It’s annoying that the one place in the house where I need a good Wifi signal (the living room couch) is the weakest spot in the house. It’s not like we live in a big house, either. It’s about 30 feet for the signal to travel, though it’s through two walls. I don’t know why, but today the signal is really bad and just keeps cutting in and out. It’s so bad, I’m writing this in notepad, with hopes that I’ll have a signal long enough to post this eventually.

My first attempt at fixing this was upgrading from the Internet Connection Sharing from the Airport Card I have in my G4 to a real router. Surely having a real router with a real antenna would make for a better signal. I got a SMC Barricade 7004VWBR which is nice because it has all the firewall stuff in there and a switch, so I can connect my various machines to it. Unfortunately, it didn’t help the signal. I tried fiddling with the antennae, no luck there either.

My second attempt was to buy a new PC card for my laptop. The one I had was an old Compaq one and was barely supported. So I bought a Netgear 802.11g card (hey, why not). That seemed to work better at first, but overall I don’t think it’s made much of a difference.

The weird thing is that some days it works fine, and other days it’s horrible. Our 2.4Ghz cordless phone definitely interferes with it, but only when you’re talking on it.

I’ve thought about trying to move my base station closer to the living room, but the wiring would be a nightmare. I guess my next step is to get an 802.11g router, so I can try to drown out whichever neighbor of mine who has a network called “river_rock”. Hey neighbor, my network is open, how about opening up yours so when you kill my signal, I’ll at least be able to surf!

This wifi stuff sure is cool when it works, but it’s just got to get a lot better.

Once again, Joel Spolsky is right on in his latest essay.

Joel on Software – Biculturalism

I’ve encountered too many Unix programmers who sneer at Windows programming, thinking that Windows is heathen and stupid. Raymond all too frequently falls into the trap of disparaging the values of other cultures without considering where they came from. It’s rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, solution-oriented and non-ideological.

“I’m Saddam Hussein. I’m the president of Iraq and I’m willing to negotiate.”
– Saddam Hussein just before capture

“President Bush sends his regards.”
– U.S. Troops.

Methinks he’s about 8 months too late.

Wow, I never thought I’d see this happen. Doesn’t look like this guy was doing a lot of commanding of rebels from his hole though.

I was looking through my access logs today and noticed a lot of ‘cute’ referrals.

Apparently, my cat is considered to be one of the top 20 cutest images in the world. (Last row, bottom right.)

If this picture had sound, I bet it wouldn’t seem so cute. Meow, meow, meow, meeeow, meow, meow, meow… shut up already!

I’m also the #6 result on “people swimming”. Maybe Jeremy is right – PageRank is broken.

I want a Griffin Technologies RadioSHARK. It’s TiVo for radio and it just plugs right into your Mac. I’ll never miss car talk again.

Nevermind, I don’t think I’ll be able to wait that long.

“We don’t need to panic or assume that the worst case scenario is going to happen to everyone. Most of us will get through this fine.”

– Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding on the widespread flu outbreak.

Most??

Movable Type allows you to enter a description or tagline for your blog. Currently I have “Because personal home pages are so 1997.” That’s true of course as blogging is replacing all the home page builders of that era. Blogs are easier to set up, don’t require knowing HTML and they’re quicker to update. There must be millions of home pages out there that were created once and never updated.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about some other appropriate taglines.

• More stuff no one cares about except me.
  
• Rants… …and more rants.
  
• Yes, I’m procrastinating again.
  
• Tales of the mundane.
  
• Hi, Mom.
  
• Because I’m horrible at email correspondence.
  

I just got back from what was probably the easiest dentist appointment of my life. I’ve been scared into taking much better care of my teeth in the last 6 months.

In the spring, one area of my mouth was feeling achy, but I couldn’t pin it down. I finally went to the dentist and he found a monster cavity between my teeth which led to multiple visits and replacing a whole bunch of fillings. It was pretty painful for a while. The replacements were cool ceramic tooth-colored ones rather than the ugly silver ones though and you can’t even tell they’re there.

Anyway since then I’ve been afraid to repeat that experience, so I’ve been more conscious about taking care of my teeth. I love my electric toothbrush and it does a great job, but it’s almost too mindless. I used to read while I brushed my teeth, but I found that I would forget to move it around to different areas of my mouth, so no I try to concentrate on brushing for 4 minutes a day. One problem it creates is that it can rub your gums too much and there are a couple spots where my gums have receeded a little because I let it brush too much there.

