Vivid Trends

Made an emergency run to Fry's yesterday when my D-Link router kept cutting out. Annoying, as I was trying to watch a streaming video on the Sony Blu-Ray DVD player at the time. Had to power cycle the router to talk to it, and that was with a hard-wired connection.

Fry's has several salescreatures on commission in the router- hard drives - motherboards section, and the zero in on anyone who as much as looks at the router display. The scam is they offer to write up the purchase for you, and you bring the item and the printout to the cashier, and instead of just scanning in the item, they scan in the item and the printout, and then they have to file the printout, so it takes thee times as long to check out, and all you are doing is giving a commission to someone who was no help at all.

In my 10 minutes of box reading, I heard a dozen bits of bad advice given to other customers, as well as to me. One guy was pointing to a $49 router as their most popular, saying it was the best one. Another guy claimed that an internal antenna is as good as an external antenna. After reading the boxes I walked away and discovered a whole 'nother aisle of routers, and one by Trendnet sounded like a good one for me at a decent price. It sounded like it had all the features I wanted, but Fry's lets you return stuff within a week or two with no penalty.

When I got back home and set up the router, I also plugged the HTC Vivid phone into the pc and ran the HTC Sync program to put my music (especially my ringtones) and photos onto the phone. That took a while, as I had to first format a 32GB SD card, and then load about 10GB of Stuff onto it, but it worked fine, and now I can use my own ringtones except AT&T doesn't let you use your own for alerts. Boo, hiss.

The router took a while to configure because a couple of major operations which are on a combined screen on the d-link have to be hand-entered on the Trendnet. For instance, on the d-link, once all your devices have obtained DHCP addresses, you can click on each one, and assign the address you want to give it. The Trendnet makes you enter name, IP and MAC address individually, it won't take it from the client list. Ditto virtual servers. I had to hand-enter each webcam.

Everything looked fine, wireless was definitely faster, and even though I could get my email on the phone and by webmail, Outlook would not download anything. I banged on that for an hour, and looked for help on line (but found none). Gave up and went to bed.

This morning I had to be up early for a 9 o'clock work meeting, and I poked around the Trendnet GUI a bit. Just for grins I went to the server access area, and told it to allow pop and SMTP (and ftp and tftp). And voila!  Outlook slurped up mail again! Those settings are supposed to be only if you are running a mail server inside the network. It's fixed, but I don't like how I had to fix it. Someone in Trendnet marketing doesn't understand  what server access is for, and that POP and SMTP clients should be open by default.

---

After using the phone for a day, I'm happy. I get a 4G signal most places, it remembered the logins to my home and work wireless, and I get a phone signal in the apartment and most places at work. The apps work, I love HTC's weather widget, and Yahoo's is slick too, with HD photos of the places you are looking up.

---

Work was good. The team meeting ran out of business to talk about after 15 minutes, but the boss' boss made an unexpected appearance so we picked his brain a bit about the Google acquisition, and whether we will have to move, and how about an event to celebrate the two releases we just finished simultaneously?

One of the other techies showed me how to monitor the problem video in a way that let me close the bug ticket. That was a biggie for the release.

My denture clinic is a no-appointment place, so I had lunch in the neighborhood at 1, then walked over there only to find they were closed for Presidents' Day. :-(

Lunch was good, a Japanese place called Bluefin. Small portions, medium-high prices, and deserted. Nice place, lousy location. I had planned on lunch at the Crema Coffee cafe, but they were packed, and were out of lunch stuff. I'll try again tomorrow.

After work I went to the Mexican-Arab market, got some eggs, milk and pistachios. They do not carry any mustard except plain yellow. They wanted $3.50 for a $1.90 bottle of Hershey's syrup. The celery looked good, and was half the price of the chain markets. None of the other produce was worth the prices. I'll have to make a Safeway run sometime soon.

---

Home, the LG Blu-ray player was waiting at the door. I hooked it up, and got it started downloading new firmware, the walked to the BASFA meeting. Very low attendance, lots of people were driving back from LA's Dr. Who convention, and President's Day probably kept others away who normally work but don't live nearby. I got in three zingers, I'm happy. My favorite was during the auction, they held up a book by David Brin, Earth. After a few seconds of no bids, I said "been there".

Home again, Domino is yelling and yowling at me. She now makes a sound like sandpaper on vocal cords. Annoying.  I finished setting up the LG player, made sure it could stream Amazon video, and then re-programmed the Logitech remote to use the LG and not the non-streaming, non-updating Vizio.

---

Been drinking a lot of milk tonight. Surprised. Lactose issues run in the family, and I thought I had that intolerance thing but I guess I outgrew it.

---

Weeded out about 200 photos from the rocket launch shoot. Still about 300, but at lest they are mostly in focus, framed well and show either a rocket in flight or a re-entry parachute coming down. 

