dns changes (who cares?) and a trip to nc
david u, a guy i’ve got a lot of respect for, has sold his former dns provider project to dyn, inc. this sort of bums me out because everydns has always been a great free dns provider. i’m not a fan of dyn’s products, and since they’re saying that they bought everydns to eliminate a competitor, i’ll be switching my dns over to another provider.
cadie and i had a great trip to nc. we went out to visit my dad and stepmom and spent 6 days in the raleigh area. we didn’t really do all that much, aside from visiting biltmore, the duke campus and raleigh to buy some music from an awesome local record store, we spent most of the time at my dad’s. on both the flight out to atlanta from albuquerque and back from atlanta to albuquerque, i used a free inflight wifi coupon, which helped to keep me sort of occupied during the 2.5 and 3.5 hour flights. it worked surprisingly well, so i was pretty impressed with it on the whole.
happy new year
welcome to 2010. happy new year.
dsl madness
according to one of the regional vps for qwest i contacted earlier this year regarding their fttn (fiber to the node) deployment, they weren’t planning on having it available at my address til next year. imagine my surprise, when i got a postcard from qwest saying that they would be deploying it by year’s end, and then further my surprise when i saw it was available as an upgrade when i went online to pay my bill. i ordered 12/5 service for $52.99/month and was overnighted a vdsl modem to replace the adsl2 modem they’d sent me originally.
i received the new modem and installed it in preparation of the new circuit going online sometime before 1700 that day. unfortunately, qwest’s ordering system didn’t finish processing the order and it necessitated a call to customer service to get it completed so their engineers could finish provisioning. after that was settled, the line was up on the new vdsl circuit…but…the modem only trained at 6.5 mbit/sec. this was obviously disappointing, as my previous adsl circuit trained at a full 7192kbit/sec without issue. i contacted qwest support and they noticed there was a problem with errors incrementing at an insane rate. their engineers were pretty confident it was an external line fault, so they issued a repair ticket.
the qwest tech tested the lines between the premises to the termination point in their CO or RT, and it was pushing 12.1mbit all the way, when he tested at the jack in my office, however, it was only showing the same speed the modem had shown, indicating it was an interior wiring fault. he suggested finding the splices and wiring the jack directly to the plant coming in from the telco.
i managed to find our wiring and it turns out the contractor who built the complex didn’t follow best-practices for telephone wiring and used telecom beanies to splice together a total of 6 wires.
beanies are designed to handle a maximum of 3 wires each, so there was obviously an issue with this. after i identified the pair coming in from the office walljack, i directly connected the plant wiring to the jack, as the qwest tech suggested. when i fired the modem back up, it trained at 12122/888. it’s not the 12192/5192 that i was supposed to get, so i contacted qwest and it turns out they can’t provision my circuit for the 5mbit upload speed yet.
suffice it to say, i’m happy with the 1.4MB/sec sustained downstream and sort of happy with the stable 600kbit/sec rate-limited (qos) upstream. the line is nice and stable and after a couple weeks, i’m going to investigate whether qwest could remove interleaving from the line, so i could get sub-10ms first hop ping times like i had with the adsl2 circuit.
webos development, borderlands, fun
i’ve been spending the last couple of weeks familiarizing myself with palm’s mojo sdk for webos. i’m looking at building an irc app for webos since there aren’t any yet. it’ll take me a bit of work, but the SDK and development environment are pretty intuitive. the application framework makes extensive use of JSON (jscript) and CSS elements.
the broncos have managed to start this season 6-0, which is pretty awesome since they haven’t managed to play terribly well since around 1999. being brought up as a cynical broncos fan means that i’m still extremely skeptical of the possibility of any future winds.
i’ve been looking at playing borderlands, but i’m sort of on the fence about it still. some reviews talk about how great the game is and that it’s fun, challenging and also really great in terms of graphics. other reviews, however, have pointed to it being a repetitive mess that isn’t any fun for more than maybe 20 hours, and that it turns into a grind-fest.
i also recently picked up both infamous for ps3 and arma ii for pc. infamous is incredibly fun. it’s sort of like gta4 with superhero powers. arma ii is what project reality wishes it could be–full military simulation. everything from bullet physics to wind modeling to vegetation trampling, flight dynamics, vehicle behavior, etc are all accurately modeled. it’s sort of buggy, but it’s a lot of fun and looks fucking phenomenal.
5 – 0
the denver broncos beat the patriots and are carrying a 5 and 0 record. i heard on talk radio on my way home first that the denver broncos’ win over dallas last week was a fluke and this week, they were purely lucky and/or bellichick let them win. i’m the world’s most negative broncos fan and even i am willing to accept that they played well today and last week.
guess people just can’t handle their stupid teams losing.
-
Random Image