My biggest problem was flossing. I hated doing it. I tried buying an electric flosser, but it didn’t really work. It can’t actually get all the way between your teeth. I bought a Glide floss holder and that did work. It gives you a lot more leverage than trying to use your fingers and it’s got an easy dispenser. Now the only problem was getting myself to use it regularly. I found the problem was that when I’m about to go to bed, I’m too tired to floss, nevermind brush and rinse. So I had the idea to leave the flosser in the living room. Anne really hates listening to me floss while we’re watching TV, but I think she’d hate it more if my teeth were all rotting away. I now floss pretty regularly and easily. Ta da!

The hygenist and dentist were impressed. Not much picking at all, except for a few spots that I tend to forget. I was also happy that my dentist didn’t seem to know about my previous rant about dentistry and his Porsche.

Afterwards I treated myself to a Jamba Juice. I used to run to the nearest conveience store and buy a ton of candy immediately after I went to the dentist, but I think I’m over that now.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with myself. My teeth may actually outlive me.

Uh hi, what are you doing here?
Mom, Dad, geez, most of my friends are here.
Shouldn’t you all be at work 3000 miles away?
Anne, why are all these people here? It’s not my birthday.
My email? Yeah, I just checked it a few minutes ago. I didn’t see anything about this.
What do you mean how often do I check it? I don’t know, a few times a day?
Well I do have my email program running all day, so I guess it’s checking for me every few minutes.
OK, yeah so I check it sometimes anyway when I’m waiting for something else, but it’s cool.
No, I don’t think I check it too much. I’m totally in control of it. I don’t have to check it, I just like to. I can stop anytime I want.
Well yeah, I have been doing this for a few years, but so is everyone else, right? It’s just email, you know. It’s not like I’m obsessively refreshing web pages.
Well thanks, I care about you all too.
What do you mean I have to stop? I don’t think it affects my life at all. I need it to work. I’m not hurting anyone.
I’m gonna go check …, uh, it’s been great to see you all, but I’m really busy with the holidays and all and I’m sure you all need to catch your flights.
Anne, would you ask them to leave?
Look, I already told you, it’s not a problem! This is ridiculous! Get out of my way, I’m leaving!

(Two days later)

Hi, my name is Jeff, and I’m addicted to email.
It started just as a fun way to relax, you know, to be “cool”.
I think my personality lends itself to this kind of thing. When I was a kid, I would check the postal mail for fun. Of course I didn’t get much mail as a kid. Now I don’t even bother with postal mail. It just doesn’t do anything for me anymore.
At first it was just some local BBSes you know, a few messages here and there. And then I started doing BITNET and exploring a whole new world. Soon, I was experimenting with several accounts, but I kept it pretty simple — all terminal-based stuff like ‘mail’ and ‘pine’ or whatever.
Then I went to college and met some people who were into some different stuff: POP, IMAP, Eudora and procmail. That was some great stuff. I got into a lot of mailing lists around then and I really liked it.
I guess what does it for me is the rush of “send and recieve” – the anticipation of all the possibilities of what I could be about to read. What’s news and what’s spam. Has my order shipped? Who found my cache? Are hard drives on sale?
Email leads to web pages and then to more email. It just feeds on itself.
Soon I got into making my own email filters and I found I needed more and more email.
I got into custom email after that, getting my own vanity domains like boulter.com.
I spent days analyzing spam and writing filters to handle it. I got into some new stuff like hotmail, yahoo mail, web mail, AOL, and checking it on my phone.
Often I’m checking it while doing other things. I have the laptop and the wireless connection in the living room, and often I’d take a hit while watching TV. Half the time I can’t remember what the show was about.
Yeah, I have checked it while driving.
Currently, I’m on Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail. On the backend I’ve got fetchmail doing POP and Mail::Audit. They’re all pretty powerful.
A couple of days ago, all my friends and relatives just showed up at my house to talk about my ‘problem’ and now I’m here.
Well I think that’s my story. I’m looking forward getting ‘disconnected’ once and for all, so I can get back to living a normal life. You know, going outside and other places out of wireless range. I just feel so guilty.