Who says you can't buy love?

[And I always thought stuff like that was an in joke that some cartoonist started up...]

So why this journal entry?

I want to discuss something that has troubled me for some time.

For better or for worse, mothers and fathers are removing themselves from their maternal and paternal roles. It began with the grandmother taking care of the kids centuries ago when the parents weren't around. It progressed to be the uncle or aunt. Soon after cousins are taking on the duty of parent.

It doesn't take long before the oldest child becomes a filial parent.

Then we enter the age of the babysitter. Have a friend come over and look after your kids for a while as a parent.

Next the baby sitter becomes a stranger called from a phone book.

Later the baby sitter is removed from the equation and instead laws are made to "protect" kids from what their parents won't.

And now we have software like Cyber-Sitter and MSN 8 to complete the transfer of parental duty from mother and father to a faceless corporation.

How long until the transfer of duty is complete and we finally become the Brave New (corporate) World many english teachers have feared?

I think it's about time that parents got down to some good old fashioned parenting. Your child should come home to a house filled with a happy mother or father always. That's your duty. If you can't fufill your duty it's your job to find a way to fix the problem.

Make it happen, parents. Make a difference in the world. Do your job at home as well as you do at work.

Just my 2 cents. And no, I'm not a parent, so don't expect me to understand the difficulty of juggling both jobs. I just see it as a black and white case of be a parent, or don't.

I can't believe it. I've heard the name before, but never bothered till I got bored tonight watching The Screensavers for the umpteeth time (hey, if it's good enough for the creator of DeCSS, it's gotta be good enough for me! But only on C-Band, none of that CanCon analog-rights-management-Max-Headroom-and-The-Thunderbirds-are-evil crap for me). I mean, it's has to be another cheezy site with nothing but crap music on it, right? emusic.com has turned me from the usenet junkie I was to the legal downloader I am now.

Best $9.99/month I've ever paid. Jondi & Spesh, Touchtone Terrorists, Jerky Boys, 808 State, Theivery Corporation, the list goes on.

I'm so glad these guys exist. DJing just got easier. Now, if only they had a way to list by artist's homeland, it'd be my CanCon special weapon.

Go there and try their free subscription (requires credit card). I think you'll find that 50 songs doesn't last.

Now, if only everything was 192kbps, I'd be happy. But even at 128kbps, the quality is quite good -- certainly good enough for my radio show.

emusic, count me as a happy customer.

--- Update [Oct 25, 2002]

emusic just passed my quality tests. No albums from William Shatner or Lenord Nimoy. Excellent.

Oh MAN this pisses me off.

My only windows machine gets infected with this when-u.com spyware crap and even Ad-Aware can't take care of it.

Their text file LIES -- they say it isn't spyware, well, shit, if it walks like a chicken, acts like a chicked, looks like a chicken, it must be so.

If you've been infected by when-u.com's crapware, try the following steps (I'll update if this works once I've rebooted):

Remove this key using regedit:

My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\WhenUSave registry key.
Stop "save.exe" process.
Delete "C:\progra~1\save" directory.

Just one more time, when-u.com, FOAD. I will firewall you permanently for the rest of my life on any router/system I ever touch. I hope you go out of business and they DON'T let you chapter 11. I hope the creditors send the repo men to steal your house. In short, piss off forever. I'm now looking for the names of whoever owns your company, because you'll NEVER get a job anywhere I work. Oh, and by the way Sears (any any other company I got ads from with this shitware) you're on my "don't buy from these companies for Christmas presents for the rest of my life" list.

Any why the hell does it take 20MB of memory to stream ads at me? I've seen trained monkeys program better than you guys.

I hope you're happy.

...other than slashdot screwing up when I post to my journal.

This USB cable is advertised with these features, which are lies and deceptions:

"...the Belkin Pro Series cable features molded-strain relief, double- shielding, and 24K gold-plated contacts for maximum conductivity and error-free data transmission."

No, gold makes it less conductive than the copper cable inside. Period. Staples, you can't change physics, sorry.

"It is constructed of the highest quality wire and has 20-guage power conductors for superior readability."

