Random Thoughts
When I title a blog entry “random thoughts,” it’s really my way of saying: I have no fscking idea what I want to write about today, so I’ll just write a little about a few different things.
The Nokia 6820 I’ve got is just about the perfect phone/pda combo. The 6800 was almost that phone, except it lacks a camera and bluetooth. The 6820 has both of these things and a lot more in a smaller size, though they took out the FM radio. The camera takes “small” pictures (352 x 288 versus the 640 x 480 the 3650 takes), but that’s good enough for most of my purposes. You can associate pictures with contacts, they display when that person calls. It’s also EDGE capable, so I can take advantage of the faster EDGE speeds on AT&T Wireless.
Last night, or was it Friday night, I was up until 3am getting Bluetooth working under Linux. I had it working on my work laptop before, but I wanted it working on my desktop system as well. Managed to get both the laptop and my desktop to connect to the Internet via my 6820 using Bluetooth — not at the same time, mind you. My desktop was unable to resolve DNS in this setup for some reason. After about 3 in the morning, I kind of lose the will. But it’s nice to know I can make it work.
On the Cable Company front, it looks as if about the only thing changing is the company I send the bill to. There appear to be no changes to my rates, at least. A posting to Broadband Reports suggest the rates and packages will be the same. Some things aren’t. For instance, under the Charter regime, I actually had a direct phone line to Tier 2 support. Under Wave Broadband, I still do to some degree (they have to shift me to a business rep if I ask for anything complicated), but I have to sit in the call queue like everyone else. Considering they just changed everyones IP addresses and everyone home router had a fit as a result, most of the calls in the queue were “reboot your cable modem, router, and computer.” That’s bad.
And it got worse over the weekend when someone horked the BGP routing tables. The static IP addresses pool they used in this area had not been migrated over yet from Charter, but theoretically, routing was set up so they’d route properly. Well, that suddenly stopped working. Big effing surprise. The tech, which had to call me back twice — the first time because he wasn’t available when I called in, and the second time to tell me “stuff is fixed,” allowed me to change my static IP addresses over to Wave’s address space right then and there. The funny thing is, I called in a couple of days prior to the outage asking when my static IPs were going to be moved and they told me to wait until I was notified. If the tech I talked to earlier in the week would have done it when I asked, it would have saved a bunch of another tech’s time on a weekend. Sometimes, it just doesn’t pay to be proactive. sigh
