I want to dump Verizon DSL because of both the poor quality of the link and the ultra-crappy tech support. I have heard good things about DSL Extreme, so I checked them out. They advertise their ability to switch you off an existing DSL provier -- Verizon being called out by name -- with very little down time. Sounds great. Cheaper and faster than Verizon. So I sign up.

Today I get a call telling me that they can switch me, but first I have to cancel my Verizon service. Then they will get me up in 2-3 weeks. But I can get dial-up service in the mean time. Oh boy! I work from home and depend on my DSL service for everything. 2-3 weeks out of service is not an option.

Bummer. I was really looking forward to dumping Verizon. The DSL Extreme web site is pretty misleading IMO.

The home network is growing in complexity. No shock to /.'ers there. I used to have one desktop plugged into my network connection. Now I have a desktop, a laptop, a Vonage phone, a Squeezebox music player, and two TiVos. I'm wondering if what others use for router hardware; what works and what doesn't. My network is a bit sluggish and I wouldn't mind upgrading the hardware if it makes sense.

Right now I've got an SMC Barricade router/wireless AP as the heart of the system, and a Linksys RTP300 that came from Vonage.

I'm getting weary of having half assed telephone conversations with people. Talking with someone who is using a crappy bluetooth headset while making dinner and yelling at their kids is not having a quality conversation. You have about a quarter of their attention to begin with, then you can't hear most of what they say because the headset fades in and out -- although it does a magnificent job of picking up all the background noise. This goes for people in their cars as well. If you're operating your motor vehicle, don't call me. Wait til you're at home or in your office or wherever. It's disrespectful all the way around to do this multi-tasking; you aren't giving anyone your full attention.

Hmmm...why is there no Vonage category? Or at least a VoIP category.

I just signed up for Vonage to support a home office now that I'll be working out of my house most of the time. I needed a second line and thought I'd give Vonage a whirl instead of having Verizon set up a second voice line to the house. So far I'm less than satisfied.

I've had a variety of problems, some of which I've debugged and some of which persist. The major problem was basic failure to get a dial tone. I finally deduced by trial and error that if I disconnected my laptop from the Linksys router that Vonage supplied that this problem went away. The "quick start" instructions that you get give you no clue that you shouldn't plug anything into those four seductive ports on the router. I will say that the router docs do indicate that you shouldn't use the router to support additional devices. This, of course, raises the question of why the ports are there. If the thing can't do anything other than support a phone, then it should have two ports: Network in and Phone out.

After putting the laptop back on the wireless network I was able to make calls. But when someone called me I could not hear them. In some desperation I checked my firewall and saw that it was logging UDP flood attacks...hmmm. Apparently it saw incoming calls as UDP flood DoS attacks and blocked them. I changed the firewall settings and can now receive calls.

The router still freaks my phone out from time to time. I have a Panasonic 2-line phone (a KX-TS3282). From time to time it will just do odd things, like beep, flash all the extension lights in unison, or turn on the intercom. I can only theorize that it's getting spurious signals on the input line. I have no idea how to fix this.

Vonage has been of absolutely no help in all this. Their web page's help is useless -- it's really just a FAQ. I submitted a service request from the web site and have heard nothing. I followed this up with two different emails on the two above problems and have received nothing more than an automatic "we got your mail" message.

This is really poor. I would guess that most anyone would plug a device into the router and would thus have the dial tone problem. The incoming call problem is even worse, because it requires some degree of network sophistication to look at the firewall logs, realize what a UDP flood attack is, and configure the firewall to deal with it. Is John Q. Public going to do this? No, so I guess Vonage is either for geeks or it's for people with very simple home networks that don't have a firewall.

My A Guide to Middle-Earth desktop calendar has the same entry for August 8 and August 9. I feel ripped off.

I recently purchased two airline tickets to fly from Los Angeles to Baja California on Alaska Airlines. The base price of the tickets was $164.00 each, round-trip. Not bad. But each ticket had $84.79 of taxes added to it! That's a 52% tax. WTF???

AFAIK this wasn't an advertised price, but it could be. This is the sort of thing where you see the ad, think "hmmm...300 or so bucks for two of us to fly...not bad." Then it turns out that it's 500 bucks for two. What am I getting for that $169.58 of tax?

I wrote to Bank of America to point out a few things about their ATM system and have put the note here for kicks. BofA's been running commercials here in SoCal about how wonderful their ATM system is going to be. As I point out in my note to them, the only thing I care about is the ability to deposit a check and get cash. Everything else I'll do online, or in extremis, inside the bank. Anyway, the note's below.

