Brrr....

I'm in Roseville, Minnesota right now for training for my new employer. It's nice to get to sit down and learn BIND, DNS, Sendmail, the TCP/IP suite, stateful packet inspection, BSD, and all the rest of the alphabet soup that embodies firewalls these days. I'm not a big fan of lecturing, though, and I can't wait to get hands-on with the products. Sitting through a refresher course in IP addressing while important for job skills is, at the end of a 9 hour day, taxing.

Yeah, Roseville's cold, go figure. Everybody here has gone on and on about how it was in the 60s to 80s last week. Yeah, now it's in the 30s-40s. Welcome to Minnesota.

So, I need some ideas of things to do around Minneapolis - I've been to the Mall of America, so that's not really an option. Any good weekend goings-on this time of year?

Thank goodness for iChat AV, iSight, and free high-speed Internet at the hotel. Without, I'm afraid my relationship with Nicole would be even more strained. It's certainly better than running up a gigantic phone bill on my cell.

Now playing on my iPod: Suite-Judy Blue Eyes by Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

Stupid Cable Modems. Stupid Comcast

From 4:30am this morning to just about an hour ago, the Internet at the house was down. The cable modem was synched up, and the router, a Netgear WGR614 (4-port 10/100 switch plus 802.11g) had grabbed an IP via DHCP. But, my OS X box, which does DNS for the LAN just was not able to do lookups or get out to the Net. Frustrated, I just left it alone and went to work. Throughout the day, I periodically tried getting to it via ssh, but no luck. No response on port 22.

Came home, dinked around with it, and just finally plugged the modem into the Mac. Voila, the fucker got on the Net, and was able to go everywhere. Plug the modem back into the router, release the IP, renew, and try again. No go- damn thing just keeps getting the same IP assignment. Oh, and get this, it's on a completely different network than what the Mac had gotten.

Finally, I just set the option in the router to use my Mac's MAC address and that fixed the problem. The router just got the same IP and network assignment via DHCP that the Mac had got. But, I wonder, does Comcast now limit who can get on the network, based on MAC? Do they look at the manufacturer bits in the MAC address to determine if one's disallowed? Why was I getting two different network assignments for each device?

As Nicole mentioned, Comcast might have an IP range set aside for abusers or routers. That way, when they ask for your IP, they'll know you've somehow violated their ToS or are using a router. Of course, I'm just conspiracizing here, but ya never know.

Stoopid Comcast.

Rain

My first full fall in Seattle, we had 100 straight days of precipitation. That was 6 years ago. So, coming out of a very dry, and extremely beautiful summer, it's always good to get October off to a wet start. We've had over 3 inches of rain, I believe, in October alone. This more than doubles the previous record. Very lovely.

On Sunday, a co-worker and I are off to Minneapolis for two weeks of training by the new company we both work for, as a result of the acquisition of our previous employer. I'm looking forward to the trip, as it can be fun to learn new things, but I'm a bit nervous.

When my previous employer acquired an Australian firm, one of our support people was sent to Brisbane to train their support people on our products. The project failed horribly, and the person in Australia was fired from 8000 miles away, coming back to the states with no job. Of course, he screwed up badly and deserved to be fired, but that still worries me that our little office here in Seattle could end up somewhat as screwed up as the office in Australia. At least we're going back to the mothership for training instead of having one of their goofballs coming to us. Even still, it's a challenge to have 6 people doing support in Seattle whilst the mothership has 20+ doing support out of Minneapolis. I just have a bad feeling we'll always be behind on information, training, knowledge, etc. We could end up being hated by the support people in Minnesota, if we can't integrate well into their organization.

So anyway, lots of reading, studying, and cramm^H^H^Hlearning is ahead of me. Not to mention being thrown into the fire, a.k.a. the phone queue. Can't wait :-P

nocked off the network? explannation mark on anti-norton?

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Today: Thank you, insect overlords.

I was hired. No job-hunting for me this winter. Hoorah.

I do feel bad for all of the people that are getting laid off, as it will mean even more work for me and those of us left. And, yeah, they're out of work, and I really do feel bad for them for that. Some good people are going to be let go.

Tomorrow: D-Day.

"And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I'd like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves." - Kent Brockman (The Simpsons - Deep Space Homer)

Well, tomorrow I learn my fate at my hopefully new employer. Part of me is glad my old company's legacy is finally being put to rest. But at the same time, I'm sad to see it go, as I've worked there now for over 6.5 years. Man, it's hard to believe it's been that long. I've been then there since I was 18.

Oh the experiences - I've had work crushes, made an ass of myself repeatedly, learned a helluva lot (not just about my job), and met some really freaking cool people. Oh yeah, and then there was my 21st birthday, a trip to Australia, and numerous bouts of infighting with other co-workers over ridiculous things about our products. Good times.

I have no idea what the future will hold if I'm hired, or if I'm laid off, but I'm trying to be optimistic about the whole thing. I'm not too freaked out right now about the prospect of being laid off, but I don't look forward to trying to find a job. Looks like I'll be wrapping x-mas gifts this year, if need be.

So, wish me luck tomorrow. I know a bunch of people are going to get the ax. I hope it's not me.

Software, Hardware, and my wallet

It's a good feeling to work with a developer to resolve a bug. About two weeks ago, I bought a camcorder, a Canon ZR60. It had multiple purposes - videos (obviously), video capture from analog sources (this is something that Canon cameras can do), and data backup. Data backup? Oh yes.

There's a piece of software for OS X called DV Backup. I downloaded it, tried it out, and after verifying it worked on a 35MB backup, I bought it. That's when the trouble began. I wanted to back up my iTunes music library (20GB+ worth) and needed somewhat reliable, somewhat cheap storage, that could be spanned across multiple media. DV Backup offered this functionality, and at a good price. It was able to successfully back up my data, but always crashed/failed/died during the verification phase. Always.

I contacted the developer and explained the problem, and after much testing, I've got a much more reliable application, that seems to work on the verification moreso than it did. There are still problems with it, but instead of failing on the first tape (of 3), it fails on the 3rd. This means about 19GB of music is able to be restored, at this point. Much better. The developer had it good - he had me and another person to test and, as he explained it to me, it only affected dual-processor Macs. If the app failed for me, it was always reproduceable by the other tester. That's got to be nice, from a development perspective.

On a hardware and wallet-related note, last night Nicole and I went to the Mac Store here in Seattle and traded in her dual 867MHz G4 PowerMac for a 1.25GHz Aluminum PowerBook G4. Gorgeous machine, and with Panther supporting fast user switching, we have no need for two PowerMacs in the house. We'll really only need one computer each. Now, if we could just get Panther soon, we'll be set :-)

I guess I'm getting in all my purchases now before someone decides to lay me off. Yup, hooray for credit. No more major purchases for the rest of the year, now.