You read data from USB power lines now? This is just plain idiotic.

Have you seen any stupid product advertising lately? Discuss away!

Have a read of this metafilter thread. Slashdot is accused of banning user accounts.

Is it 100% true? I had always hoped not, considering the effort the editors appear to go to to keep the trolls on the site, but out of sight.

Reminder to self: Use "to go to to" next time I write an accounting report.

What a bummer. I just busted one of the antennas on my WiFi AP. Anyone have any simple OmniDirectional 2.4Ghz designs they'd like to share with me? I really don't want anything particularly high-gain -- the "crappy" antenna on the AP did the job just fine, and I have no burning need to use it outside the house. Replacing the antenna with something else should be easy -- the AP uses (what appears to be) a TNC connector.

If you do have anything you can suggest, please post it. I don't mind some soldering/etc. but my skills in the Ham radio department are seriously lacking, just FYI.

Thanks!

Is it safe to cook hot dogs through electrocution? If so, is it safe to eat them? If not, any suggestions to make it safe?

Hungry people at workplaces banning microwaves want to know...

The nice people at FutureShop swapped it for a decent Nokia 8390 which was priced the same.

I guess my extended warranty had something to do with this.

But either way, I guess I'll have to eat all those horrible things I said about FutureShop in the past (either that or simply state that they're a fine company as long as you avoid buying from the website or using their credit cards).

Thanks guys! If you're looking for a company that does support it's products, I guess this store isn't a bad place to start.

As Keanu Reeves would say.

I've become a little celebrity! Fun Fun Fun! I got mentioned on a website, (and one that is frequented by trolls, none-the-less!).

Why not visit the homepage?

[If you're the owner of that domain, please dude, lose the picture. It's dog ugly!]

It would appear not.

I think you'll be rather surprised and heartwarmed at the ending of this thread. Better read it before it's archived and half of it goes missing and it loses the threading...

Wow, new features are abounding! I think I'm finally starting to appreciate the moderation system I once disliked so much.

Rescore foes of friends is a GREAT feature -- it's easily knocked off many of the regular trolls that seemed to exist at 0 threshold.

Now, if only we could get a threshold that would put personal -2 comments out of view, rather than just fully moderated comments, I'd be all set and wouldn't have to deal with a lot of crap. Woohoo!

PS - One last thing I'd love to have. And option to re-moderate foes of foes and friends of foes. It'd keep the (albeit small) group of people who like the people I don't out of my face...

PPS - The remoderate X percent of new users system appears horrbly broken. Don't use it.

I was asked to detail how to build a computer, so I got lazy and found a link that says pretty much everything.

Some tips, though:

FlipChip processors (ones with the silicon die exposed -- ask the shop) aren't for new users. Stick with a P4 for your first build, or get the store to put the CPU and CPU Fan on the motherboard for you!

It's far easier to put the CPU and CPU Fan on before putting the motherboard in the case. Just be careful you don't bend / ruin the motherboard (don't let your screwdriver slip and scratch the traces on the motherboard).

Any other questions / ideas, just ask away... :-)

(Oct 12, 2002)

More moderation

90 + 22 - 8 = 104

------------

(original)

Got into a tiff with a Nikon lover lately, lost a few points. Hey, its only Karma, and I've got enough to cover it.

So (if I'm doing my math right, and I'm lazy and might not be)...

83 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 - 1 - 1 = 90

Update (Sept. 14, 2002)

It's been a while since I wrote that last journal entry, and my opinions on Look have changed, some for the better, a few for the worse.

Here's how my experience has gone since I first posted this:

The guy did show up at the time promised, and installed the antenna as expected. He (sort of) apologised for not having the next higher gain antenna with him, because with the length of cable run, and splitter to run the separate cable 'net box and TV Box it would be a little unreliable.

