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Comcast

The past week was very aggravating, first of all our cable television goes out with a message reading:

We called Comcast and they sent out a cable guy on Friday, he showed up and explained that we weren’t receiving any channels because we had an analog cable box and that Comcast has switched everything over to digital so that they are compliant with Title III of Public Law No: 109-171. Good for them, they made the change early, their deadline for it is February 17, 2009 by law. Another problem that came up here was that President Bush may have spent time reading skimming through that bill and he approved it.

The cable guy unplugged the cable box and plugged the coaxial cable right into the back of our old RCA television. The television wasn’t capable of automatically tuning the different channels, so it ended in us realizing that the new TV that we didn’t get for Christmas was coming anyways. When the cable box was deactivated there was a screwup at the Comcast office with taking it off our account, they also took off our cable internet modem. It was remotely bricked. The cable guy didn’t have a spare in his van so he called in and scheduled for someone to come by on Sunday with a new one.

Sunday came and another cable guy showed up. The modem was remotely fixed by then but wasn’t registered anymore, whatever website you tried to go to it would redirect you to a Comcast page to download and install the setup program. Downloading it worked fine, but running it resulted in the spawning of a DOS window and an error message that basically said the executable was corrupt. The cable guy went to his van and fetched a CD with the program on it and it worked…up until it said that it couldn’t find a networking card on my computer when I was already on the network getting redirected to that Comcast page. It ended in me looking up the internet gateway from my router and the cable guy calling Comcast and telling them to push the registration through.

Our new television is a whopping 24″, compared to the 19″ that we’ve had since as far back as I can remember.

Christmas

I got some really sweet CDs and had fun with the family.

Bright Eyes: A Christmas Album

Everclear: Welcome to the Drama Club

Regina Spektor: Begin to Hope

New Year’s Day

It’s New Year’s Day Night right now and for a couple more minutes.

Nothing can better express my thoughts on this topic than the following Ctrl+Alt+Del comic:

If you don’t know what Winter-een-mas is then you can either read through the CAD archive of comics or you can read about it on the Ctrl+Alt+Del Wikipedia article.

Winter-een-mas is the LAN Party holiday.

That’s it for now.
-TinMan

So the next day I bought a new WRT54G v2 (same router) and decided that it is an awesome router with all the possibilities of its firmware since it runs linux, but it has major cooling issues, so I made a solution that’s ugly, but works. Once I get the time I’ll clean it up and make a bracket for the fan to be mounted with and adapt the fan to be powered by a wall outlet.

For now I have a silent 80mm fan taped to the top of it pulling air out of the router from the holes on top of it. The fan is powered by the NeonPulse server’s PSU since the router is always next to the server anyways.