0% of the 49005 people who have taken this quiz are like me

I took the 43 Things Personality Quiz and found out I'm a Lifelong Learning Self-Improving Extrovert

Why can't there be more of this in the world?

I rarely run across something as inspiring as this on ye olde interweb. This gives me hope in humanity.

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Verizon FiOS is Slow

Earlier this Spring, FiOS finally came to my neighborhood, and I jumped on it as soon as I could get an appointment for the installation. The installation was pretty straightforward (no house burning down or anything like that). The guy installing it was little more than typical telephone guy - he didn't really know shit about networks, but could run a wire all over the house. At the end of the install I asked him what the password to the router was so I could admin it. His response was something like, "Oh, they don't let you know the password. I don't even know what it is - I have a special password that's just used for setting it up. You'll have to call customer service to make any changes." I was about to have him rip the wires out right then and there - I'll go back to my DSL if that's the case - but, I decided to wait until he was gone and try to login to the router with some default passwords just in case he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. I was right: the router actually asks you to set an admin password the first time you log in. Nice.

That's not the point of this post though. A few days after the install I started to notice that browsing the interwebs didn't really "feel" that much faster than when I had DSL. In fact, from the time I clicked a link to the time the page was fully rendered seemed slower. WTF? I'm supposed to be surfing light waves... man. It didn't take long for me to notice that every time I clicked a link, the browser spent a lot of time "Looking up ..." That's right: Verizon's DNS servers are slow as shit. So, here are thousands of people switching over to 5Mbps or 15Mbps connections that don't allow browsing the web any faster than DSL because Verizon's DNS servers are overwhelmed. Smart. The sad thing is, most people won't even notice that's the problem, and they certainly won't know how to fix it.

Well, here's how you fix it: (yes, that's the third colon in this post - I had a classmate in high school that used to complain that the colon was severely underused, so these are for you Colston) To fix the issue, log into the router and change the DNS servers that the router uses. Duh. But, who to switch to (worst. grammar. ever.)? OpenDNS. It's fast, it's free, it's the right thing to do. If you have the wireless router that Verizon typically installs, you have the ActionTec MI424WR - just follow the link, then follow the instructions. Once you switch DNS servers you'll be surfing all blazing-fast-like, and best of all, you'll be reducing the load on Verizon's name servers, making life a little more tolerable for those poor schleps that didn't read my blog (life in general is better when you read my words).

Here's the last rub (no happy ending, sorry). The router periodically resets to use the Verizon name servers. WTF? I haven't looked much into it yet, but every few weeks I have to log back in and change the settings back to OpenDNS. I plan on writing a quick script to monitor it for me and maybe even log in and change the settings automatically (if I feel like parsing HTML - AFAIK, there isn't a telnet interface to the ActionTec... remind me to look into that.)

Why do I eat McDonalds?

Every time I eat McDonalds I feel ill afterward. It usually lasts about 20 minutes and ends with me unloading the cargo. I don't eat there very often, but about once a month a get a hankering for a number 9 (McNuggets meal), and I give in. I like the McNuggets better than the Chicken Selects. They just taste better... I think it's because I don't really believe that they are chicken. If they are chicken, it's some part of the chicken I don't normally eat (do chickens have lips?). The Selects, on the other hand, are almost certainly chicken, and they just don't taste that good. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it's the fries and not the chicken lips that are making me feel sick because I had the same feeling when I used to get the number 4 (Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal). I stopped getting the burgers there when McDonalds started printing ads on the side of their bags that said the burgers contained "100% beef." What the hell percentage of the burger was beef before that? What had I been eating? So, to summarize, I'm ok with eating McNuggets that probably aren't chicken, but I'm not ok with eating a burger that is anything besides beef. The last time I questioned what a burger was made of was when I was about 5 and I tried to convince my dad that, "of course hamburgers are made of pigs, why else would they call them hamburgers?" Yeah, yeah, and we drive on a parkway and park in the driveway. I've learned a lot since then. So, to answer the question: Why do I eat at McDonalds? Because it's so goddamn delicious. That's why.

UUIDs make me cry a little

So, I feel a little bad every time I create a UUID. Some part of me wants to conserve them. I mean, shit, their supposed to be universally unique, so if I create one for some nonsense trivial reason, I've used up one that could have been used for something important, like labeling a gene related to cancer, or tracking an incoming nuke. Sure, I know there are enough possible combinations that one can be created ever nanoseconds for billions of years before their all used up, but that's still a scarce resource. I bet someone came up with the same calculation for oil at one point. See where we are now?

So, I've decided to limit my use of UUIDs. I'm only going to create them when I absolutely need them. Only when a UUID is required and there is no other way of identifying something without it. It's my way of bringing a little balance to the universe. I'm doing the right thing. Good karma.

If you want to be jerk and use up UUIDs like there's no tomorrow, I guess you can go here and generate a bunch. In fact, they make it easy for you to do it in bulk (500 at a time). Go ahead. Jerk.

BitTorrent Google Maps Mashup

I had a thought this evening as I was checking the current peer list in my bit torrent client. I should point out that I don't really torrent much (if that's the verb), so the whole deal is pretty foreign to me. Although I understand it technically, I don't have much use for most of the torrentable content out there. I buy most of my music and video, so my use of bit torrent is limited to the odd seed I run into.

In any case, the idea... I thought it might be pretty cool to be able to look at the peer list (the list of torrent clients out there that are feeding and feeding off of you) in a geographical representation. The IP address would be used to locate the ISP (if not the client itself), and the current speed of download/upload could be represented with the size or color of the map maker. That would be pretty sweet (but not useful).

I figure someone out there is doing something like this already so I asked the Google. After sorting through a list of stuff that I wasn't looking for, I found this blog entry. I'm not sure if the guy made the Google Maps mashup or just found it. I didn't read the blog long enough to figure it out. After I found that the link to whatever he was linking to was broken I pretty much lost interest.

Maybe I'll find the time to create it myself. Probably not. But, that would be sweet (but not useful).

First post.

Google made it pretty easy to click a few buttons from iGoogle and create a blog. So, here it is. Maybe I'll post, maybe not. Whatever.