Brian's World

Welcome to Vermont

This past weekend I went to the cottage in Vermont, this generally marks the start of Spring for me, when we have to go up and do approximately 800 chores to get the house ready and stuff for summer. This weekend was no exception, minus the spring. Being busy with college, I was unable to go up earlier, so this was the first chance for the entire family to be together; dad wanted it for a “fathers day” gift. I was hoping to write a blog from VT but I had Wifi troubles, one of the “neighbors” across the lake has Wifi, but I get it at 8%-15% which is barely enough to hold a connection. I could have rowed over in a boat, but that just wasn’t something I was willing to do. Kevin and I went wardriving, I did the driving, kevin did the “netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid” command, we had a max of around 18 networks in the small town of Ludlow, not bad. I like public wifi, thats why I run one myself. I think if you’re sharing one you’re entitled to use someone else’s thats public. Its the concept behind the fonera network, which is super cool, just without the complications of work.

Speaking of work, Monday I wasn’t in. Yea, today things were pretty busy. There are 3 main things I’m working on, unfortunately its difficult to bounce ideas off other people. For example one project, I was in a meeting with the outside consultant expert man, he couldn’t even help me. Of course he provided some garbage answer about blah de blah but nothing to support typing the logic in the text box like I was asking. If I was a consultant I’d answer questions honestly, and if I didn’t know I’d go find the answers. Cognos is cool, ish… when it works I guess it works well, but it seems people take forever to set it up. Stupid framework manager, I feel like writing the joins in the reports, lol. Maybe that would help? Hrm. Sounds like task 4.

I’m not officially announcing anything yet, but I think I’ll be out soon. I’m used to being the only one that knows what I’m talking about, but I’m also used to being able to explore my ideas which is something I have trouble doing. Its just difficult when I’m being asked to present the best solution, but oh yea, that solution is bounded by A, B, and C.

RPI has some cool projects underway, I know they’ll increase my time commitments slightly but I think I can work it in. My goal right now is to create infrastructure. Before I can “make it big” the right tools need to be in place, and thats what I’m working on now. Right now, things don’t seem to be linked together at all, and they’re not really, but once I figure it out I’ll know. Expect some cool stuff, I’ll make it happen. Speaking of which I need to make a trip sometime, hrm.. when to go

Oh yea, last night I went geocaching. It was pretty sweet, I’ve heard about it a lot, mainly through my ties with boy scouts.. and its pronounced “Geo catching”.. theres no wierd “cash” in sound of it. Myself, Katie, Nickl, and Scott went out and found 1 and couldn’t find 2. One I won’t count because some people were fearful of a homeless man that lived in a pile of driftwood. I didn’t see him around, just trash. We must do again.

I guess I’ll go to bed, tomorrow I’ll hope to have a super productive day at work and crunch out tons of stuff, we’ll see I guess.

As always, keep your stick on the ice.

Motivating the Internet and TV

Where I need to be, I would try to write this in like poem form, just for the fun of it, but poetry and me are oil and water, so its best I not taint the internet with such a disgrace.

I’m not sure exactly where I’ll head, its dark down here in the basement. My father likes to save money by only turning on a few lights and he was the last one to adjust the lighting down here. The dark makes me feel sleepy, even tho there is plenty of time to work.

Again I find myself having motivational troubles and I really dislike it. As always there are plenty of items to do, but currently I’m feeling limited by resources. Designing a site based on css and all the fancy div’s and stuff isn’t something I’m great at (I can make tables great!), I can manipulate existing designs, make some pretty substantial changes, but I’m not prone to start development from a null page. Ideally it would be a learning experience for me, and I have no doubt it will, but the whole learning stages aren’t great. Its difficult to find tutorials to do exactly what I want, maybe because I can’t express it in words correctly. Alas I’ll continue on, one Div at a time.