Plans for tomorrow:

Work
Denture clinic

Weird Dream Channel

I am on vacation. As usual I am by myself, which lets me go places on impulse whenever I want. In theory I am visiting Bangkok, but the place looks more like what I would imagine Milan or Barcelona would look like. I have made a conscious decision to search out the lower income districts, taking mass transit.

My first trip is on the monorail, and a couple of stops in, we go up a section which is like the start of a roller coaster ride - slow and almost straight up. Then we go down a slide-like section "wheeee!" and coast to the next stop. I get off at the last stop, and am surrounded by tall brick buildings.

I wander around, there is not much to see here.

I take two or three more transit rides, and finally it is time to find a hotel or something. The "or something" is a slum apartment where I rent a room. I am there long enough to turn the patio into a kitchen, with a camp stove and grill and a folding table and chairs. I have a single bed with Italian-looking white sheets and bed covers.

And now it is time to move out, vacation is over. The landlady, an attractive woman with an alabaster complexion, long black hair and blue eyes, has hired two men to help strike the patio since I have no way to cart away this stuff. They are both men I know IRL, though I can't place them. One is in his 20s, the other is closer to my age. They spend a lot of time staring at all the stuff, and the older one starts making a fuss about how much they will be paid. I tell him the landlady hired him, ask her. He tells her that $10 an hour is not enough. She says he isn't getting $10 an hour. She rattles off some numbers to calculate what the job is worth, and asks me to do the math.

I look at the numbers, but my brain freezes up, I can't do the math. I find my old HP calculator, afraid that its battery may be dead. The battery is fine, but the display is too dirty to read. Older helper keeps complaining, and throwing out more numbers and excuses. I open the patio door to the street, and push/guide him out, telling him I am done with his arguing, he's fired.

I am back on the monorail, going back the way I had come, which means the big uphill climb will be a big downhill slide, and I go "wheee!" out loud. The other passengers glower at me.

There is still one night of vacation, I think I'll get a room at the Intercontinental.

Another Milestone

When I got home tonight, I emptied both litterboxes, put a new cartridge into one, and put the other one into the storage room. One cat only needs one litterbox.

It showed me how very sick Pumpkin really was, that when he was here, I would have to change both litterboxes every two or three days. It has been 2½ weeks, and neither litterbox really needed to be changed.

It's Tuesday, And I'm Fat. BFD.

I think my dreams of being in Rio for Carnival (aka bubble butt heaven) are not going to happen unless I win a couple of lotteries. I have been in NOLA twice for the week before Halloween, which is a lot of fun because the merchants are hungry, and you can buy masks and beads and stuff at bargain prices. Bourbon Street is still a trip, but it is a lot easier to get a good view.

---

Today somehow I forgot to do the project I was doing before the bug fix issue came along. Boss reminded me it was due yesterday, which is a joke because we only got the software Wednesday. I wrote all the test cases, but need to fill in step-by-step designs and references to the specs. Tomorrow. If I can get a connection I'll work from home.

Went to the denture clinic at 1, short wait, the doctor did some grinding, it took maybe 5 minutes. Had lunch at the crema coffee cafe, which was replete with local bubble butts. The help was kind of slow and disconnected, and they were out of the good lunches so I had to settle for a turkey/havarti panini. WTF is panini? It tastes like a sponge coated with flour. Gag me. They had excellent, fresh chocolate cake which made up for it. And Moroccan Mint iced tea.

---

After lunch I had an hour left, so I went to a dive which had been mostly closed for renovations last year. They were supposed to re-do the back room in a month, it took 6 months. It was heartbreaking - what had been a place which was tolerable has been made into rat hole I will never go to again. What they did was turn the back room into a series of semi-private rooms with beaded curtains. Inside the rooms they use the full-wall mirror trick to try to make the room look bigger, but I found myself at one point blocking my own way because there was not enough light to see I was looking at a wall, not a hallway.

I only stayed for 10 minutes, which was okay since it meant getting on the freeway back to work before the 3 pm diamond lane change.

---

Went to Safeway to get the things the Mexican-Arab market doesn't carry. Light blue cheese dressing, dijon & horseradish-spiked mustards, Arm & Hammer detergent, large squeeze bottle of Hershey's syrup, dill seeds, donettes, mint oreos. On my way out of the store I was accosted by a little girl selling cookies. Girl Scout Cookies. They are on my Occupy shopping list. She had thin mints! For the first time in decades I bought a box.

It was only fitting to have the first ones with tea. Flowering jasmine tea from Communist China.

---

Dinner was the second of three portions from Sunday's KFC run. Domino was very impolite about insisting on her share.

---

Plans for tomorrow:
Work, maybe from home in the morning and in person in the afternoon.