Well, he did install the antenna anyways, and ran cable all the way to the basement window (I told him I wanted to take over at that point -- besides, I doubt he wanted to do anymore with it). I connected it to the splitter, which is (AFAIK) the explanation as to why you have to buy TV service along with the internet service. Their cable boxes (Hybrid "Wireless" Cable Modems) don't put the usual 18V on the line to power the antenna. The TV receiver, however, does. So the power is siphoned off the TV cable line by the splitter (which I always thought were impossible to use with stuff like this, but I'm assuming this one is special) and applied to the antenna, and only the HF antenna frequencies are split to the separate devices.

The guy was nice enough to leave both the TV receiver, and the internet receiver here. I got them both set up in no time (the cable modem uses plain ethernet, no encapsulation, and hands out DHCP IP addresses -- nice for us linux fans).

After some hemming and hawing, I convinced LookTV not to send out their intnernet "technician", so those three visits got compounded into one.

Well, now lets get to the quality of the service:

Out here, I get about 37/100 for the signal level on my TV receiver. Not too good, but good enough (to a point). During wind, LookTV TV freezes up every 10 or 20 minutes, but the signal always comes back in (this is probably due to the antenna having to be almost on the very top of our 40 ft. TV tower). The internet, though, is much more reliable, and I've never actually seen it go out due to wind, does (very occasionally) freeze, and every once in a while the cable modem locks up, requiring a hard reset (bummer).

The strange thing about the cable modem (to me) is that a serial port on the back hooks into an external POTS modem (which was included with the cable modem for the $100 purchase fee -- woohoo!) which dials out whenever activity is detected. It was originally dialling a full 519 area code number, which I thought was long distance, so I put my serial cable sniffer between the cable and POTS modems. Fortunately, it wasn't, but Look changed the number anyways (which brings me to my next little problem)...

Don't ask the guys at LookTV to to change the dial up number on your cable modem if it works. For me, they screwed it up multiple times. It took a good few hours to get things right. Blech. At least now it doesn't sound like its dialling long distance (methinks they just stripped the 519 from the start of their number).

The other strange thing is their cable modem appears to make an automatic PPP connection with that POTS modem, using (I'm assuming) a username/password combo built into the modem (I hope it isn't common to them all). I didn't catch the username/password pair, sorry, and without a good reason I'm not going to try to find out.

Speeds are _excellent_. Even during what I think are peak hours, I easily get 1 Mbps from sites that can handle it. If I'm doing a windows update, I've maxed out at 3-5 Mbps. I'm very impressed with it.

Another little bit of icing on the cake is that the tower I'm pointed at (Guelph) is next on the list for a two-way service upgrade, which will be hella-cool for internet. :-) (But will increase the price from $19 to $39 a month).

Anyways, the TV receiver is a decent model, proprietary/customized to Look (it seems) made by RCA (but reasonably high-end, still), with a _far_ faster processor than most of the slightly older low cost Bell Expressvu/Dish Network models, however it is refurbished (who cares). The output from it is spectacular, EASILY beating out all Canadian satellite TV service, and matches the quality from DirecTV.

Pricing for the TV service is _very_ competitive with satellite services (I don't know about cable TV pricing, sorry). We get virtually every channel for about $35 a month. Not bad at all.

Anyways, that's about all I have to say about LookTV right now, except to say that if you can get their 2-way service, go for it. If you can only get their 1-way service, and don't mind the limitations that provides, go for that too ($19 a month for up to 5 mbps? You aren't going to find a deal like that ANYWHERE).

So, there you have it. A reasonably satisfied LookTV customer (although when they go 2-way I will ask for a higher gain antenna).

------------------------------

Ok, for those not living in Southern Ontario, LookTV are these guys. They offer wireless TV and internet services (not via satellite).

I should also mention that because I live near the Kitchener/Waterloo area availability of DSL/ISDN/Centrex/T1/Dry Loop services is extremely spotty (don't bother verifying it with Bell -- I have and they're lying). I'm not covered because Bell decided it was cheaper to run 15 km of wire to our small town than open up a remote CO. So, if I want high speed internet, the only options left are either wireless, satellite, or do-it-yourself. The only two companies I know of offering wireless internet in my area are LookTV and WorldWithoutWire (WWW). I contacted WWW about 1 1/2 years ago about working out a deal so I could get high speed internet from them, and possibly to distribute it to other people (at a good profit to them, of course). They said that unless I ran a business they won't deal with me. Fine, if that's their attitude, why bother?