A constant bother of mine is the slow internet speeds. Which has pushed me into looking at some fancier routers and hubs that I really don’t need. I’m interested in some qos traffic shaping and static routing, unfortunately my dd-wrt switches and netgear wgr614 at the head of my network are ,more a less, stupid. Note the comma use there, I was going to neglect them but decided to add pieces of punctuation to help readers.

I’m almost tempted to say I’m currently bored with the internet, I have a feeling MassMutual is having a lot to do with this. I like being able to explore things, experiment, find better solutions and develop my own approach to problems. I’m not a fan of being told what to do, restricted, given a set of instructions to follow, etc. Especially when I haven’t done anything wrong in the first place. I could see restricting someone who has made mistakes, but not off the bat. I could really go for some trial and error or something. Part of me wants to do some math at the moment, but I don’t have any good math problems to work on that wouldn’t be better addressed online. I feel like I’ve currently expanded my horizons as wide as they can at the current focus level, and I need to zoom out a little more to expand bigger, but there are forces keeping me zoomed in, work, summer vacation plans, the lack of financial resources to buy computer related products, the region I’m currently ins slow internet, etc.

For example, I think one of the next big things in computers will be personalized servers, people will have their files stored in some type of server array and everything will be accessed over a high speed network, there would probably have to be a local cache of a few gigabytes, and really fast internet to make it feasible, but I think its a possibility. Now to play around with this I need fast access to a server, which I can secure locally with the NSB1 project, but the routing path throws me to boston then back to western mass; I’m thinking there must be a way to static route though a local hop we share in common, requiring some network hardware capable of issuing those requests. I’d also need lots of storage space and related items.

I’m also interested in getting into video again, I mean I do video at RPI TV but it hasn’t reached maturity yet; I go into a place like the local PEG station and it makes me want to jump in and help out, something RPI TV doesn’t inspire in me as much. Most likely because the complexity of the RPI TV operation is very limited.

I guess I’ll go to bed, I really don’t have anything better to do at the moment, maybe I should go buy a good book. I can’t remember what I’ve read and not read. Who knows. Ok, I’m gonna buy a bunch of books maybe. Amazon is cool with dat.

1 Down, 1 to Go

Today was the last day at work for one of my two managers, probably the manager that gives us the most work and checks in with us on a daily basis. Adding to the confusion, the other manager is leaving at the end of June. What will we do? I dunno, but it certainly will be interesting. Today I spent the whole day writing an Excel Macro, its a pretty beastly macro and takes a few minutes to run; my first macro writing experience. Less than pleasurable programming.

Onto my personal computing vendettas, file storage. Right now my external hard drive has less than 25gb of space left, and I’m not very pleased. I’ve been seeking an upgrade for a few months but I’m really not sure the approach to take. The cheap way is to buy another firewire hard drive but thats not a very effective long term solution or an efficient way to solve the problem. Idea 2 would be seeking a RAID 5 option, 3-5 reasonably sized hard drives. This requires a few things, a) money. b) hard drives. c) raid controller. If I’m going to make this investment, I’m certainly going to need somewhere to put them all because they won’t fit in my microform pc so If I’m buying an external inclosure I could just make the leap to a seperate file server. Then I run into performance issues with my currently ethernet/wireless based network but I do achieve the connectivity I want. The performance issues really slide me into a firewire solution’s, see the loop here. And part of me is like wait 3 years (yea right), the whole database file storage will take off and you’ll have to adjust again.

I’d really like to setup a fiber network at home, but the though of that makes me laugh.

If the internet was fast I would consider consolidating all of my stuff into one master server, with RAID 5, backup UPS, etc, but the internet just isn’t fast enough for me to record live TV over it, the buffer would cause issues. I plan on doing some hop exploration, seeing if I can find shorter static routing paths between me and my frequently visited sites. No, I haven’t taken any advanced Cisco networking classes, but I’d like to.

Hardware thoughts would be greatly appreciated?

I’m tired and my throat tickles, time for bed.