lazy-fox.net

I upgraded the site to WordPress 3.0. Hopefully, nothing broke itself in the process. If it has, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it.

Better post coming soon, promise.

The company who now owns my old domain squeakyweasel.net has it up for sale.  Naturally, I bid what I thought the domain would be worth (it still gets 60 hits a month, apparently, most likely spam bots), $10.  To me, a company who got it for free or whatever once I didn’t renew it, $10 is a reasonable price for a domain that barely gets any hits anymore.  Well, the site’s minimum bid is $60.  OK, really pricey but I’m working overtime right now, I could fork out $60 for nostalgia value.  The company who owns the domain now (Sedo) is asking at least $5000 for it.  Seriously 5 grand?  That’s way more than I thought the domain was even worth.  I mean, the site never even took off beyond being a personal blog.  Maybe it’s the fact that I had it so long some business person somewhere thinks it’s got a “huge web presence” or something.

I got a deal on a Sharp Aquos LC46LE700UN 46″ LED 120Hz that I just couldn’t pass up.  This means I’m going to donate my “old” Sony Bravia KDL-40V4100 to my brother and his wife with almost immaculate timing as he’s going to do a lot of sitting around in-between surgeries and can’t do much.  Plus, the TVs they’ve been given are pretty old and most of them have burned out leaving them with a little 25″ or so.  And trying to play video games on that just doesn’t fly.  Now, I just need a way to get it over there once my TV comes…

There’s no doubt you’ve heard about the iPhone 4 coverage at the WWDC and that AT&T is offering some customers early upgrade prices.  I think I’m one of these people but my account was setup as a Microsoft business account and, as such, I’m taken to a special Microsoft page whenever I click on the upgrade eligibility thing which only offers Windows Mobile phones (like the Samsung Jack or iPaq).  Despite others experiences, I’ve had an extremely positive experience with AT&T and very negative ones with both Verizon and Sprint but I’d be lying if I didn’t say the HTC Evo 4G and HTC HD2 (Hey, look!  T-Mobile finally got something worthwhile!) didn’t look awesome.  Not to mention, Android is making some real leaps and bounds lately.  I think I’m going to see if I’m eligible for the iphone 4 come the 15th and, if I am, pre-order it.

If you haven’t heard already, AT&T is doing away with their unlimited data plans.  In case you weren’t aware, the “unlimited” plan isn’t unlimited; it’s capped at 5gb.  Checking my data usage since I’ve owned my phone (March, 2009), I have never gone over 170mb in a month.  According to the new pricing chart, I can save $15 a month on my wireless bill by docking down to the 200mb/mo plan.  Or, hell, I even save $5 a month by switching to their 2gb plan.  I’m a fairly moderate 3G user, most of my heavy data usage is done at home when my iPhone automatically connects to my WiFi network and just uses that instead (it’s faster too).  Not to mention, if you’re already on AT&T’s unlimited plan for $30/mo, you can keep it…  for now, at least.

But seriously, this has been met with such ferocity.  People are so incredibly angry about losing their “unlimited” plans.  Give it a rest.  Seriously.  I’d really like to see what the huge deal is.  So far the only two arguments I’ve gotten are “I stream all my podcasts live” and “I use it for tethering to my laptop”.  In regards to the podcasts, just have your computer download them and sync them to your device.  With hard drive space being ~$1 for 10gb, there’s no real excuse to that unless you’re using one of those silly 16gb solid state drives as a primary drive for some unknown reason.  I don’t have much on the tethering issue (mostly because I don’t do it myself) other than “learn to be patient” or look up whatever you wanted to know with your phone.  Remember when going on vacation usually meant no phone or computer usage?  Would that really kill you?  Besides, it’s nice to “go off the grid” every now and then and get a chance to relax.  But really, people make way too big of a deal about tethering (most people don’t even use it) or any change whatsoever.

TLDR: People whine about the most trivial things that most of them don’t even come close to taking full advantage of and it wouldn’t affect them in any negative way.  In most cases, it would reduce their monthly bill by up to $15 a month.

Quite possibly the best kitchen timer ever?  I would be hard pressed to say otherwise.

I’m still trying to figure out this iPad hysteria thing.  Gizmodo posted that the iPad has now hit the 2 million sales mark.  That’s a lot of iPads being sold and bought.  Really, looking at the specs and everything, it’s just a big iPod Touch with a better screen resolution and nothing more.  While I haven’t used one yet, it looks like an absolute nightmare to type on both in that the keys would be awkwardly big and spaced and keeping the device at an acceptable typing angle.  But seriously, I don’t get what it can do over my netbook (HP Mini 10.1″); in fact, it seems way more restrictive.  I do own an iPhone 3G and while I like it, I can’t imagine having another device, that’s bigger, and completely void of the phone aspect.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  I like iPhone OS despite its quirks and strange frustrations sometimes, I just can’t imagine using it on a device I don’t really see the purpose of it existing in the first place…

Also, this is absolutely ridiculous.  My Zune constantly doesn’t charge or thinks it’s on a USB 1.0 port instead of 2.0 and it gets no love.  But really, just plug your iPad in to the freaking wall…

The server came. That’s partially why I’ve been slacking. I installed FreeBSD, got some power usage figures, then realized it only has an 80gig hard drive. Well, that won’t do. I did luck out and it came with two gigs of ECC ram instead of just one. I’m waiting on a newer WesternDigital Caviar Green drive now and then I’ll try to find a good colocation provider in the Seattle area, get some rails, and away we go.

