I had an issue with my iPhone yesterday which I thought was highly unusual. I had upgraded to the 3.0 release of the firmware last week, and things were going fine until yesterday afternoon. While sitting on my desk at work, the phone all of the sudden lost connection to the network completely, which never happens because there’s an AT&T tower on the roof of the building. I figured it was just a random service issue, and to back that up a coworker’s phone was also having problems. Eventually for him, the service came back. For my iPhone, however, the service kept coming and going.
I figured once I’d leave work it would clear up, but my assumption was wrong as I didn’t have any service the entire way home. What’s worse is that when I tried to launch any app, other than the apps the phone came with, they would crash. Multiple reboots later and I’m thinking that my poor iPhone has given up on life. After a bit of research, I decided to do a full-blown restore to factory settings, and to my relief, my phone is working once again. I think part of the problem is that iTunes crashed out in the middle of a sync the previous night, which could have caused some corruption that I didn’t see until yesterday. At any rate, the only loss was the music I had on it, but that’s easily replaced.
Sometime next week I’ll be posting about my top 5 favorite apps on my phone.
general geek, iphone
I had been excited about this game ever since it was announced, as I’m a big Ghostbusters fan. This was one of the few games I actually preordered (60.00 for a video game is pretty crazy) and when the day came, I left Gamestop happy as could be. I got home, popped the game in and off I went, busting some ghosts, wandering through levels and generally having a lot of fun.
I have the PS3 version, having gotten rid of my Xbox360 since it had just been sitting and collecting dust. From various reports on the ‘net, this version has less-than-stellar graphics, but to me it still looks pretty darn good. I played through the game in only two sittings, amounting to around 6 hours or so of game time, short by any standards. I was pretty disappointed to find that I just dropped 60.00 on a short game.
Even with the short single player campaign, there is a multiplayer mode (well, unless you have the PC versoin), which I tried out last night. There are ranked and unranked games, along with a couple of different modes. I didn’t notice much lag, and it seemed to go pretty smoothly with 4 people simultaneously. It did raise one issue: I need to get a headset for the PS3. I do have an old Motorola bluetooth headseat around somewhere that I could use, according to what I’ve read.
At any rate, Ghostbusters is a lot of fun, but the single player campaign is rather short. I’m kicking myself for buying this right out of the gate. Had I known it was so short, I would have waited until this hit the bargain bin.
general gaming
I’ve finally found what I’ve been looking for as far as notes / organization at work goes. I discovered org-mode for Emacs while I was researching and testing some ways to keep me organized. I had gone the wiki route previously, but I found that the dependency of a database and browser just didn’t suit my “have it when / where I need it” ideals. Sometimes, I have to log into my work machine from home, and forwarding my X display can be painful. Since a lot of the time I was using Lynx to view pages anyway, I figured I would opt for a more text-based approach. I’ll go into how I’m using org-mode, but for further information, please check out the website.
Timesheets
I have to keep track of time I spend working on various things. Usually I used a pad and paper for this, but a lot of the time I don’t want to have to stop, write something down, then jump back. I have a timesheet.org file open in Emacs during the day so that I can switch to the buffer and enter my time. I use one headline per week, and create a table for the time. It works out nicely because now I have one file with my timesheets. I started this about a week or two ago, but I have no plans of entering all of my old time here.
Scripts, Utilities and others
Throughout the course of the day, I’m using a lot of different tools to get my work done. Sometimes I’ll discover something new and helpful and I’ll want to keep the command around for future use. For that, I have a scripts.org file to keep things organized. For customer information, right now I have one big customers file, but I think I’m going to start splitting that out into separate files soon.
The thing I really like about org-mode is being able to collapse the various levels. It keeps the information I don’t need right now out of my way while at the same time keeping everything in text form, so I can read it anywhere. I know I’m not harnessing the full power of this mode, but it fits my needs and perhaps it might fit someone else’s needs out there as well.
linux emacs, life-with-emacs
DSL: It Lives
I managed to get the phone line wired up and the DSL functioning. The line itself was a lot easier than I had hoped. It was just a matter of running the line out to the interface device and hooking up two wires. The most difficult part was crawling around under the house. Hopefully, though, I won’t have to worry about going down there for anything else for a long, long time. The DSL service itself has been running well. Gaming hasn’t been affected, and overall we’re happy with it. In the process, I also canceled Tivo and Vonage, saving us a bit more money.
Valve Releases TF2 Sniper and Spy Update
Valve, within the past week, has released a major update to Team Fortress 2, this time with weapon upgrades for the Sniper and Spy both. Details can be found here, but the other major change is the way the new weapons are unlocked, or should I say given out. With previous updates, you had to complete achievements to obtain new weapons. Now, though, you obtain new weapons by pure luck. There are a few people that seem to have an idea of the statistics, but generally you have a chance for an unlock once per hour. The more you play, the better your chances. Of course, there are some people bitching because of all of the time they spent to obtain the other unlocks, and now people are getting them without much work. Personally, I don’t mind it. Everyone should have a chance to mess around with the new weapons, and some people just don’t have the time required for some of the achievements needed.
