uvageek

Over the past few days my Netgear WNR854T Gigabit Wireless N routing device decided to kick the bucket.  It was two years old and had been in use for the past six months with fluctuating success.  Last night it stopped showing up in available wireless devices.  This evening when I checked on it and reset it, all that was lit was a single green light stating that it was powered, nothing else.

After several attempts at resetting the device it would seem that it is officially dead.  As it was two years old, it is not under any warranty with Netgear.  As we mourn the loss of this device, the question arises as to what to replace it with?

Now Playing - The Chemical Brothers - Push the Button - Close Your Eyes

So a while back a friend of mine was all about Microsoft’s PopFly, which I do have to admit is a cool and flexible framework for bringing different pieces of information together, however I’m not a huge fan of the drag and drop interface that is somewhat rigid.  I realize that if you really want you can dig into the API and connect things up with whatever information source that you like and draw that data in.  “Why are you talking about PopFly?”  Because it deals with Mashups of information taking data from several sources and plotting the information in a visual way that draws the client user in.

Nonetheless, a friend of mine returning from a few weeks across the Pond in Europe popped me a note to see if I could provide transport from the airport to home, sure no problem - I would hope that someone would do the same for me if I asked.  So like a good friend I figured that I should be on time and check the flight status.

…so, in much the same way that you can query Google with various parameters to bring back pre-filtered results, for instance the term “Weather in Washington, DC” brings back what you might see in iGoogle as your local weather, you can do so for flights.

Simply put in the flight identifier and the results are displayed there in Google’s search page with the departure and arrival times and cities - quite handy.  But wait, the mashup of information… so you click on the link and are brought to FlightStats.com which draws in information from a few different sources.  But wait, there’s more, click on the “Track this Flight” button and all of sudden you have a mashup that includes Google Maps integration.

Good show Flight Stats!

Now Playing - Michael W. Smith - Healing Rain - Healing Rain

Sydney Harbour NYE 2007-2008

Happy New Year everybody - I’ve gotta say that this picture and many others from good ole Sydney are simply spectacular. As much as I hate flying, I think I might spend my 29th NYE there next year. Might.

Mae - The Everglow - Someone Else’s Arms

IMG_0104

Originally uploaded by uvageek

So the Northern Virginia area has been dealing with “interesting” weather in that we ended up with some blistering cold temps this week and are looking forward to mild days in the 50’s and 60’s this coming week. Nonetheless, it snowed on Wednesday, Dec 5 and ended up causing havoc on the roadways (not that they were treacherous but more along the lines that commuters decided that 5 mph was the speed they wanted to drive). By Dec 7 when this photo was taken, there was still snow on the parking garage parallel to the office building in which I have an office. Quite cute to see someone’s idea of a message to the rest of the folks on the north side of the building.

Hungry Field Mice Knock Out Phone Network

I know that like most people you probably expected the completion of the commonly known cliche`, “…the mice shall play.” However in this case, it would seem that these little mice were quite the menace in central Sweden. How the mice were able to get through the shielding that usually encompasses fiber optical cables that are run underground is a mystery to me unless of course they were able to get into a duct that cables might typically be run through.
What’s even more fascinating though is the response of one of the telecommunications engineers who was quoted as saying:

“This is not at all common,” said Hans Borjesson, a technician at TeliaSoneria.

I guess that’s not the first thing that came to mind for me. I suppose I thought that this was an every day occurrence. Perhaps someone should notify Sweden to be on the lookout for more of these rodents without a cause…

Court deals blow to German beer law (Reuters)
Reuters - Germany’s nearly 500-year-old rules guarding the purity of beer
have been dealt a blow by a court judgment allowing a small brewer to call its product
“beer” even though it contains sugar.

Okay, so I admit that this story isn’t all that incredible, but I still think that it’s somewhat interesting that the Germans value “Pure Beer” so much. Strange don’t you think?

So I’m working from home today and reading through a blog article, clearing my mind and I come across this semi interesting URL for http://www.beingclever.com. But instead, I look away for a minute at something else and try to remember what the URL is and think, “You know, it’s something clever, yeah that’s it.” So, I go ahead and type in http://www.somethingclever.com. Yeah, definitely not what I was looking for though slightly funny. I wonder who the message is directed to. The page source itself is rather simplistic and quite concise.
My other blunder of the day was when I was going back to Somethingclever.com but only typed in something.com, again a clever page with content to boot.
Amazing what you find out on the web these days.

Is it just me or does it seem that the majority of America’s youth these days are unappreciative and completely self-centered? It worried me the other day when I saw a little kid, maybe 12 with a cell phone. Like whoa.
What America needs is to reinvest in classical music. Yes, classical music. It’s been studied by scientists (smart people for the most part) who have put together theories (postulates, hypotheses) that listening to classical music as a young child stimulates the development of different parts of the brain. So this would in effect mean less children suffering from ADD, less children that have problems grasping the basics of math and reading comprehension. It would mean there would be the potential rise in the number of young adults 20 years from now with a gift for complex abstract thought, leading to another renaissance of reasoning.
However, as it would be we listen to music that has no meaning, no meat, no complexity, it’s just a simple guitar riff with a bassline playing with some meaningless words thrown on top. There are those musical groups that attempt to really stick to music theory and then there are those that really are meaningless.
What do I propose? For every hour that a person listens to “music”, they listen to something by the masters such as Khachaturian and his Gayane Suites.
That’s my quip for the day. Hope you have a good one.

I feel like a little kid again… Chris and I ended up staying up til about 5 this morning playing and beating Halo 2. Kind of a lame ending, but oh well. I still like the first better — especially the map “Wizard”.

For those of you that know me, you know that I am a connoisseur of rum. I prefer Bacardi, but have been known to try others. My favorite drink by far being 15/16ths a glass of diet coke and an 1/16th a glass of Rum (whether regular Bacardi Spiced Rum or his more powerful and vanilla brother Bacardi 151 Spiced Rum).
Some rums are less desireable and lack the taste that Bacardi provides. I’m curious to try this experiment that this group tried with Vodka and a Brita water filter. Check it out: http://www.ohmygoditburns.com/
If a lot of you are interested in being a part of this, let me know and we’ll set up a date. No, there will be no drunkenness, strictly like wine testing, just Rum. And I’m not quite sure if we’ll use a bad rum and make it good, or use a good rum and make it better… we could be like BASF… “We don’t make the rum you drink, we make the rum you drink better.”