My son Travis and I went out Saturday to purchase some good beer from Total Wine. As I put the Red Hook Longhammer IPA and the high-gravity Rogue India Pale Ale on the cashier’s counter, I was surprised to be asked for my identification! I guess a three year old in tow doesn’t sway some people, eh?
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December 2007
Fifteen minutes
With amazingly warm weather Saturday, and after Kelly came back from her run going on about how awesome it was, I opted to get out myself. It was already 4:15 PM and close to sunset. The air was beginning to chill, but I didn’t care. I put on some shorts and hopped on my bike for a quick circuit down the greenway path and back. It took a mere fifteen minutes, but that ride did wonders for my health. I left feeling achy but returned absolutely energized!
I’ve got to make regular exercise a daily thing, especially since I’m working from home now. Plus, I’ve got to take advantage of these 70-degree December days.
OpenWRT on your DSL modem
I was happy to learn that some fine hackers have ported the excellent OpenWRT package to the very Zyxel (rebranded as Sprint) DSL modem I bought off of Craigslist for $20. Some of these Zyxel modems include an integrated WiFi access point, so in theory you could use Linux to control your DSL, act as your firewall, and push bits into the ether, all from one tiny little box.
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Dual-homed home
For those of you who were waiting with baited breath to know how my AT&T FastAccess DSL was working for me (you remember, the $10/month plan?), I have been slack in updating you.
In short, it works great. Not fast enough to replace my cable modem, however, not with 768Kbps down and 128Kbps up. It wasn’t more than an hour or two before Kelly was complaining about the slow connection.
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Idle engines
For the three years we’ve lived here I’ve watched the trains pass by my house. The bread man’s misfortune became my luck. I was going to finally introduce myself to the train crew.
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Let the calls start flying
As a frequent-flying geek I read with interest that JetBlue may soon roll out Internet access on its flights. When reporters raised the possibility of passengers making Internet phone calls, the airlines stubbornly dug in their heels:
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Truck snags railroad crossing gate at Durant Road
A bread truck traveling east on Durant Road caught a railroad crossing gate as it descended this morning, spilling loaves of bread onto the road and causing minor damage to the gate. No one was injured. A northbound CSX freight train was delayed for two hours while CSX workers repaired the gate. The accident happened around 8:30 this morning.
Raleigh police distributed the bread to motorists.
The hazard of updating links
I discovered that MT.Net‘s once-impressive Technorati Authority rating is about half what it used to be. I think this drop occured when I finally pulled the redirects that pointed the old Drupal links to my site to the new WordPress ones. Even though search engines (and others) coming to old links were told by my webserver to update their links, Technorati (at least) didn’t seem to pay attention.
Cheap Thoughts: flying saucer(s)
Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and present a crazy idea.
I do lots of thinking at 30,000 feet. I even do some at 10,000 feet on approach. Tonight I was marveling at the skill in which the pilot was using the rudder to counter the strong crosswind we were flying through. It planted a seed in my mind.
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Bad behavior from Bad Behavior
I was blogging away happily from the Atlanta airport tonight when suddenly MT.Net didn’t like me anymore. I got a message from my Bad Behavior blog spam blocker flagging my IP address. Since I was coming from the airport WiFi’s gateway address, I assumed that spammers and the like may have sent spam from the airport and gotten the address blacklisted. Still, I managed to get in one post from the WiFi before it blocked me, so that didn’t seem to be the right answer.
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