As a long-time BofA customer I have a couple comments on the evolution of ATMs in your system. This morning I swung by your La Habra branch (200 E La Habra Blvd) and saw that you have new systems installed there. I had intended to do a deposit/withdrawl, but all six envelope drawers were empty. So I settled for a plain withdrawl. Anyway, my comments on the new ATMs:

* I was asked if I want to use English every time, which I do. I assume this setting will be remembered. I never did understand why you did away with the old system of having dual English and Spanish prompts for "Enter your PIN and press this key." That got two operations with one key press.

* Fancy LEDs around the card slot. Do we really need this? I think most people will figure out where the card goes.

* Touch screen. This has got to cost more than the old softkey approach, and there's only one place this money comes from (me, the customer).

* Giant receipt. The new receipt is about 3.5" wide, which means I have to fold it to get it in my wallet. I think as a rule your receipts should not be larger than a piece of US currency.

Upgrades are great, but they should have a purpose. I suppose the touch screen enables a bunch of new features, but I doubt that I'll use any of them. For me the ATM is for deposits and cash dispensing. Everything else I do online.

Thanks for listening.

- Jeff Allison

I recently purchased the full-blown Extended Edition of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings on DVD. So far I've watched The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers and I'm very happy with the extended versions. I've been a huge fan of the book since my high school days, some 25 years ago, so I originally approached the films with a mixture of hope and fear. Seeing them all in the theater I was pleased. Jackson and the cast did a wonderful job bringing Middle Earth to life. There were changes from the book, of course, some of which bothered me and some of which did not. Excising Tom Bombadil was no big deal, as he doesn't affect the story. I was bugged by what they did to Faramir, however, as it seemed to me that his character changed for no good reason. The extended edition of TT deals a bit more with Faramir (and there may be more in RotK, but I haven't watched it yet). In general the extra stuff in the first two movies is very good, and really adds a lot to the richness of the story.

I was pretty surprised by how well these films did a the box office. Being intimately familiar with the books I had no trouble following what was going on, but if you hadn't read them then I have to believe you were lost a good part of the time. When the fellowship have to decide between Caradhras, Moria, or the Gap of Rohan, do people who have not read the book and have no mental map of Middle Earth really know what this decision is about? More importanly, do they care?

I think they do not care. I think the majority of movie-goers want to see attractive people in exciting situations, and that's it. Define the good guys and the bad guys and let them have at it. So you get Orlando Bloom riding an orc shield down the stairs at Helm's Deep. That's just the price we pay to get a decent treatment of a great book on the screen. It just seems odd to me that the audience doesn't demand more. Peronally I feel annoyed if I don't get the backstory or if it doesn't make sense. If the characters have no motivation for doing what they are doing, then why should I care about it?

The same thing showed up in the prequel Star Wars movies. Neal Stephenson wrote an op-ed piece about this for the New York Times that wound up generating a /. article. The Stephenson piece has gone to NYT archive hell, but you might be able to find it out there somewhere. He poses the question, "Whose ship are Annakin and Obi-wan on at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith?" I think most people would have no f'ing idea. And in this case it's not really their fault, because a bunch of the Star Wars prequel backstory is not even in the movies, it comes from the ancillary material on line and in various print forms. The point is that the audience doesn't care. They just want some bad guys there to cross lightsabres with Annie and Obi-wan.

I was finally able to procure a Logitech Harmony 880 remote control, stories of which have been circulating since early this year. I have owned an early Philips Pronto for several years, and like it quite a bit. However I found that when watching the TiVo or using the Squeezebox I would use the native remotes rather than the Pronto. Since the point of a fancy remote is to have one remote, it seemed that the Pronto was not living up to its duties. Part of this is the touch-screen interface. While nicely flexible, the touch-screen does not have the tactile feedback that a real button has.

Enter the 880. This promised to be as flexible as the Pronto, with a cool web interface for programming, while using real keys to do the controls. Sounds great, so I bought one. Found it online for a bit over $200 US, so this is not a cheap toy. List price is around $250, but as of mid-July you just cannot find these in stores.

The unit showed up yesterday and I'm pretty pleased so far. The remote feels great, and works as promised. The online programming tool knows about scads of devices, so the onerous task of learning from your existing remotes is gone. Instead you go to the Logitech web site and work through an online package to set up your device. Now here's the first drawback: it doesn't work with Firefox. Big bummer.

The second drawback is that the unit doesn't seat in the cradle much of the time. You have to jiggle it a bit to ensure that the batteries are truly charging. That could be a drag.

