February 2004 Archives

Ethan and I went out for a little wardriving today. We focused on Hollidaysburg and Altoona. He did a good job wearing the antenna beanie.

What we found was that a whole lot of our neighbors must have gotten access points for Christmas. Each of the pins on the below map represent an AP. As you can see, there are a heck of a lot around my neighborhood now. One of them is close enough to my house that I could probably pirate from it.

I think I'll be doing some more wardriving tomorrow on my trip, just to keep me occupied.

So, we went to go see "Miracle" on Valentine's Day. We had heard that a new theatre had opened in State College, so we headed up 220 to check things out.

I was expecting something along the lines of TinselTown in Erie, but much to my dismay, I found something more along the lines of the mall theatre in DuBois. First of all, the new theatre is out in the boonies, we couldn't even see it from the side of the road. There are no ammenities at all in the place other than 3 video games that they must have gotten from some 1980's arcade that went out of business. The only thing that differentiated this theatre from the one in the Altoona Mall was stadium seating, which I can do without anyway.

I"m sure that the Altoona/State College metro area has enough population to support a decent movie theatre. Perhaps I am spoiled in that I got used to TinselTown Theatre in Erie, but I can't understand why we can't get a theatre that is somewhat decent.

Even if the "good" theatre in Altoona (the one in the mall) would show the big ticket movies instead of shipping them next door to what is perhaps the worst theatre on this side of the state I'd be happy.

CERMUSA loses another intern:

Mike Shanafelt:2
Interns: 0

Total hours served by Mike Shanafelt hired interns: 7

Ever since I posted my brief message about the Super Bowl halftime show in which I was simply pondering why Janet Jackson was even on a Super Bowl Halftime show considering she hasn't had a hit for 10 years, I've noticed a lot more traffic visiting here and the majority of these visits are directed from Google or Yahoo queries from people looking for "Janet Jackson Halftime Pics".

So, let me say right here that There Are No Pictures of Janet Jackson's Boob on this site. There will never be pictures of Janet Jackson's Boob on this site.

I didn't even see the incident because I had my DVR running at the time and had decided to fast forward though the whole thing after I saw P. Diddy's cheerleaders singing "Oh Diddy, Your So Fine, You So Fine You Blow My Mind". Even if I had seen it, it wouldn't of been that big of a deal. My God, it was a boob of some 35+ year old lady with a big piece of jewelery covering most of it anyway!! Big deal. It was all just a ploy to direct attention away from her child-molesting brother anyway.

I heard about Dudebox on the Dell DJ Forum this weekend.

All I can say is that if you have a Dell DJ, then this program is a must-have. Screw MusicMatch. It has no where near the functionality of Dudebox. With DudeBox, I'm able to modify playlists directly on the DJ, stream audio from the DJ to any computer on my LAN, and transfer all of my files to the DJ in less than 1/2 the time it takes MusicMatch. It absolutely rocks.

I'm still waiting for the much-needed Dell DJ firmware update to hopefully take care of the several issues that have been discovered. I'm not holding my breath though. I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't until this summer that it finally comes out. It sucks that Dell couldn't provide a decent manager for it's product, but it's great to see independent compaines like Red Chair Software coming out with innovative products to fill in the gap.

My master plan to rid my residence of Charter Communications is finally coming together....

After signing up for the Dish Network back in October, I've waited until now to finally get the local channels they had promised back in December. So, last week I ordered Verizon DSL to replace our Charter Cable broadband connection. Today I'll be calling Charter to tell them to go to hell!

I placed my DSL modem, router, and wireless access point in my dining room, with the idea to hook my desktop computer up using a USB wireless adapter that I got for free after rebate from eCost. The nice thing about this setup is that I got rid of a significant chunk of rat's nest cabling that was sitting behind my computer desk.

The DSL install went pretty well, but when I hooked my router up to the DSL modem, I found that I couldn't get to some sites, including Hotmail and eBay. Luckily, my friends over at Broadband Reports had postings on how to fix the problem. It ended up I needed to change my router to PPPoE and it worked.

No particular order:

1, Lockergnome
2, Cat's Weblog
3, MoreStuff4Less
4, sarah. word.
5, Furo.com
6, C:\PIRILLO.EXE
7, Jumping Monkeys
8, ABC US News
9, Wi-Fi Networking News
10, Rob's Weblog
11, Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog
12, Jeremy Zawodny's blog
13, Hacking NetFlix
14, LionShare
15, Microsoft Watch

To subscribe, use Feedreader.

I forgot to mention last week that Dish Network finally picked up local channels for the Altoona/Johnstown areas. So now we are getting all of our local affiliates plus "expanded basic" service on our dish for a little cheaper than what Charter offered. Plus, we get the use of Dish Network's DVR, which isn't quite as nice as a TiVo, but will do in a pinch. It was great being able to pause the Super Bowl last night so we could get Ethan to bed and then come back down and start it from where we left off.

Once I get my DSL setup, it's time to say bye-bye to Charter.

2 Questions:
1, Why is Janet Jackson anywhere near the Super Bowl?
2, And why is Justin Timberlake grinding with her?

Here's our little Westminster Titan at Mommy's alumni game:

OK, I got invited to OrKut (So what if I paid some guy off of eBay $3 to invite me :), so now it is time to start seeing who I meet. I was already emailed from a girl I knew back at Westminster. I invited a bunch of people to join, but most of them are afraid of this kind of stuff, so I will be surprised if they sign up.

I ran across this commercial from another blog. Looks like the Bush administration now controls the Super Bowl as well.