JustHost: So far so good
It’s been around a month since I’ve switched webhosting, and so far I’ve been happy with the move. The support is amazing. I had an issue and had it resolved within about 2 hours, which is a big plus. The site does seem to be stable, and I haven’t found any real issues yet. I just need to finish getting the site put back together and I’ll be good to go.
tech gaming, geek
After tonight (hopefully), Comcast will be out of my life. The latest bill came, and for some reason they seem to be charging me for basic cable when I specifically told them to take a hike, so I will, with great pleasure, call them and tell them where to go, assuming I get the phone jack finished tonight. I have the new jack in place, I just need to finish running the line out to the NID and I should be set to go. I’ve never had this much trouble with Comcast before, but once I moved it seems like everything went to hell. ATT doesn’t have the best track record either, but for the price and reliability (not to mention lack of a contract), I think we can live with 6 megabit DSL.
tech rants
Over the past week, I’ve had nothing but problems with our internet connection here at the house. I must have called into their support center at least 8 or 9 times over the course of the week, and if you’ve been following my Twitter feed, you’ll know that hasn’t been a pleasant experience. The first few days they had said there was an outage in the area, so they couldn’t send a tech out. Friday comes, and I end up calling again. The tech tells me they noticed the downstream signal is weak, and that I should call back in when I got home from work, which I did. The tech I got in touch with at that point had me do the same, exact thing I had done about 5 other times. I was beyond livid at this point, so I politely told him I’ll wait it out. The net connection today has been stable, but I’m still going to switch over to ATT for cost reasons. I can’t justify spending 70.00 a month just to be screwed around with when an issue arises. On top of that, Beth got accepted into culinary school so we want to try to rework the budget to be able to deal with the student loan payments when they start rolling in.
The thing about all of this is that there isn’t a choice as far as high speed goes, really. There’s either Comcast or ATT, two big companies concerned about the bottom line. Someone from the Comcast executive offices is supposed to be calling me. Unless by some miracle they can match ATT pricing, they can kiss me goodbye as a customer, period.
tech opinion
As you may or may not know, I recently had enough of Dreamhost’s outages, with the latest being their email service. I depend on my email for a few things, and having it go down is something I can’t tolerate. Sure, I could have used Google apps for my domain, but why should I have to? I had been with them for 7 years, and unfortunately as time progressed, their reliability has gotten worse and worse. They have a Twitter account for outage reports, and there’s at least two per week. Long story short, I bid them farewell and switched over to Justhost after reviewing my needs and the company. Already they’ve won me over with their responsive tech support, and an actual ticket system I can log into and look at. All in all, they seem pretty decent so far. The only downside is that I cannot access the webmail client from work (due to work firewall issues), but that’s not a big deal.
tech website
I’ve neglected the blog a bit lately, but with good reason. We’re still working on settling into the house, and on top of that, my mom and sister came down from Pennsylvania for a visit. We ended up visiting the World of Coke in downtown Atlanta, but of course I didn’t bring the camera. My daughter enjoyed most of the time, except for meeting the wall face-first and busting her little lip open. She also warmed up to her grandma and aunt, something I was a little concerned about due to the last time they were here for a visit.
I’ve been playing handyman / builder / assembler the past two weeks as well. Last night I put together my daughter’s new bed, then the week prior I put together the entertainment center. I know, real geeky stuff. I need to seal up a couple of holes (particularly the holes drilled for the network cabling) to keep some pests out, then of course comes the big project of seeding the yard and trying to get grass going.
At some point soon, I want to dig my electronics stuff out and start messing around with it again. I have an Arduino Prototype shield I need to assemble, along with some cool little projects to try out. Eventually I want to get an ethernet shield and do something concerning network and environment, perhaps a simple temperature monitor, or I also thought about getting into building a personal weather station. My mind has all sorts of cool ideas, I just need to sort them out and figure out which ones I want to actually pursue as I learn about this stuff.
general house
I took the day off of work today for a few reasons, one of which being so I could help get a few loose ends tied up. One loose end in particular was getting the rest of the office set up, or at the very least wired. The problem here was that the cable modem is out in the living room where the cable comes in, and I can’t see spending 75.00 for an outlet in the computer room. The options were to string a cable along a wall or the floor, or drill a couple of holes and string the cable along. I spoke with the landlord at length last night about things and mentioned about the network cable. Without me asking, he mentioned that I could drill a couple of holes and utilize the crawlspace under the house.
Well, today was the day, so I drug out my trusty cordless drill and put two holes in the floor. I had 100ft of Cat5 that I previously didn’t have a use for, so that ended up being used for the run. I fed it down, then it was time to crawl under the house. I’m a big guy, but there was enough space for me to crawl commando-style to the cable, toss it down towards the office, and run it back up through the hole. I tell ya, there’s something about being under a house that’s… interesting. The cable is now strung, with plenty left under the house. I pulled enough up on either side so I could shift things if need be. This weekend, I’ll finalize the run by sealing the holes with a bit of silicon caulk to keep the bugs (not many under there, but still) as well as seal any air leaks so I keep heating/cooling more efficient.
On top of all of this, I’m planning on getting some pegboard in an effort to clean up the mess and tangle of cords in the office, and out in the living room. The living room, of course, will probably end up waiting until we figure out if we’re getting another entertainment center or just cleaning up / painting the pieces we have now. I do plan on taking some pictures of the goings-on, so stay on the lookout for that
general geek, house
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