Final complaint: as an enticement to register your product, you are offered a 20% discount off a new Logitech product. OK, sounds good. I go through the registration rigamarole and get the discount code. With an expiration date of July 18, 2005! That's weak, guys. If you want to give me a discount, give me a discount. Don't make me use it that same day. Boo.

I worked for Sun Microsystems for three years, during which time I was forced to use StarOffice/OpenOffice on a regular basis. Like most people I cheated -- I would use MS Office to create docs and then simply import them into SO and save with a different format. The reason everyone did this was because the SO programs were just so kludgy, slow, and prone to sudden death. Seeing that the 2.0 Beta of OpenOffice is now available, I figured I'd give it a shot to see if it is any better.

Early reviews are not good. I loaded up a basic Word file and it looked fine. No problems there. Then I loaded up a moderate Excel spreadsheet. This is about 180 rows by 40 columns or so, single sheet. It has lots of references in it: cell A42, for example, might have a value that depends on the value in A40, which depends on the value in A39, etc. Excel has no trouble with this, but OO Calc choked on it, putting 527 errors ("Interpreter error, too many references" according to the help) everywhere.

That's pretty much a show-stopper for me. That and the fact that it takes sooooo much longer for OO to load as opposed to MS Office. Maybe there's a way to pre-load OO that I haven't found, but it needs to load a doc in less than 30 seconds.

Thunderbird is good enough to get people moved off of Outlook and Outlook Express. I wish I could say the same for OpenOffice versus Microsoft Office, but I can't. I didn't spend a lot of time with it, but if the spreadsheet can't deal with a pretty simple Excel file, then I don't see any point in learning more about OO. There may be a better way, or at least a different way, to do what I'm doing. But so far my post on the matter in the OO forums has gone unanswered.

Steve Lopez writes a thrice-weekly column for the L.A. Times, which I read regularly and usually agree with. Today's entry, which you can find here, but which I have reproduced below in case it disappears, focuses on the inappropriate partying going on in Washington as people die in Iraq.

People die all the time, of course, and life goes on. But this administration invaded Iraq for no valid reason so blood is on their hands. Reasons were given, but they were all invalid: first were the weapons of mass destruction. Now we have officially given up the search for these weapons that we "knew" were there. Second was the "fact" that Iraq was a breeding ground for terrorists, and the oft-hinted at connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Iraq was not a breeding ground for terrorist, but it sure is now. What could make Osama bin Laden happier than an imperial adventure into a Muslim state by the USA? Prior to the invasion bin Laden had little regard for Hussein's secular dictatorship. Finally we were told that Hussein is a bad guy, that he mistreats his people, and just has to go. Yes, he's a bad guy. Yes, he mistreated his people. But there are many bad situations in the world. There's North Korea, Sudan, Burma/Myanmar, and many more. If the charter of the USA is to invade every country with a "bad" government, then we had better get busy.

A war based on lies that has claimed more than 1300 American lives, maimed tens of thousands, and killed who knows how many Iraqis? And a party while it's going on. Pretty sick.

Steve Lopez's article follows.

TEVE LOPEZ / POINTS WEST Mothers Mourn as the Elite Party On Steve Lopez

January 21, 2005

The first mom I spoke to by phone Thursday morning was Celeste Zappala, whose sons used to hang around with my boys now and then in Philadelphia. Zappala was in Washington for President Bush's inaugural, demonstrating against the war that took her eldest boy.

"I'm at Foundry United Methodist Church, where I just spoke about the cost of war," said Zappala, who carried a poster-size photo of her son, Sherwood Baker.

Baker, a 30-year-old National Guardsman, was killed April 26 last year while searching for weapons of mass destruction. Baker, a husband and father, had gone to Iraq with a walkie-talkie and navigational device his family bought for him because they were not provided by the military.

And now his mother was in Washington on the day of a grand inaugural celebration that would cost more than $40 million, most of it paid for by American corporations. When I asked Zappala what she meant by the cost of war, she answered:

"I mean that there are 1,370 American soldiers dead, 10,000 soldiers injured and at least 100,000 Iraqi people dead. A country has been destroyed, and we make new enemies every day, but we never see the coffins coming back because there has been a deliberate effort to sanitize the war," Zappala said.

"We're here as witnesses to what the real costs are. You know our family's been demolished by this, and my grandson grows up without a father. That's what the war means.... Is this the time to spend $40 million for flowing champagne and caviar? While they're partying in fur coats at balls, blood will be shed in Iraq."

Zappala and a few dozen others who have lost loved ones in Iraq, including Cindy Sheehan of Vacaville in the San Francisco Bay Area, had tried to visit the Pentagon on Wednesday but were turned away by armed guards. When I spoke to Sheehan early Thursday, she was at the intersection of Constitution and Pennsylvania, waiting for President Bush's inaugural parade to come by.

