve pretty much led the life I thought I always wanted, I had a girlfriend that was fantastic, I’ve got a great car, a nice apartment, pretty much all the toys I could possibly ever want as well. It’s seriously gotten to the point where all I want for myself now is to relax, go on nice long vacations travelling to all the places I’ve dreamed of with the girl I’m in love with.

Granted because I’ve gone just a bit beyond my means and I spent too much money on college and living in England I’ve got a nice lump of debt that I have hanging over me. I kinda feel like this is all just a fact of life and such so I’m in this position where I’m looking for houses so that I could consolidate my debt into a mortgage and have one payment for that, get some room mates to reduce expenses, etc etc.

At the same time, there’s this inner voice inside me that tells me I should be doing something different, it’s that voice that’s also behind my rebellious nature towards authority. Recent events and stress in my life has seriously got me thinking about things like this. Not to mention, I’ve talked to Julie quite a bit through our relationship about the shackles of adulthood. I’ve also talked quite about all this with my Gramps as well. I partially blame him anyway for seeding the desire to travel the world and do something unique and different.

I’ve really been into photography for some time. Coupled with the desire to travel and have my contribution to the humans on the planet be something more than just ensuring that Media Center is a little less buggy. I’ve given serious thought into doing humanitarian work, doing photo journalism, or who knows what along those lines.

I guess that is where I’m lost at the moment. I love working at Microsoft, even as a contractor, some days it sucks some days it’s great, but the people I know there are awesome… and it is work after all. I’ve justified my entire crisis of adultdom on the fact that the grass is always greener and these are the facts of life and no matter what I’m working on there’s going to be stress. Because of my trouble with authority, I’m not too sure I’m cut out for a long standing corporate job.

My Dad worked out Southern California Edision for something like 15 years, he’s definitely going through a mid-life right now. I don’t really want to be working at Microsoft for 15 years and then start going through the same thing. I typically just go with the flow and relax and whatever comes will come, but I also am the type to get my mind made up and work non stop till I get there.

Meanwhile I can’t really figure out what I’d do as an alternative. I’m not even too sure what professions are out there that would help fulfill my wild eyed dreams of travel and making even a small difference in the world. You know, trying not to have too many regrets looking back on life another 24 years from now.

My Gramps has suggested that maybe I just sell the car, sell pretty much everything, and travel for a year or two, or even three. Doesn’t sound like that bad of an idea really but impractical, irresponsible, and not very adult like. Then again this this coming from my 83 year old grandfather. Maybe he knows something that I don’t with all those years. Plus there’s no reason why I can’t pick up where I left off after I get that travel bug out of my head. Of course maybe I’ll really fall in love with that and find something amazing during that time.

Not really sure what the true point of this post is, I guess it’s just a good brain dump.

I heart Boing Boing sometimes. It’s my fav of the big 3 RSS feeds out there, sometimes I love it even more than Engadget, but whatever. They linked to this page showing how little nutrition is in most of the big fast food places burgers and fries. I’m still in shock over this:

“The Double Six Dollar Burger from Carl’s Jr. contains an insane 1520 calories. That’s not a typo. One sandwich contains more calories than some smaller females need… PER DAY.”

I do miss In-N-Out though, there was always something nice about the way the bun was just a bit crispy around the edge from the grill. On the plus side I’ve gotten pretty good at a home made burger in the last couple of weeks and the grill I was given is pretty sweet too. Now if only I didn’t live so far away from everyone I know, I’d have people over to join in .