managing stress in a fast-paced world

I was asked recently if I use my Sprint Data plan to browse the web or tether to a laptop… I don’t and don’t ever plan to. I’d say that 99.9% of the places I go to all have wireless internet. From going out to eat, drink, play games, friends homes, etc. There’s always a friendly hotspot. I have to admit that after working at a wireless company for nearly a year now I know more than I ever thought I would need to know about wireless and there’s still alot to learn. I now know why playing network games over wireless is tricky, but I also know how to fix it

Anyways, getting back to the subject, back in the days of my commute from Santa Clara to Oakland, I used to tether my Sprint phone to my laptop, it worked okay, never great though. I’m sure the new EVDO network is better, but most of the time I’m perfectly happy with the small screen of the MotoQ vs. booting up a laptop. I still do carry a laptop everywhere I go and use wifi when the MotoQ just doesn’t cut it anymore, things like the Google Wifi in Mountain View are great. The Metro-Fi in Sunnyvale doesn’t cover my home, but I’d never use it over the screaming fast fiber I have at home. As far as city wide wifi, I’ve used the MV network multiple times, from getting a haircut to hanging out and having drinks, it’s a great perk to living in Mountain View. Last week Google released some pretty impressive usage numbers for the network too.

BTW, here’s my speed test, dunno what’s up with the latency numbers, might be caused by all the other traffic on my network!

Last night I had dinner with Dardy and Mike, we saw Adam (our wedding photographer) walking out and about. We haven’t seen him since our wedding!

After dinner I owed Dardy $20, so I went to the ATM and it ATE MY CARD! GRRR! I went home and promptly canceled it. It’ll be another 7-10 days before my replacement comes. I should go to the bank today and get my weekend cash now. What a pain in the butt. I’ve been buying things on my AMEX card lately too, I keep saying the expiration date over the phone or typing it into the webpage, I didn’t realize it expires in a few days, 09/07… I wonder where my new card is?

Slowly each computer in my home is getting upgraded to Windows Vista, I actually counted the number of computers I have:

4 working laptops

4 non-working completely busted laptops

6 always on computers

way too many computers and computer parts laying all over.

It’s actually a little insane how many computers I have, anyways… I installed 64-bit Linux on one server, and 64-bit Vista on another… Vista actually seems to run better vs. the 32-bit version I have installed on another PC. Go figure…

So I have 64-bit Vista Ultimate installed on my old Dell 8400 which I must have bought back in 2004 or 2005. I loaded it up with 2GB RAM, 2TB of hard drive space, and Vista even detected the TV tuner it came with. The one problem I was a bit worried about was finding drivers for all the hardware. The Dell is noticeably faster than the supposedly faster AMD system I built from parts for my Media Center (which is running 32-bit Vista).

The home network is running great, I have 2 wireless AP’s setup now since I was starting to have throughput problems with just 1. Every PC has a gigabit connectiong so that’s plenty fast for now. Windows and Samba shares make accessing things so easy too.

I guess the last thing to mention is that I finally got around to setting up my file server, I chose to use Fedora Core 7 in the end mainly because I wanted to read some data off of my old hard drives and FC7 has built in support for many more filesystems than the alternatives.

I don’t know why I waited so long, but I finally got around to buying those $0.96 cement blocks and mounted my SuperDish to it, it’s now out of the way and in the corner of my patio. Next thing to do is clean the patio and setup the BBQ again.