"My son was regular Army, enlisted," said Sheehan, a full-time mom married to a hardware salesman. "We didn't want him to enlist, but he was 21 and it was something he wanted to do -- to serve his country. He was always into service as an Eagle Scout, an altar boy."

And yet Casey, her son, was against this war.

"He didn't think it was a just war.... He didn't see Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States ... but he felt he had a duty and a loyalty to his buddies. He told me he had to support his buddies by doing this job, and he told me, 'Mom, the sooner I go, the sooner I'll be home.' "

Casey, 24, who wanted to be an elementary school teacher, was cut down in an ambush April 4 last year while trying to rescue fallen comrades. He had arrived in Baghdad only two weeks earlier. Sheehan said her son's unit was using Vietnam-era flak jackets because of a shortage of newer armor.

"I had seen a TV news report about eight soldiers being killed that day in Sadr City and I saw a Humvee burning, and thought my son was one of the dead soldiers," Sheehan says. "I just had a terrible feeling."

That evening, she returned from walking the dogs and found three military officers standing in her living room.

"I just collapsed on the floor screaming, and I think it's the closest I could have come to death without dying. You just want to get away from yourself. The pain is so intense; not just physical but emotional and psychic pain, and you want to escape it."

Over layers of clothing on a freezing day, Sheehan wore a T-shirt bearing her son's image.

"I came to protest the inauguration, because I think the opulence of it is inappropriate for a country at war. I can't believe these people are excited about party dresses ... when there are probably people dying in Iraq while they're partying."

Sheehan said she doesn't know how to fix Iraq now, given the chaos and simmering ethnic division. She thinks that the U.S. should provide money and supplies for rebuilding, but that a continued American military presence will rally insurgents and continue diverting resources from a true war on terror.

In his inaugural speech, President Bush gave no indication of any immediate change of course. In fact, he issued what sounded like a recruiting call.

"Some have shown their devotion to our country in deaths that honored their whole lives ... and we will always honor their sacrifice," Bush said. "I ask our youngest citizens to believe the evidence of your eyes.... Make the choice to serve in a cause larger than your wants."

There was no indication whether the 23-year-old Bush twins, who were in attendance, had decided to enlist.

After his speech, the president dined on lobster, scalloped crab and roasted quail. At midday, this item appeared on the newswire:

"Lana Marks, renowned designer to A-list Hollywood, society and royalty, has been selected by First Lady Laura Bush to design several custom couture LANA MARKS handbags for the second inauguration of her husband.... "

The last I heard from Celeste Zappala, she was on the run with the photo of her dead son, taking cover as police used pepper spray to repel surging demonstrators.

Fourth and long. I'm punting. The Mandrake experiment had mixed results. On the plus side, the install is easy, the partition manager is a nice touch, and the wired network worked. On the minus side, I could never get wireless working, if I booted up with my USB key plugged in the CPU pegged, and Thunderbird looked like crap under Mankdrake/KDE.

If I wanted to set up a server box, Linux is a pretty clear winner. For a desktop workstation it's mixed -- I wouldn't worry about the wireless, but what about the USB key? And why does Tbird look so crappy? For a laptop I have to stick with Windows. Why have a laptop if it doesn't have wireless? Other people have made my Broadcom card work with ndiswrapper, but I haven't been able to. I suppose it's possible, but I just don't feel like battling through all the problems when it just works with Windows. Lazy? Yes, but it's all about results.

The saga continues...

I've been battling wireless support for several days now. I have been attempting to get ndiswrapper working, but to no avail. I think I screwed myself a bit by listening to some advice from the ndiswrapper mailing list which told me to get rid of a file that I now wish I had back. I should be able to get all this by rebuilding ndiswrapper from scratch, but the make doesn't work on my system. No idea why, and the mailing list hasn't been helpful. I have also posted on mandrakeusers.org, so we'll see what comes of that.

It's pretty clear that Linux on laptops won't be penetrating the corporate space any time soon unless they get wireless sorted. This has to just work. Now I know that vendors aren't helping by refusing to offer drivers for Linux, but that's just pushing the blame elsewhere. Ndiswrapper is a genius idea, but it needs to work out of the box.

I'm not ready to give up yet, but I am getting weary of this. It's odd to me that the advice for installation on the ndiswrapper Sourceforge/Wiki page is not quite the same as what I get on the mailing list, which is not quite the same as what I read on mandrakeusers.org. Some of this is related to different wireless cards, I suspect, but some of the differences are pretty fundamental. Mandrakeusers.org says you need to edit modprobe.conf whereas the Wiki install makes no mention of that. Seems a little half-baked.

