Archive for October, 2007
earthquake!
Oct 30th
I just felt the ground shake for about 30 seconds as I was getting ready to go to the gym. It’s the first quake I’ve felt since moving into this house a little over 3 years ago. Time to take down some loose stuff from shelves and the wall!
http://quake.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/nc40204628.html
Off to the gym. Hopefully another one doesn’t happen while I’m there!
my MBP’s wireless is teh suck, part 2
Oct 29th
In an earlier post I was having problems with my MBP losing its wifi connection without apparent reason. On a whim I decided to downgrade from WPA2 to WPA encryption, and what do you know, the connection never dropped, even after leaving my MBP on all night long. Considering that I was using WEP+MAC filtering just a few weeks back before switching to the new router & WPA2, I’m still more secure now with WPA+MAC filtering. Not that there is anything really interesting to sniff on my network anyways. I’m hoping that when I upgrade the MBP to OS X 10.5 (Leopard), I can go back to WPA2.
Now I just need to get the Xbox 360 back on my network so that I can waste endless hours that I don’t have playing Halo 3. The Xbox was hard-wired to my Airport Express which was acting as a WDS repeater, but now that I’ve moved to WPA, I don’t think WDS works anymore. I’ve been wanted to wire up my house for Gig-E for a while so maybe this will be the tipping point!
Idiots on the freeway
Oct 28th
I was driving up to San Francisco this afternoon and 3 cars tore by me: a red Trans-am, grey Acura TL, and grey Nissan Maxima. They were obviously racing one another, so I kept back since these idiots either 1) had too much testosterone clouding their judgment or 2) had too much road rage. Those idiots kept weaving back and forth in medium traffic, and I thought to myself that they’re either going to get into an accident or cause someone else to get into an accident.
I see the Trans-am make a really quick lane change, and by the looks of it he over-corrected and then spun out of control, literally spinning across the entire freeway on 880N before the San Mateo Bridge exit. I thought it was totally going to be a messy multi-car collision, as everyone’s brake lights lit up and traffic came to a stop. Miraculously, he didn’t hit a single car, and he then floored it and sped off. Freaks. I called 911 to report the f*cktards, but hopefully someone closer to them actually got plates and called them in.
I think all guys go through some phase where they feel the need for speed on public roads (myself included). Thankfully I had an outlet & spent time doing track days @ Sears Point and Thunderhill a few years back. It got really expensive, though, so it was great while it lasted. At least I can still go to a go-kart ring and get my racing itch taken care of in a safe environment!
What worries the most when I see street racing is not the ones doing the speeding, but rather the other drivers around. If you spook the wrong person, he/she might slam on the brakes or do something else really dramatic and cause a chain reaction with the surrounding traffic. :\
i need more sleep
Oct 25th
I’d be lucky to get more than 6 hours of sleep on a typical week night. Part of the reason I think is because I start working on things around 11pm or so and they always take longer than I expect, so before I know it it’s 2am or later. Forcing myself to wake up to make the carpool lane before it ends @ 9am means I usually need to be awake around 8-ish and ready to go out the door by 8:45am to get past the worst of the traffic congestion.
I know this isn’t that healthy for me, and I was reminded again when this article on sleep deprivation was published in the SF Chronicle. Ooompf.
my MBP’s wireless is teh suck
Oct 24th
My MacBook Pro’s wireless connectivity started acting up a few days ago out of the blue, and now my wireless connection drops every few minutes for no apparent reason. Ug, WTH. My Dell laptop’s wireless connection works fine though.
I first thought that maybe one of my neighbors bought a new 2.4Ghz cordless phone, and it was wreaking havoc on my internets, but that wouldn’t explain why my Dell laptop would hold its wireless connection. My router is transmitting on a channel by itself, so it’s not likely interference from the neighbors’ access points. Everyone was either on channel 6 or 11, and I was the lone person using channel 1.
Thinking that my Linksys WRT54G wifi router has seen better days, I went out and bought a new router(a D-Link DIR-655), as I noticed that my Apple Airport Express in the living room was loosing its connection to the Linksys more often than usual as well (the AE is set up as a WDS repeater to the signal coming from my the Linksys). I admittedly just wanted some new shiny to play with. I mean, who wouldn’t want to have a draft N router with gigabit Ethernet ports?
The problems didn’t seem to go away, and ends up that some googling resulted in a lot of reports of randomly dropped wi-fi connections using OS X 10.4.10. Sigh. I’m not sure why mine just started all of a sudden. I tried downgrading to the 10.4.9 airport files but that didn’t seem to help, so I’m gonna revert back to the 10.4.10 version and suck it up for a few more days before Leopard (10.5) comes out & hope for the best.
At least in my searching for an answer, I found a fix to a semi-related issue — that of the OS X airport process taking up 100% CPU — upgrading to VMWare Fusion 1.1beta fixed that.
