Live & Direct from Nowhere in Particular...

May your pockets be heavy and your heart be light,
may good luck pursue you each morning and night.

— Irish Saying

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Happy 3.1415926…

I ran across this on macnn.com. It seems a frequent traveller with a new MacBook Air missed his flight. Not because he was late, but because TSA thought the Air might be a “device” rather than being a real laptop. Don’t they watch TV?

I’ve been having connection issues lately and I’ve been home sick the past couple days, so it has been really obvious. I called the cable guys & it looks like it may actually be my router. Right now I’m connected directly to my cable modem & everything is great. Snappier than it’s been in a while. So, this led me to decide to try some testing.

Speedtests - Direct Connection to Modem

Dallas, TX - premiervoice.net

Dallas, TX - filecloud.com

Kansas City, MO -propelwireless.com

Speedtests - Direct Connection to Modem

Dallas, TX - premiervoice.net
The first try on this I had an odd upload anomaly, it hit 100% & didn’t stop, but the datarate kept decreasing. It seems as though it had sent all the data, but missed the packet saying it was done.

Dallas, TX - filecloud.com
This one was sitting around 480 upload, then jumped to 502 right at the end (as did premiervoice).

Kansas City, MO -propelwireless.com

So, it appears that the router doesn’t have any significant effect on bandwidth when it’s behaving. But everything else seems to be working at the moment too. I’ll have to remember to try again some time when the connection is sluggish. What a pain. Getting to my router & cable modem is not easy.

I was reading an article on the Time website about those houses that were burned in Washington.

Despite its claims of green construction, area activists fought it, fearful that it would upset the delicate environmental balance in an area that contains an important aquifer and streams favored by Chinook salmon.

And the runoff from the fire hoses containing all the chemicals that are in building materials is good for the salmon? Not to mention the CO₂, potential carcinogens and particulate pollution released from the burning. Or the fact that they are likely to be rebuilt with insurance money anyway. (Well, maybe not these, since they had been on the market for a year.)

Brilliant.

It’s right up there with dumping paint on some rich lady’s fur coat, when you know damn well she’ll just go buy a new one.

I had been wanting a Jawbone bluetooth headset. After seeing these films I think I want one even more. These are quite amusing…

Ray showed this to me. Too cool not to share…