whodawannahuh?

Make sure to check back this weekend for a big site overhaul. The reason for the lack of posts lately is due to my time being spent working on the style sheet for this page. (If you don't know what a style sheet is check out Wikipedia's entry for CSS). Have a great Friday everyone! =)

After my long wait today was suppose to be the day that I finally had internet in my apartment. Upon arriving home and testing my DSL connection and finding it still not working I called Verizon. The first person I spoke to tells me that my account had been cancelled two days ago but he had no idea why. I then get transferred to someone who should be able to tell me what's going on. After waiting a few minutes I am informed by this new person that my account had been cancelled because the speed I requested, 3Mbps, was unavailable in my area. Apparently I am too far from the office containing the signaling equipment. Personally this could be a very reasonable thing to happen, minus them canceling my account without telling me. The reason this is totally absurd is because I live in downtown Boston, and when I say "downtown Boston" I mean I am right in the center of the city. How could Verizon not be able to give me service due to my location?!?!?!?!?!?!? All hope is not lost though, the person on the phone was able to give me a slower service, 1.5Mbps, that should be up early next week. While this means I won't get as fast a speed and I have to wait longer, it's better then nothing right? Plus with my new connection I can browse for other broadband services in my area =p On a much more happier note I finally found a place that sells congee! Like I thought it is not on the english menu, you just have to ask for it. Yum! =)

Yesterday my Verizon modem finally arrived in the mail and when I got home I immediately began to set up my internet connection. The last time I set up a DSL modem with Verizon I remembered that in order to use a router with it you first had to log into the modem and disable its own router functionality. Knowing this I connected my laptop to the modem and entered 192.168.1.1. A login window came up and I entered some default information for the router and logged in. Once in I saw that there seemed to be a wireless linksys router contained in this modem, while this was pretty cool I had a much better router I wanted to us. Therefore I went about changing the password to the modem and then disabling the wireless abd router functions before logging out. After all of this, I logged back in to make a few more changes. Upon logging in I saw a completely different set of menus and the password was once again a default password. Thinking about this for a few minutes I realized that my laptop had connected to an unsecure wireless network a few minutes ago and that was the router I had changed the password to and turned off pretty much all functionality to... Oooppss. Someone in my apartment building is probably very frustrated right now with their router. They can't figure out why they can't connect to it, why it isn't connecting to the internet and why the password suddenly changed. While this was all accidental it definitely shows you why you should change the default password on your router and add some encryption on the signal. =p

For those of you who don't know I happen to live in Chinatown. This means there are a lot of places that sell very yummy food close at hand. One food I have been unable to find since moving here is congee. Congee is a great breakfast food because it is cheap, not to heavy, warms you up and is very scrumptious. I think I have been unable to find it because it's one of those food items most restaurant's don't put on their menu, but if you ask they have it. I guess I'll have to start asking around and see what turns up! If anyone knows of a place in Chinatown that sells good congee definitely let me know! =)

Is it bad that every time I've talked to my girlfriend this week she has fallen asllep?

Once again I have a link to an interesting article. The article is "What I learned@MIT." The main focus of the article is discussing different situations and comparing what the school was attempting to teach in different scenarios to what the author learned about the real world. In case you are too lazy to read the article here are some highlighted bullet points:

• Trying to learn everything from scratch is a loser's game - take advantage of available literature.

• So when I join a company and hear how smart the people there are - I'm not impressed. Unless they're also good people to work with. That's a lot harder to find.

• Keep the design as simple as possible. Adding complexity just for the sake of it is just risk maximization - not something you want to do in real world engineering projects, unless you're graded on complexity and not a working result.

Obviously some of his suggestions and ideas are focused more for the tech audience out there, but I think even these can be useful in many other situations. For instance, keeping a business plan simple makes it easier for your audience to understand and digest which helps getting your work done and progressing in your field. Well I hope you all enjoy the article, my short summary definitely does not do the article justice. Especially since I am very tired and am probably not writing to my normal "high" standard ;) Good night all!

Ever since I moved into my new apartment people have been asking me for pictures. I finally got around to taking some so I thought I would appease my fan club and post them. Unfortunately blogger does not handle posting multiple pictures very well, at least I was having some difficulty getting a good format. This means you will have to wait for pictures until I get my server up in running. If you really need to see pictures just send me an email or im me =p The one picture I did post is of part of my living room (what you can't see is the bookcase with the Christian books and geeky computer books). Enjoy!

Well I think I've finally decided that I am going to save up some money and buy a server. Once I do that I am going to start hosting my own webpage and blog! I plan to go with a Linux distribution for the server. Why you ask? Okay you probably didn't ask why but I'm going to tell you anyway =p One big reason is so that I can have more control over the setup of the blog. Another big reason to have my own server is I can use it to run a lot of different services without having to risk my main machine. Some services I am thinking about are ssh, vpn, and ftp. (The links take you to the wikipedia entry for each acronym if you are curious what they are) Getting the server up and running will be a fun process in it's self I'm sure. This will probably take me a couple months to get everything together and actually do, but expect big changes in the future! Of course all of this is assuming I finally get an internet connection in my apartment. By the way the picture is of Dell's new 30inch LCD display. It's only $2200 so feel free to buy me one =D