Personal

The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.

Faster! Faster! Fas…aw, crap.

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I was playing with what I’d hoped would be a new feature for the site last night. Things were looking really promising for a while, too — but it looks like it’s not going to happen, or at the very least, not anytime soon. Bleah.

A while ago, Kirsten recommended I take a look at Andromeda, an application for streaming audio across the ‘net. At the time, I didn’t figure it was something to look into — primarily because all of my .mp3 files were on one computer, and my webserver was a seperate machine. Howerver, since the old webserver died and I’m now serving djwudi.com off of the same machine that has all my music, I thought I’d take a look at it.

Downloaded and installed it last night, and after a quick e-mail with the developers to figure out one small glitch, things were up and running. It works really nicely, too. From my PC, I could hit my website, browse through my music folders, set up playlists, and listen to any .mp3 file stored on my webserver. Nifty! I had all sorts of ideas for how I wanted to play with it, too — everything from linking to a band’s directory if I mentioned them in a post, to seeing if there was a way I could integrate it with my ‘Music of the Moment’ display to add a ‘play’ button for whatever track was being displayed at the moment.

Unfortunately, there’s one key roadblock — my connection to the ‘net. My incoming connection is nice and fast (1.5 Mbps, about the speed of a T-1 line), but my outgoing connection is pretty pokey (128 kbps, about twice the speed of a 56k modem). So, I figured it was worth taking a look at what other options I might have through my ISP, Speakeasy.

Turns out that according to their pricing grid, I’ve got two options for adjusting my speed, and staying close to my current price range. For $10/month more I could drop my incoming speed in half to 750 kbps, but triple my outgoing speed to 384 kbps. Or, for $20/month more, I could keep my incoming speed as-is, and triple my outgoing speed. After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to go for the first option — while I really like having the T-1 speed incoming, it’s rare that I really use it all, so I figured I could go ahead and live with half of that, and take the smallest possible increase to my bill.

So, off to the phone to call Speakeasy. At which point, the bad news hits. It turns out that there are two different companies that Speakeasy parners with to provide their DSL service locally, Covad and WorldCom (though it might not be WorldCom, I’m hoping I remembered that correctly). The connection I currently have goes through Covad, and apparently it’s the top of the line Covad connection. Upgrading to a faster speed would require switching me over onto WorldCom’s network — which would require me cancelling my current line, and re-ordering a new line at the different rate. Sounds easy enough…except that it would create about a month where I’d be without DSL access.

Dial-up access only, and no website. Ugh.

The only other option would be if I had a second phone line. Then I could order the new DSL line, hook that into the second phone line, and kill the current DSL line when the new one kicks in. Unfortunately, that would require me paying for two phone lines for that month, two DSL lines for that month (plus all the setup costs for the new line), and then the hassle of changing my phone number at the end of the switch.

None of those options are particularly appealing.

End result, then, unfortunately, is that my site stays it’s current pokey (but, thankfully, usually okay since I keep most of my pages pure text) speed, and no Andromeda integration.

Ah, well. It was worth looking into, at least.

Stoopid. With two ‘O’s.

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In working on the job submission tool I’m involved with at my job, it keeps amazing me just how many complaints and/or comments we’re getting from customers that they wouldn’t have if they would read the information on the page. But they don’t, and they whine, which forces us to attempt to dumb it down even further. I’m convinced that the lowest common denominator is sinking minute by minute.

Then I realize that I’m working in a place where there are signs posted on all the soda machines — which are free, and marked as such — explaining in four steps how to get your free soda from the machine.

  • Select and push button of desired soda.
  • Allow soda to drop.
  • Remove soda from cooler.
  • Please remove only one soda at a time.

As my dad once told me, “you will never lose betting on human stupidity.”

My most humble apologies!

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Erk…as horrid as a thing this is to admit, I goofed up.

Yesterday (the 15th) was my dad’s birthday, and in the midst of my usual weekend duties, I completely forgot to call. Or write an e-mail. Or post a note here.

Or anything. Sigh. I generally try to be better about this.

I’ll be calling tomorrow morning — if I’m lucky, before he gets up and checks this website…but if not…happy (late) birthday, dad! You’ll be hearing from me soon!