Specs on the server:
Dual Intel Xeon LV 2.8gHz (hyperthreading)
250gig Western Digital Caviar Green
2gigs of DDR2-800 ECC ram
ATI Radeon Mobility onboard graphics
Dell PowerEdge SC1425 1u rackmount case

I found an old machine to tinker with FreeBSD and get back in to the motions. It’s my old gaming PC before the one I have now. AMD64 4200+ dual core, 4gigs of DDR2-800 ram, 400gig hard drive, and some crappy PCI-E video card I found lying around. Amazingly, after some bios tweaks, it runs almost completely silent. The loudest bit is when the hard drive is doing any sort of activity.
Messing around with this thing really makes me miss having a Lian-Li case. It’s so spacious, nice to work in, and weighs almost nothing…

Over the years lazy-fox.net has gone from being hosted on several friends’ servers, to my own “server” (neowulf) in a datacenter that eventually got up and quit (I never got my poor little neowulf back), to pointing at nothing, and now it’s pointing at a shared hosting account I have with ASmallOrange who are absolutely terrific.  Since the loss of my server I’ve been kind of distressed about trying to keep everything up and let it all kind of slip.  Well, it might be returning to its former glory.  I got an amazing deal on a Dell PowerEdge server which has dual Intel Xeon 2.8gHz processors, a gig of registered ECC ram, and a 80gig HD (which will be swapped ASAP along with a ram upgrade).  And I got it for one purpose, to return this whole thing back to its former glory once I can find cheap collocation here in the Seattle area.  I’m actually kind of excited.

Well, as the post before this one dictates, I am now part of the iPhone collective.  Why an iPhone?  Why even a new phone at all when my little Samsung Fin was getting the job done for the most part?  Well, my old provider, Helio was bought out by Virgin Mobile.  Ever since then, the service quality has decreased and I started getting soliciting calls and text messages quite frequently.  Not to mention, data transfer’s not free for the most part on Virgin Mobile, it usually ends up costing $0.05 a kb.  Since I got my iPhone last week, I’ve downloaded 200 megs of data alone which, at Virgin’s rates, would have cost me $10,240 in downloads alone.  I’m not too keen on forking over $10 grand just for data rates.  Anyway, it was time for a change.  I have a bunch of friends and know quite a few people from work who all use AT&T and don’t really have any complaints so I decided to give it a shot.  Besides, I have a track record of train wrecks with Verizon.  So far, no qualms and I can’t see any down the road.

Now, why an iPhone.  I wanted a smartphone after being completely sick and tired of the ordinary lackluster cell phones.  After watching a few of my friends use their iPhones or Windows Mobile and being a bit of a power user myself, I was intrigued.  I wanted a touch screen, I don’t want a ton of buttons, I want a nice looking yet functional UI, and I wanted a good price.  I was slightly willing to dish out for a HTC Fuze, I like the interface and full qwerty keyboard (despite being bulkier) but, for general UI experience and web browsing, no one has anything on Apple yet.  The other “option”, I suppose, would be the BlackBerry Storm but it’s a Verizon exclusive.

Anyhow, I’ve got an iPhone now and I absolutely love tinkering around with it; it’s been an absolute joy to use so far.  I do have a few minor issues (copy and paste) but most of those are being fixed come iPhone OS 3.0 which should be out this summer.  Awesome.

Well, I’m finally feeling like my normal self again on this rollercoaster ride of health I’ve been on lately.  Hearing out of my right ear is still splotchy at best but it’s better than it was.  The fever’s finally gone.  I woke up this morning wanting to throw up but it went away after I got to work and drank a few glasses of water.

In my absence, the great Paul Newman passed away.  News of his death slipped by almost completely unnoticed due to the current economic crisis and the completely rediculous and stupid things congress is doing about it.  If you are unfamilure with Mr Newman, he was an actor, co-founder of the wonderful Newman’s Own brand, served in the military, a generous donator to charity, an auto racer (Indy, competed in one LeMans 24 hour), and more.  Seriously, one of the most amazing people who ever lived.

I may have found an alternative to the ever increasingly aging version of WinAmp I use (v2.95).  It’s called AIMP and so far it’s winning me over.  The amount of memory usage it uses versus the old version of winamp is quite a bit more and the default skin is ginormous (still looking for something small and lightweight) but I enjoy the sound quality, support for audio formats without various plug-ins, and the complete lack of needless bloat.  Seriously, why does WinAmp have the option to play video?  That’s what Media Player Classic is for.