Sometimes I love the little synchronistic finds the internet provides. Doing some research into a local brew-ha-ha between a bunch of small minded sexists and some decent people who like sports and care about their moms/sisters/daughters, I find out that the architect of this PR fiasco is a man who Spokeo informs me is a rat. OK, born during the year of the rat, but still funny to scroll down his profile and see the section “Rat”.
Comcast was unprepared for the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm midnight release, it would seem. By 12:15, my internet had gone down, and it sounds like I wasn’t alone. I was on hold for support 30 mins, still in the support queue, when it came back up. Played another half hour before it went down again. This time their automated system at least acknowledged the outage. Looking at the forums, it looks like they weren’t the only ISP to crash under the load.
I finally got around to upgrading my router at home. I’ve been old schooling it with a classic Linksys WRT54G, but it had been showing it’s age, both in terms of protocol obsolescence and with actual error conditions as well. When the script kiddie started hammering it with hiser fruitless attacks, it finally got to the point where I just had to move on. A few months ago, in preparation for this day, I’d picked up a Belkin N+ router, big mistake. Even bigger mistake was waiting 4-5 months to actually start setting it up, so now I can’t return it. I won’t bore you with too many details. The iPads couldn’t connect to it’s wireless, it dropped it’s connection to the outside internet and never picked it back up, an exceptionally annoying configuration UI, etc etc. Anywhoo, I went by the buy and picked up a Cisco/Linksys E2000
Even without having plugged my two gigabit capable boxes directly into the new router, instead of the old 10/100 switch, the difference in wireless speed is blessedly noticeable enough to justify the cost of the wasted Belkin and the wonderful Cisco/Linksys. Plus it’s got much nicer routing possibilities, like different ports for outside and inside sides of a tunnel. Plus the new router’s new MAC means my external IP changed, so I’ll have to wait until the next script kiddie, who scans for non-default ports, to come along, before I can play with a honeypot. =p
I’ve been buying a bunch of toys with the make-up bonus, and noticed some interesting things with Amazon.com and sites that at first blush aren’t associated with them at all.
The first toy I wanted was some filters for my cameras. I’d found a company that sold thru amazon’s marketplace, called 47th Street Photo, who seemed to be the sole US retailer for an asian optics company called Opteka. Their own e-commerce website had a larger selection of products, and better prices on some things, but significantly worse prices on other things, so I ended up making two orders, one to 47th Street Photo, via Amazon, and one directly from the Opteka website. As I get order confirmation and shipping emails about both orders, I notice that they are identical, except for the company name. In the end, all the stuff arrived and works perfectly, but I find it amusing that I seem to have saved about $60 just by making two orders instead of one, and that both ended up processed by the same facility anyways.
The second toy I wanted was a melodica
Oh internet, with a billion people online (not to scale), anything I can think of to look for, someone has done, in some form or fashion. I’m getting ready this morning, listening to some tunes on the ipad, and it occurs to me how droll it would be to walk down the street with it on my shoulder like an old skool boom box. Someone thought of it, and made a gelaskin already =p