Dance, Spider-Man, dance!

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I think this has been going around on the ‘net for a while, but I just stumbled across it again. I don’t know who made it or where it’s from…but it amuses me.

Dance, Spider-Man, dance!

I don’t ‘forward’!

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I get a lot of things sent to me by the people I know, and that have my e-mail address. Some (many) annoy me, but at times I get sent stuff that I actually like, or find amusing, or some such.

Going through and cleaning up my hard drive after upgrading my system, I figured that a blog would be good way to keep all these things around in a central place…so, that’s what I’ve done! There’s only a couple things up there now (and they’re both pretty long), but more will appear as I keep digging through all the stuff I’ve got scattered around my drives.

So without further ado — I don’t ‘forward’!

Even cops get to play sometimes

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Every morning on my way to work, I walk out my door and head about five blocks down 8th avenue to my usual bus stop. Once a week, when I need to pick up my paycheck, I cut through the Freeway Park next to the Convention Center and head into downtown to the Today’s offices.

Since I had a paycheck waiting for me today, that was my route. Once I turned into the park entrance, though, I was a little concerned, as there was a small group of five police officers, all on their patrol bikes, grouped around the top of the staircase I normally head down. It didn’t look like anything was really happening, though, so I just kept going on my merry little way. Just before I got to the top of the stairs, one of the officers turned his bike around, carefully took aim — and started to attempt to ride his bike down the staircase, egged on by the other four officers he’d just been talking with, and another officer already at the bottom of the staircase.

He paused at the first landing long enough for me to walk by, then started working his way down again, only to take a tumble off his bike about halfway down. Fortunately, the next officer, already starting to ride down the stairs on his bike, managed to both avoid the one who’d just fallen off his bike and was laughing and trying to disentangle himself from the spokes, and keep going down without taking a spill. “It’s not as easy as it looks!” said the officer waiting at the bottom of the stairs, as we watched a couple more start to bump their way down.

Must’ve been a slow morning.

Man I wish I’d had my camera with me.

So it’s been a year

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I’d like to come up with something amazingly deep and profound to say, but for one reason or another, it’s just not in me. Besides, plenty of other people have worthwhile things to say.

I think part of my little bout of writer’s block is just that the entire situation is frustrating. One year ago, something huge and immensely terrifying happened. In the year since then, however, a multitude of other, smaller, less immediately noticeable things have happened (usually in the name of ‘patriotism’), that added up scare me as much as (and quite possibly more than) the attacks themselves. It’s a different kind of scare, but it’s a scare, nothenless. Awareness of this side of things does seem to be growing, though, which is good.

I guess, most of what I’d really want to say I’ve said already, either in some of my rants over the past year or in the links I’ve chosen to highlight in this blog (the majority of which, unfortunately, still reside in limbo).

I dunno. I’m rambling. Caught between wanting to say something, and not really having anything of real import to say.

What kind of God…?

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Thinking about the upcoming one year anniversary of Sept. 11th, Dave had this to say:

A common theme — what kind of God lets this happen. I answer that with another question. What kind of a country is so selfish that it doesn’t see that 9-11 was [the] tiniest big tragedy viewed from a global perspective. What about famine in Africa? What about AIDS? They wonder at the spiritual vision of a person who jumps from the World Trade Center to certain death, but don’t wonder about the millions of people who do the same thing with tobacco? It’s out of balance. We’re out of balance. 9-11 was, IMHO, a small upheaval in getting to some kind of equilibrium in how the U.S. participates in the world, both from the U.S. perspective, and the world’s perspective. That we got so much sympathy says how big the human heart is. That there wasn’t more celebrating in the streets of world capitals says that they forgive us for our selfish attitude, which is back in force as if 9-11 never happened.

So what was the lesson of 9-11 that the U.S. has failed to learn? I think it’s that God doesn’t think we’re as important as we do. The concept of national security is obsolete. We can’t close our borders. We live on this planet with everyone else. Global warming, AIDS, terrorism, all penetrate all borders. New York is a world city. The last gasps of isolationism will be snuffed out by more humiliation, until we get the truth, we aren’t above the rest of the world, but we are part of it.

Amen.

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