As I try to get some work done waiting for car repairs, I discovered that the ETD on Route 23 in Kinnelon, NJ, has Optimum WiFi within range. Being a Optimum Online customer, I get free access to it.

My initial opinion of this particular hotspot is really unpredictable latency and packet loss. Speedtest.net results:

It’s not bad – I’m posting this blog entry from the connection – but the latency and packet loss makes interactive sessions like SSH really painful. Still, it’s usable to get some work done – email, web browsing, etc.

Tags: Optimum WiFi, Kinnelon, NJ

After a bit of drama with my old pair of glasses, I went out and got myself an eye exam to update my prescription and have ordered myself a pair of tie-dye frames from Zenni Optical for $40! They are made of so much win and awesome:

I know you’re jealous. Don’t feel bad, it’s okay, you should be. These frames even come with 581% more cowbell.

For my own notes, my prescription is now -5.50 OD/OS sph, DS (SPH) cyl, and PD 32/33 (65).

Tags: vision, glasses, Zenni Optical, tie-dye

If someone handed you $100 right now, could you spend it? How long would it take you to decide what to buy?

Not long at all, right?

Well, I seriously fail at retail therapy. I was given a $100 Visa gift card as a Giftmas 2008 present, and I can’t think of a single thing I want to buy with it. Is that pathetic, or what?

I thought about picking up a video game or two, but I really don’t have the time nor motivation to play them. Modern video games totally lack the necessary charm and appeal of older games. They use advanced graphics and cinematic sequences to “wow” people, but the gameplay is empty. You can’t compensate for a boring game with eye candy alone, at least for me.

I thought about movies or music, but there hasn’t been music released in the last 5 years that I thought was good enough to own except for a few songs which I picked up on iTunes or through Amazon MP3. Same goes for movies — the ones I care to watch, I’ve already seen and I haven’t seen a movie in years that was good enough to be worth watching twice.

Ah, what about books? Goodness, there’s that free time issue again! I still have books sitting on my shelf that I want to read that I haven’t read yet. Buying more just seems wasteful, at this point.

Surprisingly, as a technology geek, I’m not a big gadget junkie. I went through the phase of collecting shiny doo-dads and frankly, I got tired of throwing them out when they lost their shine. Is there really such a thing as a must-have item? I haven’t found one, yet.

About the only thing that I still really like is food. I love to eat! I guess the best way to spend this money is to take the family out and enjoy a nice meal. Oh, but then the dilemma of deciding where to go sets in …

I guess there are worse problems to have than not knowing how to spend $100, but it really bothers me that I don’t have a go-to list of reasonably inexpensive things that I’d want to buy. This is why I’m such a hard person to buy gifts for: I truly don’t want anything. I don’t mean this in the polite “oh, it’s okay, don’t worry” sort of way, but in the “oh, please, not another thing that I have to find a place for and hold onto until I get tired of it and throw it out” kind of way.

Maybe I’m truly able to find happiness with what I already have. But, a part of me — probably conditioned and programmed through advertising as I was growing up — feels like I’m “incomplete” without more material possessions. Part of me asks “what’s wrong with me?” because I don’t already know what I’d go out and buy with this money. Do you know what I’m talking about?

What would you go and buy with $100 right now? Or, are you like me, without any clue what you’d do with it?

Tags: retail therapy

Apparently, South African Airways runs some kind of Linux for their in-flight entertainment system.

Of course, on the leg of the trip from New York to Senegal, the flight staff kept rebooting the system trying to get it to work, with very little luck. Most of the time we just stared at the Linux boot process hanging, trying to talk to the NFS server. Fortunately, they got it working for the Senegal to South Africa leg of the trip.

Tags: South African Airways, Linux, fail

I love problem solving and puzzles. My friend Christina brought me back a fun one from her trip to Mongolia. Here it is, solved:

Apparently this puzzle type is what Stewart Coffin calls “Locked Nest.”

It may not look like much, but the challenge is to assemble it from a completely disassembled state. It’s not only geometrically challenging, having to visualize the pieces in their final states, but physically challenging, having to hold the thing together as you put it together. Several times, while I was working on the puzzle, a pin would slide out or a rod would be out of alignment and the pin would miss it.

This is definitely a puzzle I’ll enjoy solving many times over. It’s quite challenging.

Tags: Mongolian, puzzle, Stewart Coffin