My officemate moved out today. Yes, 10+ years in the company and still sharing an inside office that was built for 1 person. I could vent volumes about that but that's a topic for another day (at least my officemate gets a window office all to herself by moving to another team). Whatever happened, the network hub in our office no longer works! I arrived into the office after my officemate had already moved out, so I logged on to my desktop computer only to find no available network. I initially suspected the port had been shut down, but a call to helpdesk confirmed that wasn't the case.

 

 Turns out the hub has died.  

 

An inability to connect to the network pretty effectively removes any chance of doing actual work. You might think that this kind of work stoppage would be something we'd prepare for. Well, no. Our IT department doesn't supply the hubs, they have to be purchased by the individual business units. So, it looks like I'm stuck until our admin orders a new one and waiting for shipping too.

 

Oh well... I suppose I can get by on a wireless connection on my laptop and plugging one desktop machine directly into the wall port, so it's really not all that terrible. I just want my ex-officemate to feel guilty for killing my network connection ;-)

 

Have a nice Labor Day weekend, everyone.

 

[Via the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, and Crunchgear]

I'm in Las Vegas for a wedding (no, not mine...) It's hot, 106F, just perfect weather for getting trussed up in a suit and tie...

 

I'm using my latest toy while I am here, a new hi-def video camera from Sony, the HDR-SR7, a 60GB hard disk inside, shooting AVCHD format (H.264 MPEG 4). I've only had it for a few days and it got its first serious workout today at the wedding. I will no doubt have fun once I get back to Seattle on Monday, downloading the videos to my PC and doing my first attempt at video editing. I got a copy of Sony's Vegas video editing software, and I need to learn how to use it. Besides just editing the movie into something watchable, I also want to learn how to downgrade the quality from 1080 High definition video to something more watchable on the internet, and also make a copy in MPEG-2 or other format that doesn't need a blu-ray disk player to play, which AVCHD seems to require.

 

Check out ultra-cute, rubber-bodied Keepon, getting down to the groove in a Spoon video. The scientists behind Keepon had previously made their own vide of Keepon dancing and chose a Spoon song for their demo. Spoon obviously dug it, and invited Keepon to be the star in their new video:

 

 

If you happen to be in LA on Sept 10th, you can go see Spoon and Keepon's reunion at Wired's NextFest concert. The song, btw, is "Don't You Evah".

 

[via BoingBoing and New Scientist Tech]

I'm sure many of you are starting to prepare for a new school year, and going shopping for your kid's supplies. Well, here's a really sad commentary on the state of parent paranoia in the US these days - for a mere $175, your kid can have a bullet-proof backpack to carry all those books around in. It will stop 9mm hollow point bullets at 5 feet range. I have no idea if that is good or not since I have never fired a gun, other than in video games, water pistols and so on.

 

 

What do you say? Will little Jimmy be gunned down in the school playground this semester? Will his mom and dad feel better knowing his backpack is bullet-proof? I'd imagine the books inside the bag will feel pretty snug and secure, but Jimmy? I guess the next f**ked-up individual planning out his very own Columbine massacre had better start practising his head-shots, just in case people start buying these things. [via Engadget]

You might have noticed my earlier posts about bandwidth via my Fiber-to-the-home connection. Today I had a technician come by to check my setup, as I was getting really poor upload speeds, compared with what I was paying for. At first the technician blamed everything on Microsoft and a "ghost in the machine" which they could not track down within Windows networking. However, having seen good, consistent upload speeds when accessing different DHCP ports which I don't actually use, they did find an issue with my Static IP setup on the ports that I am actually using. After some tweaking on their side, my speeds improved considerably.

 

Here are the charts from the last few days (all tested via the excellent Speedtest.net):

 

As you can see, my upload bandwidth has grown from the 3000 Kbp/s range up to hitting hights of 19000 Kbp/s, with an average of around 12-13000 Kbp/s. It's a lot less consistent than I would like to see, however. I am happy enough for the time being, but it's still a bit weird - since the technician left, my tests have shown that even the tests which report a bandwidth of 12000 Kbp/s might actually be getting higher rates - close monitoring of the upload test shows highs of 18-19000 range even while the end result number comes in much lower. I am not sure why, maybe something to do with the packet shaping code that my ISP is running on the network, or perhaps something related to the static IP setup that I have.

Did Microsoft design this house?

 

My inner geek found this funny and clever.

I suppose if you don't know HTML then this is meaningless, but hey, that's not my problem ;-)

Why is it that Gmail can give away 2+ Gb of email storage space, and yet my work email inbox is limited to 450Mb?? It's not like they can't afford to buy a few more hard disks for the Exchange servers... I go through a LOT of email at work, some with very large attachments, and 450Mb can barely keep 1 month of email. I'm tired of getting "Your mailbox is almost full" warnings almost daily.

 

There has to be a better way... right?

 I realized that when Halo 3 is released (September 25th), I'm still going to be in Hawai'i on my honeymoon. In fact it won't be until the 29th that I would be in a position to go to a store and buy a copy. That is of course a big problem - the chances of any store anywhere still having copies of the hottest game of the year sitting on shelves 4 days after the launch? yeah right.

 

I try to pretend I'm cool with this, but I'm not, really. Especially not when Bungie reveals little secrets like the up to 4-player Co-Op for the campaign mode that they announced yesterday. Something has to be done here! I need to get my hands on a copy of Halo 3 somehow. In fact I want it somehow sitting on top of my TV so that the minute I get back from honeymoon, I can start an all night fragging session.

 

Welcome to married life, sweetie ;-)   hehehehe...

 Here's how I look after my photo was Simpsonized.