Just Like (a) Human

Oh, hello! I didn’t see you there.

I’ve been having some issues with wireless around the house lately.
The roomie has resorted to running a Cat5 cable from the router in the living room to his room so he can actually connect, because he’s that frustrated with the lack of performance — his drops are worse and more frequent than mine, it appears.

I’ve noticed that my connection will vary: It’ll drop to dog slow and unusable, with horrible ping times while the roomie can’t connect wirelessly or it’s like business as usual.

Since he’s gone to the Cat5 solution, he’s been pretty damn stable. I’m considering doing the same thing, but I don’t really like the appearance of Cat5 strewn across the floor (an issue I noted in season 1 of Furnish Our Apartment), which might cost me my geek license in some circles. It could be because I tend to stumble over it, though.

I’d like to run as little cable as I can to get the job done, so I did a little snooping.

We’ve got coaxial cable run around the apartment (thanks to the previous tenants, I’d dare say), which should allow me to move the modem. However, I remember that the last time the modem was more than a short throw away from its wall mounted jack, I had problems with the modem itself getting and keeping a signal.

The router, on the other hand, would be free to move.

Therefore, it appears that my best option to fix the connectivity issues in the apartment would be as follows:
Leave the modem alone. Pick up 50 feet of Cat5 and a power extension cable. Run it as neatly as possible from where the modem is to one of the closets. From there, move my IRC terminal (a WYSE Winterm WT9455XL running Ubuntu headless) and the router to this new location. Get them spun up and ready to go. Once I’m sure the two work by poking them from the wireless, then I’ll re-run my roomie’s Cat5 cable to his room to eliminate the extended run, and run a Cat5 for myself from the router to my room.

Part of me wants to put holes in the wall for this, but it’s an apartment. I should ask my landlord what I can do with regard to the wiring, and see if he has a problem with us redoing some of it to be neater than it currently is (since some of it is really tacky and abysmal — holes punched in walls without plates covering the deal, and placed in a bad position). Maybe knock a little off the rent for a month to let us redo the wiring, or something…

About 20 minutes ago, I logged in so I can update my WordPress install by Subversion. I see this:

[dollar@cake ~/pxnet_html]$ svn up
U wp-includes/version.php
Fetching external item into 'wp-content/plugins/akismet'
Updated external to revision 19778.
Updated to revision 6166.


Checking WordPress after that, I see that it is indeed WordPress 2.3, and just in time. I finished ironing out a few kinks here (UPDATE YOUR PLUGINS NOW) and there (Look at the new Plugins interface, now with “Update your plugins now” deliciousity) before I took the leap, and now, it’s official, with a nice green sticker on the WordPress.org homepage, 2.3 is here.

I had my first day of Dell training today. I found out that this contract will be on the rather interesting side, too, since we’ll be dealing with small to medium businesses, generally.

I just hate getting up at such an awful hour of the morning (read: 5 AM!), but if it puts the meat in the basket, I really ought not to complain.

Keeping it short and sweet tonight; take care.

How’s this for kicks?

It looks like the iPhone just went through a price drop (ALREADY), and Jobs is being kind in reimbursing HALF of the overpay price (The old price was $200 higher, remember) in the form of a gift certificate.

I’m still in the “WHY would I buy a six hundred dollar phone?” camp here, even though the phone is now only four hundred dollars, but I’m finding this whole thing to be truly funny.

I’m just waiting for the free suppository add-on to come with the iPhone (as well as the phone being usable on a carrier that isn’t AT&T) before I consider buying it, but I’d still be leery of buying it. It’d provide me with no features worth my time.

I finally caved in.

Since I wanted something else to play on my DS, and I came to the realization that we only live once, I decided to buy the R4 card for the Nintendo DS.

I simply wanted a card that had better compatibility than this Datel Games ‘n Music card I got at Wal-Mart a few weeks ago. Some of the homebrew stuff just does not run on the GnM all that well (DSLinux, for example), and I think it’s because of an artificially imposed bottleneck on the card itself.

So hopefully, I’ll be having some kind of fun with this thing next week.

I’ve noticed lately that whenever I attempt to blog a photo by phone, the post to this blog here fails. It’s getting annoying, despite everything I’ve tried to make it work.

I’ve tried release versions of WordPress. I’ve tried CVS versions. I am trying SVN versions. None of them get the blog posting on the first try, and that’s just totally annoying!
I’m just not sure who to point the blame at, though, because it might be my fault for mostly using CVS and SVN for WordPress, however, I haven’t tried on a non-SVN blog hosted on this domain.

I just wish I had a better way to make sure I could send an image from my Sprint phone and make sure it posts over to this weblog.

I’m also open for suggestions on how to fix my image blogging issue.

As a kid, I’ve had this fascination with languages of the world around me.

I once tried to take basic Spanish and French classes in the same year — I was in third grade. That act alone showed me an appreciation for people who have command of more than one language, because that year showed me how hard it is to learn a language solely by hearing it OR seeing it.

While checking my email accounts (goodness, I have many of them), I stumbled across a link where one can, for Free: Learn English with audio.
Given that English is my native language, I was inclined to toy around with the site, to see just how well it was done.

The home page is essentially bare, save for one Google AdWords box, and the flash object containing the flash cards (no pun intended), which I find to be a very good idea. Nothing says “Learn English” better than a gigantic flash ad for Verizon High Speed FiOS, right?

The Flash box on the page has five labels. Four languages are supported on a path to learn English: Spanish, French, Russian, and Hebrew. There is a standalone label that gives only the English, with no transliterations or translations of words to English, as well as the aforementioned language labels, whose contents come complete with a transliteration of the way the word sounds, as well as the audible enunciation of the words.

For example, I chose French.
For appliances, I see what we call a Stereo in English:
Stereo, sti’(r)io, chaîne stéréo
The first is the English spelling. The second is a transliteration of how we say it in English, and the last is the (familiar) French way of saying the same object. If I clicked on it, I’d hear the “sti’(r)io” as the enunciation.

It’s a pretty healthy way to teach the basics of words, though I admit, I don’t miss conjugating verbs with these cards (simply because I hated conjugating être in my French classes).

I can see how having a free resource to begin learning English as a Second Language from would be so useful.

[tags]ESL, English as a Second Language, Polyglot, Linguistics, Learn English, Contributors[/tags]