Road Trip 2008: Day 0

This week we’re on vacation: a road trip that will take us 3,000 miles up the east coast of the United States, over to Ohio, and back to Florida in the next 10 days. I’ll be blogging the “highlights” when I can via my Eee.

We left the Tampa area right after work this evening and headed over to Orlando since my in-laws were there for the 2008 Kiwanis Convention. Check out the sweet “ghetto blaster” we found in our hotel room!

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Too bad I didn’t have any tracks from “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” on my iPod. 😀

Wow, it’s really quiet when the power is out

We had a quiet, relaxing, electricity-free evening last night thanks to a 5 and a half hour power outage in our neighborhood.

It was remarkable how quiet it was in the house without all the white noise we are used to: the bubbling of the aquarium, the hum of the refrigerator and the air conditioning, etc. My daughter found the whole thing entertaining and proposed the idea that we should have one electricity-free evening every month (candles, flashlights, no TV, etc.). I think we’re actually going to try that.

From the tech side of outage: I run NUT on my Ubuntu server that hosts windracer.net so I know the UPS switched over to battery at 4:52pm yesterday afternoon when the outage started because upsmon sent me an e-mail. At the same time, Nagios started reporting (also via e-mail) that my office printer, my TiVo HD, and wireless bridge were down. Those are in a different room so I knew it was the entire house without power and not just the circuit to the computer closet. 15 minutes later, NUT gracefully shut down my NAS (a Buffalo LinkStation 250 running the OpenLink firmware), and then the server itself as the UPS reached a low-battery state. I’m using a 750VA UPS in the closet to power the modem, router, NAS, and server, and NUT reports only a 40% load for a 14 minute battery run-time. That seems a little low so I might need to look into replacing that unit. Everything booted up normally when the power came back on at 10:18pm.

Before upgrading the server to Hardy Heron two weeks ago, my uptime record was 135 days. So much for my own personal five 9s of uptime. 😀

Tethering the Treo 680 and Eee PC

Next week I’ll be taking a road trip vacation up the east coast which means a lot of time in the car. I thought it would be cool to be able to use my Eee PC in conjunction with my Treo 680’s data connection to get on the ‘net while (literally) on the road (instead of having to stop and find an open wireless access point). And no, I wouldn’t be doing this while driving. 🙂

Normally mobile broadband would involve some sort of cellular modem for your laptop in conjunction with an expensive data plan (like AT&T’s solution). Most of those products don’t take Linux into account, however, and I already have an unlimited data plan on my Treo.

I came across a thread on the eeeuser forums that got me started: using Mobile Stream’s USBModem utility on the Palm allows the Eee to see it as a normal modem when connected via its USB sync cable. Then I created a new dial-up networking connection on the Eee, fired it up, and wallah! Internet access through my cell phone.

Granted, the Treo is not a 3G device, which means Edge speeds (see the screenshot below) but I’m not expecting to stream video off of YouTube, just check my mail and browse the internet.

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It didn’t work right away, though. I had to do some tinkering to get the settings just right. You can find the details in my reply to that thread on the eeeuser forums.

Vista search broken after SP1

I ran into another Vista SP1 problem this evening.

Whenever I used Start-Search, or the Win+F shortcut, I got the following error:

search: This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel.

Google to the rescue again! Apparently something in SP1 can cause registry permission errors on certain keys, which breaks Vista’s search feature. Wonderful.

Using the instructions in this post from the Winhelponline blog, though, I was able to fix the problem!

WIJFR: Raven

A young couple necking in Van Cortlandt Park are taken at gunpoint to another location. She is raped while he is tied up in another part of the building. Then the two are put into the trunk of the car and dropped at different locations. The girl is dead…..the boyfriend is charged with murder.

“Raven” is a 1987 crime novel written by Mike Lundy (a pen name of Donald Bain, author of the “Murder, She Wrote” series). This is not my normal genre of reading but I picked up this book 20 years ago at the same library book sale where I got “Mission” so it came to me by random selection. When I was cleaning out my bookshelf and ran across “Mission” and “Raven” I decided to re-read them both.

Fred Raven is a New York City detective who, along with his partner Leroy (Lee) Higgins, is assigned to solve a string of rapes/kidnappings in Van Cortlandt Park. They’re both “good” cops, but aren’t above going slightly above/around/outside the law to get things done. They’re both family men, but aren’t above going outside of their marriages either (let’s just leave it at that ;-)). Their methods are unorthodox, but does that matter if the bad guys are caught? Mixed in with the main storyline are some various tales told (conversationally) by Raven and Higgins of their past cases and how they solved them, which gives the reader a background into their characters.

The book is an easy, straightforward read but be warned there are some graphic scenes and descriptions in it (probably not the kind of thing I should have been reading 20 years ago). Also, it takes place in the 80s so it’s a bit dated: when’s the last time you saw a detective use a pay phone in a bar to call his boss at the precinct?

Side note: four out of my first five WIJFR posts have all been about one-word titled books.

Summer alarm sales "scam"

Not technically a scam, but still something that I consider to be shady business practice …

This evening I had a young college-age kid knock on my door wearing an Apex Security polo with an official-looking badge on a lanyard around his neck. He had seen the ADT sign in my front yard and basically starting giving me the lowdown on a new Honeywell security system to replace my current one.

He explained that criminals knew alarm systems used the phone line so would always cut the phone line first before breaking into a home (“maybe you’ve seen that on the news or in movies like ‘The Bourne Identity’, cool movie” he said). This Honeywell system he was pitching used GSM cellular so it was always in contact with home base (“except we have better signal than regular cellular”). He had just installed one for my “neighbors down the street.”

Then he started talking about how Honeywell would be through my neighborhood in the next few months “upgrading” systems for free, he wanted to put a sign for my yard, and I started getting more suspicious. I seemed to recall reading/hearing about door-to-door alarm sales “scams.” Once I started getting that vibe I ended his pitch saying I would do my own research, thanks for stopping by, etc.

After he left I immediately called ADT to speak with a representative and of course they had heard about Apex and their door-to-door sales pitches. The rep told me that yes, they’re a legitimate business, they (ADT) don’t approve of their tactics, but there’s nothing they can really do about it. A few Google searches about Apex, APX, etc. turns up a lot of info on the company. Apparently they’re part of the summer alarm sales “industry” and college students can earn “good money” selling these systems for companies like Apex. They tend to downplay the Apex part and stress known brands like Honeywell or GE.

I can’t fault them (the college kids) for that, but I do disagree with their (Apex’s) hard-sell scare tactics. I can easily see the elderly in my neighborhood falling for this method (I found a local article from last summer where that actually happened). I also found this interesting blog on the subject.

Just a heads up … watch out for these guys.