Satellite internet was my next destination. After finding Canadian satellite internet far too expensive (over $500 CDN a month for what I use) I chose an American company (nebulink). Obviously, due to idiotic CRTC style laws (please FOAD CRTC -- criminals such as yourselves don't deserve to live in my country) I am required to no longer surf Canadian websites through high speed, which suits me fine. I pay $90 CDN a month for what ExpressVu charges $500 CDN. While unreliable, since SatMex just barely covers my house (and requires a nice 10 ft. dish to receive), its worth it when you save $410 a month.

So, a lot of this came down to LookTV. LookTV looks like a good option. They're local, they provide service to residential areas, and shouldn't have the horrible lag and fade problems satellite internet does have.

Anyways, back to LookTV now you have some background on my situation. I've been trying to get service from them for about 4 or 5 years (or since whenever they opened up). About 2 or 3 years ago they send a guy out in the pouring rain who checks for 5 minutes to see if there's a signal or not with some sort of handheld frequency counter. Of course he finds no signal, so he leaves and I'm still screwed. No problem, except I think it was a little lame that their only testing equipment is a handheld frequency counter.

A few months later I notice they no longer offer internet service. On their website it states "Due to high demand, we can no longer offer wireless high speed internet access". Yes, they said that they have too many customers, so they will have to shut down their internet operations to new people. Wow, now that's whacko, huh? Sortly after that, LookTV announces some major restructuring due to serious financial difficulties. This includes a decision to only service apartment buildings in the future. Weird.

Well, LookTV finally comes around to their senses and realises apartment bulidings are better serviced by cable TV. Lately they have offered service (TV and internet) to Residences again. I figure I'll give them another try.

Ho boy, this might be a mistake.

They have an awesome offer on wireless internet I can't pass up ($19.99 for virtually exactly the same amount of service nebulink offers me). I phone them up and tell them I'd like their internet. The lady tells me their deal on TV. I tell them I don't want TV, I want internet. She tells me I have to get TV with the internet. I figure this must be a package deal, but even at $50 total a month its still worth it. I tell her that's ok. Then she tells me I'm going to have to pay $150 for the TV receiver. I explain to her I won't be using it. I don't want your TV service. Don't give me the TV receiver -- I'll still pay the $50 a month anyways. No dice.

Well, in my head I amortize the new cost of the equipment and installation (about $400 total) and I figure I'll still break even in less than a year. I tell her to go ahead.

Now, here's where it gets even stranger.

She tells me that if there's no signal in my area again that I will have to pay for the installer's time. I explain to her that my neighbour across the street has it, and the antenna is pointing just slightly west of my house, and that behind my house is about 10 km of fields. There's absolutely no way that house can get a signal lock and I can't. Their antenna is about 15 ft. in the air -- I have a tower 40 ft. in the air. She says if he can't get the signal I still have to pay.

Well, at this point I'm a little angry, and I tell her that the new installer should put as much effort into finding the signal as he did for the guy across the street. She notes that house has a signal lock in the repair guys notes field. Ok, so at least they'll put the effort in. Good.

She tells me they'll be there between 12-5 on Saturday to put up the antenna, 12-5 on Sunday to install the TV receiver, and 12-6 on Wednesday to install the wireless network card. Thank God I don't get paid $40 an hour like the installers or I'd be broke when I said yes.

Well, it gets to 4:30 on Saturday. No show. I phone 'em up. Turns out the time entered in the computer is 12-5 on Sunday for the antenna and the TV and Wednesday for the Computer. Well, normally I'd be POed, but since its not going to actually eat into any time I don't have allocated already, why the heck not?

So, tomorrow I'll give you an update as to whether this lame-ass company can measure up to a tiny satellite company in the US.

And I'm still not happy that I can't install the antenna myself. I've done my own BUD (twice), KU (twice), and DSS dishes (five times), some with only about 3 dB above the noise floor, and this is supposed to be so hard they won't let me do it.

Oh well, could be worse I suppose.