I decided to go ahead with the move to Linux on my laptop. I have kept a Windows partition rather than going whole hog, which turned out to be a Good Decision. I went with Mandrake 10.1 because I've heard that it's a pretty friendly distro, and part of this experiment is to see if getting off of Windows is really doable for someone who doesn't want to make their computer their hobby.

I downloaded the distribution and burned CD's using "BurnCDCC". This is likely the first stumbling block for a potential new user. They may know how to burn CD's, but they don't know how to burn an ISO image onto a CD. Explorer doesn't know how to do it either, so you need a third party app. They're not hard to find, but newbies will likely want to order CD's.

My CD's burned fine and I was able to boot from CD 1. I needed to shrink my Windows partition, which the Mandrake distro lets you do. It's really nice that a partition manager is included here. Partition Magic works fine, but who wants to pay $40 for something you use once or twice? I got a little scared when the partition manager failed the first time. I had already done a defrag and error check, so I don't know what the problem was. It worked the second time, but getting odd errors from partition managers is not fun.

The install went OK, and the system seemed to detect my gear, from display characteristics to USB mouse to Ethernet adapter (but not wireless, more on that later). I was able to boot up and get into the KDE environment. But here I hit a snag. I noticed that the system was getting hot and the fan was on full bore. I ran top and saw that there was a kedit process taking as much CPU as it could get, and it never seemed to go away. I nuked it and got a disturbing error message about mounted filesystems. Mostly by luck I determined that if I booted up wihtout my USB key drive in place, this symptom did not occur. I posted a note on the mandrakeexpert site, but nobody has even looked at it in four days, let alone offered an answer.

I then got down to migrating some apps and documents over. One big conern I had was how to share mail between Windows and Linux. I was afraid that I'd have to have a flag day where I quit accepting mail into my Windows Thunderbird mailbox and started accepting it on Linux. But I found a nice article that describes how to share your mailbox between Linux and Windows. One problem: it requires a FAT partition since Linux can't write to NTFS partitions. So that meant getting back into the partition manager, shrinking down a partition and creating a small (4GB) partition just for mail. I did that, and it went OK. I now can read mail from Linux or Windows and it's consistent, which is great.

Over the weekend I decided to tackle the wireless issue. I did a bit of resarch and learned that the wireless card that is embedded in my laptop (a Broadband card) is not natively supported on Linux. You need to build ndiswrapper and configure it. OK, I'm game. I download ndiswrapper sources, but they won't build because I'm missing kernel sources that contain defs that they need. OK, one step back, let's get into the configuration manager in KDE and load up kernel sources. Bzzzzzt. When I try to install that package, KDE tells me that it can't install. No reason why, nothing. So now I'm stuck. I don't know if I'm missing something, doing something wrong, or what. And there doesn't seem to be a very vibrant community to ask. Or at least I haven't found it yet.

In summary, I'm not overly disappointed. I've got a dual boot laptop. I can access my documents, and equally important, my mail, from both sides. Open Office is installed, so I can read Word and Excel docs, which is important. On the down side, I have no wirelss support, which is a must in a laptop. I also cannot get my USB key drive working, which is a drag, as it's a very handy device.

What next? I'll pound on getting the kernel sources installed so I can fix the wireless problem. Then I'll look into the USB issue. At that point I'll be ready to see if this is a truly useful configuration for me.

I'm thinking of making the move to Linux on my laptop, but I have some concerns before I leap.

Based on what I use my laptop for, the following questions and comments come to mind:

Web browsing and email. I already use Firefox and Thunderbird, so I don't see a problem here. Presumably I can backup my mail from the Windows version and restore it in the Linux version of TBird.

Office apps. I have MS Office installed, which I use primarily for Word and Excel. A little PowerPoint, but not much. I have used StarOffice in the past, so I suppose I can beat OpenOffice into submission.

Publishing. I edit our local Audubon chapter newsletter, for which I use MS Publisher. What equivalent is there for Linux?

IM. Are there AIM and Yahoo IM clients?

USB. I hear horror stories about USB support in Linux. Will I be able to use my USB storage devices and mouse?

I run a few once-in-a-while programs on the laptop. For example, I run ProntoEdit to program my Pronto remote. I doubt that there is a Linux equivalent is there?

Music management. I have a copy of all my music on the laptop, managed with iTunes. What's the Linux equivalent of iTunes?

Is there a way to sync my Palm OS handheld with info on the Linux side? Is there a Linux version of Palm Desktop?

I think I've talked myself out of this move.