I’ve finally regained my strength from the mayhem that happened this weekend. Monk and I went to ROC Friday night and didn’t come home ‘til Saturday afternoon. COD2 goodness was had by all. I played a lot of Quake 3 instagib too. As Monk would say, “Good times. Good times.” A former co-worker broke his ROC cherry too. I think he had a good time. 
When I got there, I broke out the laptop to find any open wireless networks in the immediate area. Low and behold “Cathy” put out 768k goodness. But, ironically enough, we found a nice connection in-house and used that instead.
Work is really going well. It has been such a change in attitude, atmosphere, and life that I find myself smiling from time to time for no reason. The Hell in which I used to have to commute to every day has slowly crept from my soul. I feel like this freight train of BS has been lifted off my shoulders and that I can start to live my real life. I also feel like I’m finally able to use mainstream technology rather than living in the past. I used to think that I was keeping up with tech. I was mistaken.
The 915 MHz wireless link is limping along; creeping up to its inception anniversary. A large cellular company put up a tower around 2 miles to the NE. Since that time the signal strength for my network has been cut in half. I’m been researching ways to cut out the cable at both locations. That will increase the signal strength 100%. Amplifiers. Different brands of gear. Different frequencies. I’m just not catching a break on staying with the 915 Mhz platform. Solid state hardware would be great for hardware failure issues.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
Fitzwell and I did a bit of wardriving last night in Kalamazoo. I was running Kismet on my laptop (Intel Pro Wireless 2200BG) and he had a Linksys card (WPC54G) in his. I’d find networks without security using Kistmet and he’d associate with them using WinXP. Neat stuff. All told, we found 700 different access points/wireless cards in the time we drove around. I’m going to say we covered probably 4 square blocks. I’m thinking about doing it again, but this time during the day and with an external antenna.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
I’ve writing this post using the latest version of the Ubuntu 6.06.1 live CD. I’m also using a Digital RoamAbout 915Mhz PCMCIA wireless card to connect! This means I can use this type of card with a current Linux kernel and get a 915Mhz link. The first PCMCIA card I bought off eBay had a bad antenna module. I didn’t know that at the time because it was the only card I had. Today I received four more of these cards from an eBay auction. All of them work and I was able to test that the first card I bought… hence the bad antenna module. My next hurdle is trying to figure out how to hook one of these PCMCIA cards to an external antenna. The good news is I have a bad antenna module to hack up for practice.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
The owner’s son from my previous employer called me the other day. It seems that the storms we had a few days ago had taken out his DSL connection… basically frying his modem. Verizon sent him a replacement but it just wasn’t working. His PC and his wife’s PC both would connect for approximately 2 seconds and the “network cable disconnected” message would come up. It would cycle through this repeatedly.
For troubleshooting, he had a switch that I had given him in storage. I had him connect the PCs to that. It did the same thing. I told him that I couldn’t believe both network cards would have gotten nailed leaving the PCs in working order. As a last ditch fix, I had him get a couple of network cards from his company and install those. The next day I got a call that the replacement network cards fixed his issues! Unbelievable! To have two network cards get zapped and the voltage not actually go farther into the motherboard is just amazing. He’s happy and I’m shocked that my recommendation worked!
Griminal Grim's Ramblings
I played around with databases today. I’ve been using MySQL for the last few weeks to do the chores for my Visual Basic 2005 projects. Today I used the DB2 ODBC connector to access the AS/400 tables. Goodness at its finest! I’ve set the ODBC connection to have read-only access though. I don’t want to muck anything up. Reporting and data access for custom programs will be the extent of my usage. This is the way a corporate database should be used IMO. Writing directly to production tables that the ERP package uses is a big no, no.
I also upgraded to Visual Studio 2005 Standard. The price of $240 wasn’t that bad.
Griminal Grim's Ramblings