In my ongoing quest to find a moderate (read: reasonable and not over the top) conservative blog, Little Green Footballs is surprising me. Good reading.
Author: Jan Dembowski (page 37 of 96)
This morning I heard the results of an election I was following: NY-23 went to Bill Owens.
Just to be clear, NY-23 is a district that is on the Canadian border and except for it being a special election it was no big deal. What made it a big deal is that when a moderate was selected to be the Republican candidate, prominent national Republican groups went ape. So the other Republican candidate ran on the conservative ticket and trashed Dede Scozzafava. And of course these prominent national figures played the “Purge the Party! Get rid of all the RINOs!” song.
Toss in President Obama’s name and you get people around the country weighing in just for the press (yes I do mean that Alaskan Quitter and professional public speaker).
So now Bill Owens is going to represent NY-23. The Republicans will keep going after their loyalty oath and any moderates in the national spotlight will have to change their spots or lose any hope of getting re-elected. Any chance of these geniuses getting it is out the window.
This is not a gun totting white-christian only country. Most people I know are moderates. It’s just that the radicals on both side of the aisle get most of the press. I don’t want a radical government from either side, I want one that will actually solve problems without violating the law or sacrifice the constitution for security. This name calling and purging of people in the middle is just plain stupid.
This is what happens when you want to save money. You work around problems. See that power strip above my PC? It’s super velcro’ed to my desk.
My PC has been acting up for a while this year. After a few hours of usage, it gets to a point that if I need to restart the PC, it’s 50/50 if it will come back to life. The common denominator is that if I leave my PC plugged into the power socket over night, I won’t be able to use my PC in the morning.
I would have to reach behind my PC and pull the cord out of the power supply. I don’t know if it’s the power supply or the mother board, but I don’t want to spend any money on this machine. I just got into the habit of pulling the plug when I shut the PC down.
That’s not very technical so today I went to Radio Shack and picked up a power strip and some super velcro. I stuck the strip onto the side of my desk and have my PC, speakers, monitor, and WD MyBook plugged in. When I shut down the computer, I wait till it’s fully off and toggle the strip’s on off switch.
It’s low tech but does the job for now.
I’m downloading Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix right now for installing on my Acer Aspire One. Normally I would BitTorrent it but with FIOS it’s coming down directly at +2.1 MB/sec.
Ubuntu 9.10 is out, get it at http://www.ubuntu.com/. I’m planning on checking out UNR this weekend.
That was easy. I ordered Vonage yesterday and my V-Portal arrived today.
All I did was plug the Internet port into my FIOS router and my wireless phone into the phone jack. Once it acquired an IP address, it downloaded a firmware update and rebooted. That was it and I was off and running.
Before I converted to FIOS, my Optimum Triple Play came with a phone line via the cable modem. I had the regular house line with Verizon and a home office line with Cablevision.
I used that line strictly for work. It was the number that the NOC would call in the middle of the night when I had to provide support. That way only myself and Lily got woken up and the rest of the family did not get disturbed.
Since I discontinued Optimum Online, I lost that line. Going forward Lily and I plan to use a second line for both work and personal use.
Today I ordered the second line with Verizon. It came out to $44.99+tax each month and had the Verizon Freedom Essentials plan. No international calling but calls to the US and Puerto Rico were bundled in. A quick check with Vonage’s web site and I called back Verizon and canceled the order. I ordered the Vonage World plan for 24.99+tax per month and that includes calling internationally to 60 countries.
For anyone that has been under a rock for the last 6 or 7 years, Vonage provides a box that connects to your network and does VoIP. One end of the box goes into your LAN/Internet connection, the other end goes into your telephone. No Internet connection means no Vonage.
There are several things I like about Vonage.
Caller ID and call waiting. Vonage looks like a regular phone and has all the usual features that you expect these days.
Transcribed voicemail. You setup in your Vonage dashboard your voicemail so that it’s not only accessible form the web, you also get a transcribed e-mail with the WAV file as an attachment. I can have that go to multiple e-mail addresses so both Lily and I know when someone left a voicemail as well as the text of what they said. It works, I’ve already left myself a voicemail and got a kick out of the e-mail that soon followed.
Call forwarding and SimulRing. Call forwarding is one thing, but ringing multiple lines can be cool. There are times when we’re expecting a call and we don’t want to miss it. Now we can forward the call to ring both our cellphones. After 30 seconds the call will go to voicemail.
Network Availability Number. If your Internet connection goes down, you can have a standby number for forwarding to. No Internet connection? No problem, just forward to your cell phone. This forwarding will only occur when the Vonage box falls off the network.
My Vonage V-Portal (the hardware to provide a phone jack) is arriving tomorrow so I expect to beat up the service a lot.
I examined the logs for my visitors and noticed a couple of hits for the search “FIOS channel guide not updating”. When my FIOS was installed last week, I had that exact problem and here is what I found out.
Make sure your FIOS cable modem is working. Log into http://192.168.1.1/ with the default admin password combination (look it up) and make sure that your set top boxes are listed.
See that column in the middle of the web page? That lists your PC and your set top boxes. On my installation they are labeled IP-STB1,2,3, etc. and they are all Connection Type: Coax. The setup boxes need the FIOS Internet gateway to communicate via IP to Verizon and get the guide data. If they do not show up there then they are not getting any updates.
One of the Verizon people I spoke with mentioned that some people hardly use the Internet portion of FIOS and were not aware that the service needs both to work. After two weeks all the guide data was expired; once that customer switched on the Internet gateway the guide data came back.
Of course, that wasn’t my problem. For me it was that the splitter installed in my cable line was not up to speed and was interfering with my set top boxes getting the guide data. The tech replaced the splitter and everything started working. That splitter was from my Cablevision installation and the first tech should have replaced it. No hard feelings and I’ve been enjoying the service including the ability to remotely schedule recordings.
Wow. While doing my early morning browsing I came across retroCrush. I think me and my brothers took that catalog to the electronics store in the RKO Keith’s theater in Flushing. The store was part of the building and next to the ticket booth up front.
I remember because the Atari games were very cool and we had to save our allowance to buy the console and games. I also remember because that electronics store was crooked and pulled a bait and switch. The ad they had in the newspaper said one thing but when you got their (with a crowd of other kids) they said it was a mistake and they would not honor their own ad.
That was not a bad lesson for a kid to learn and me and my friends went shopping elsewhere. Now a days all my serious purchases are made online but I do like going to stores if only to see the games and other toys in person.
That store is long gone and RKO Keith’s has languished in limbo for 30 years. But visiting retroCRUSH brought back some fun old memories.
A Verizon tech came out yesterday morning and replaced a splitter on my cables. Poof! The TV guide is now working. I’ve had it for less than a day but the wiz bang factor is making the service look great.
