Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, like most of the network denziens of the year 2000, I use a wireless network. 802.11g, no WEP (I use application-level security when such things are appropriate). And, because I live in a lath-plaster house, I spend most of my time staring at signal level meters that show one bar at best.

Recently, I had reason to go to Fry’s electronics to pick up a high-gain antenna or three. I got one USB adapter with a 8dB antenna (it looks like a little microwave dish, it’s adorable) and a signal strength meter, and that’s kind of cool, and I got a 10dB omni and a 15dB ‘corner’ (i.e. 90 degree slice) antenna and put them up.

The results could best be described as ‘strange’.

With just the corner antenna operating, I get 5 out of 5 signal on my laptop in the room that previously would regularly disconnect because of poor signal quality. However, when I add the omni to the mix (my access point has two antenna connectors which go, as far as I can tell, to two seperate transcevers) the signal goes *down* to about three bars. As near as I can tell, I’m better off throughout the entire house, signal strength wise, with just the 15db corner.

This makes NO sense. There are even places in the *shadow* of the corner antenna that do better with just the corner than with the corner and the omni. It’s like the omni is 180 degrees out of phase or something…

Anyone have any ideas?

So, recently I found the email addresses of a bunch of my friends from the late eighties and early ninties, and emailed a bunch of them. Two of them replied to my first ‘ping’ style email, but attempts to build a further conversation were unsuccessful.

Now I can’t decide what to do… do I email them back and try to get a conversation started? Do I just accept that they’re not interested in being friends, either because they remember me as annoying (I probably am) or because they don’t remember me at all, or because they’re just busy and don’t really have time for emailed corrispondences..

I don’t know. One of these people was fantastically important in my life at one point (even though I was never as far as I know important in hers) and it kind of hurts that they wouldn’t even bother to trade a few mails with me. Okay, so it really hurts. But I know I’m being too sensitive, and that bothers me too..

So maybe I overreacted on the IRS thing a little.. it turns out they were just notifying me that they were going to drain all my bank accounts unless I set up a new payment plan with them because the old payment plan didn’t take into account that I wouldn’t be done paying it off by the end of 2005.

So I called them, and they were very nice and made arrangements to continue my payment plan and as long as I have everything paid off before next year, all will be okay.

S.

I haven’t seen the contents of the aforementioned mails from the IRS so I don’t *know* that they want to either audit me or jail me. I’m just reacting to my fears based on my complete inability to keep records straight.

So, I’m in Socal, and according to K. there are registered letters from the IRS. Given my sloppy (and often nonexistant) recordkeeping, and tendancy to guess at numbers I don’t actually know the value of, I’m sure that they’re a audit, and that I should expect at least a year of jail time.

I’d kill myself, but I hear the IRS actually has agents in the afterlife..

Okay. It’s been a long time (Reletively) since I’ve been whining about religion and my lack of ability to fit smoothly into the one I was given by my parents. So I thought I could get away with doing a little more of it. Again, I’m going to pick on Genesis.

Okay, so God creates Adam and Eve. Then he tells them not to eat the apple. How is it that God shares a language with Adam and Eve?. They’re freshly created – and as anyone who has dealt with human children knows, humans have to learn language, it doesn’t come programmed into us from the factory – and yet, they share a language with God and with each other. Seems to me a whole lot of stuff got left out of the story there. For that matter, exactly what language does Ze L-oh-rrr-dee speak? We know it’s not english, it’s probably not aramiac – it would be pushing credibility rather far to think that the supreme being in charge of everything happens to speak english when only a third of Earth does. Chances are it’s not a human language at all, is my thinking on the matter.

And yet, in the sermon on Genesis, when they’re talking about the wickedness of the humans who ate of the apple.. how dare they disobey God’s commands – like we’re not all *designed* to disobey authority (by all indications) – no one ever mentions the ludocracy of the language barrier. What, did God flash-load a entire language into Adam and Eve so he could talk to them? If so, how did he pick which language to load, and does he do this regularly?

I’m not saying there isn’t a God, or possibly several. I’m convinced that there is. I’m just pretty convinced that there isn’t much human literature on divinity that is anything other than pure guesswork and stories. But, hey, I could be wrong..

(p.s. it still annoys me.. Jesus wasn’t named Jesus! Stupid western culture can’t even get anyone’s bloody name right.)

Okay, so as many of you know I’ve got this, well, *thing* about encryption. Not a thing to the point where I sit around and argue about cryptographically random noise, but I like to ponder. So I had this idea that I’m sure has occured to just about everyone at some point:

Use a DVD as a one-time pad.

OKay, so it’s got weaknesses. But, any given CD/DVD probably has just about every bit string you could ask for. You just send your data as a series of offsets and lengths (probably encrypted using some other method just to make things further obfuscated). The person you’re sending the data to knows which movie or CD the offsets and lengths refer to.

Okay, so it’s not so much useful as silly.

S.

(credit to Kayti for finding it)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNl9ESk5t4Y&search=80s%20music

S.

One of the first music videos I ever saw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwYYkmAtNuE&search=80s%20music

for happy endings, it takes two…

Words that send fear into the heart of every user of debit cards.

My bank recently decided to reissue my debit card as a mastercard instead of a visa – not something that I really understand, but okay – and (grr) turned off my old card without waiting for me to activate my new one. Well, okay, so it’s been like two weeks since I got the letter, but still.. what if I’d been out of the country? I really feel like they ought to keep the card working until the expiration date if it is at all technically possible..

(And now I have to worry about which automatic billing things are broken, too. Grr. Grr. Grr.)

I took a test on the web for ADD today – Cutoff is 20, and I had 61 points. Which may explain why I’m writing a journal entry instead of writing code that needs to be done by tomorrow night.