Heck yeah. I’m something like a whole 5% scottish… at least I think… I need to do some more poking around in the family records to find out all the detail. I do know we are from the Clan Galbraith (my 2nd youngest brother, Will has Galbraith in his name, not that it’s proof, just that I’m jealous). Some poking around the net finds the clan tartan, and a wee bit of history.
My next problem is my cell phone. I have a Samsung SCH-3500, and the speaker sometimes doesn’t work. I had the handset insurance for it ($4 a month), but it still cost $35 to get a replacement, which is the going rate for the same model on ebay, but this way they wave the activation fee (I don’t know how much that is, but I bet it’s not cheap).
Problem is I have all kinds of phone numbers programmed in the phone. I had always assumed it would be easy to copy them out of the phone in the future. It would be a very looong process to do it by hand. So I found a cable on ebay that would probably go for $15 thinking that I could write a program to copy the phone book for me. Then I started poking around for docs on the internal phonebook: NO GO. That interface is not documented. I might be able to hack it somehow, but not wanted to waste time I found that FoneSync would do this for me. It’s not offered by the maker anymore, but it goes for $50 or so. Relying on my Scottish blood, I determind that it could be had for less and set up a sniper on an ebay auction.
I ordered a 802.11b access point (D-Link DWL-900ap) and pc card (USR 2410) with money I got for my birthday. They arrived today, one day before the UPS tracker said they would. I opened the boxes, plugged in the AP to ethernet and power, popped the pc card in, beep beep, linux recongnized the card, got an ip address and it just worked. Very cool. Possibly the easiest hardware install I’ve had in years.
I went out on to the porch and tried using bing, a bandwidth testing tool to see what the transfer rate was and boom no more link. Looking at the access point showed the WLAN light lit soldly (it was blinking before). Unplug the AP, plug it back in… same thing. I monkied with it for a while and then called Tech support. After a few minutes on the phone (it which they wanted to know a lot of details about my network, “what kind of router do you have?”) they said “send it back”. Grrr!
So the question is: Did bing kill it? or was the hardware defective? Quite odd. Not sure if I’ll run bing when I get the replacement.
Also no luck on getting kismet running with the pc card.
Zeke and Jessie came over the mountain this Saturday as part of my wife’s evil plan to surprise me for my birthday. Zeke was poking thru my comic collection and started looking at Transmetropolitian. He then stopped dead in his tracks and read the first trade paperback. I think he liked it. He borrowed the rest of what I have (if someone can buy me issues 46-60 I’d love you forever) and they are now spreading around Harrisonburg to all of his friends.
So I started poking around finding other stuff by Warren Ellis, the writer/owner of TransMet and found some other stuff by him. I found one comic online: SuperIdol, you need to know what a meme is. Here’s the best definition I found on the first page of search results on google (from this page):
meme: (pron. ‘meem’) A contagious idea that replicates like a virus, passed on from mind to mind. Memes function the same way genes and viruses do, propagating through communication networks and face-to-face contact between people. The root of the word “memetics,” a field of study which postulates that the meme is the basic unit of cultural evolution. Examples of memes include melodies, icons, fashion statements and phrases.
Tonite, my prefered browser isn’t working to well. Galeon is crashing when I switch windows. Quite odd as it work before and the only thing I can think of that I changed is the window manager (gnome/sawfish to icewm).
In the mean time I’m reading stuff via Dillo which works amazingly well for being 300kb in size.