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The adventure begins
(Phone rings)
Me: Hello?
other guy: This is Orlando from covad, are you aware that bell atlantic has an appointment today to begin the installation of your DSL line?
Me: (hopefully) Yes.
other guy: Is there someone at the location to let them gain access?
Me: Yes.
other guy: Well, the bell atlantic tech said there is no one there.
Me: (getting up and starting down the stairs) Well, there is a large note on the front door with multiple buzzers for him to ring, one of which is the apartment I've been in all morning.
other guy: (pause) Hold on.
[cut to me standing in the street looking around]
other guy: O.K., he said he stepped a block away to make the phone call. Let me give you my private line. If he's not there in 10 minutes, call me back.
Me: Is it the number you're calling me from? I've got it.
other guy: O.K., good.
[10 minutes of me waiting around pointlessly in the street... then me dialing phone number]
other guys voicemail: I'm away from my desk at the moment...
[20 minutes later...]
other guys voicemail: I'm away from my desk at the moment...
[1 hour later...]
other guys voicemail: I'm away from my desk at the moment.
Done, and done. Is it Friday yet?
It must be a pretty cold day for the dark lord because I left my computer running last night and it seems to have successfully pulled all 69.6 megabytes of developers tools over my often sporadic 56k dial up connection. I've never even been able to get the 13 meg Mozilla through my browser before (had to connect through my FTP program which wasn't possible in this case,) but for some reason Netscape decided to just keep going and going and going... And it did in all over HTTPS, so I assume it was 128 bit encrypted as well? Strange. I estimate it took over 6 hours, although like I said, I was asleep for most of it. All this computer work really takes it out of you.
OS X is working out great, except I need Apple to release the developer tools so that I can install PHP and my database. Luckily I just learned they have been posted on Apple's developer site (which I wisely signed up for a few weeks ago.) Unluckily, it is a single 69 megabyte download! I guess real developers (of which I am not one) have fast connections. I decided what the hell, and gave it a shot on my 56k (yeah, right) but at first I got no response, and now the site seems overloaded. No doubt you are on the edge of your seat, entranced by this and other incredible tales of adventure. Have no fear, lots more excitement to come, and I will probably continue to insist on documenting it all right here. Tomorrow I'm scheduled to futz around in the morning wasting too much time reading other sites, and then in the afternoon I might complain some more about the office not being ready. In between I'll procrastinate some more on the latest job. So stay tuned for all the news!
Here's seven pages of pictures of new geek gadgets shown at a recent trade show in Japan. I guess the video phone is coming soon. I'm not sure what all the other things do, but must of them look supremely cool. Beam me up. (from /.)
Wow. I just got confirmation that my DSL installation begins next Tuesday. Bell Atlantic comes first, and then (supposedly) about a week later Covad comes, and then I'll be all set. Of course, things mights still go wrong (see Oct. 2 entry.) And the office isn't ready yet. And I still have to decide what to do about the server situation (thinking about valinux recently.) But hearing anything from these companies must be a good sign, right?
There was an interesting idea here about the growing problem of backing up data. Because drives are growing in size much faster than their data transfer speeds are increasing, it will soon take prohibitively long to copy all of your data to a second disk. But, maybe that's not really a problem. Or maybe it is. Or, maybe not.
"There are backup plans in place to discover new
paradigms." Ahhh, the old backup plan of discovering a new paradigm - very clever.
Reasonable thoughts on the future of P2P (or, what comes after music piracy?)
Cloning keeps heating up. Weirder and weirder. And we're just getting started. (via robotwisdom)