Wayne D's Blog

Today my personal cell phone refuses to power on.

Rogers turned off my Internet today without warning because they said there was excessive RF leakage from my house. Nothing here has changed in my wiring for 5 years so why when they found it today did they have to turn it off immediately? Couldn't they have waited a day or two? My wife has an internet based project she has to work on today and tomorrow. Boy was I pissed when I called rogers to complain. The tech is supposed to be here at 8 tomorrow morning to fix it, we'll see what happens then. My rogers blackberry interferes with every receiver in the house yet my cable TV is supposed to be a hazard to aircraft navigation.

Then I'm using the blackberry to read my rogers email and in the middle of that I get a message that the email service is unavailable and to try again later.

I had discovered the solution to ldap preventing a FC7 system from booting months ago and I thought I had written it down but when I upgraded on of those junk heap Dell Optiplex 320's that I was fighting with a few months ago from Debian to Fedora Core it reared it's ugly head again. The boot process stops at Starting System Message Bus and sits there for a very long time. It eventually times out but not before your hair has turned grey.

To fix it you have two options:
Remove any mention of ldap /etc/from nsswitch.conf
or
change
bind_policy hard
to
bind_policy soft
in ldap.conf

I was listening to Quirks and Quarks today and Gary Taubes was on the show talking about his book, Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. You can listen to the segment by clicking here. His hypothesis is that our obsession with fat as the cause of obesity has blinded us to the real culprit, carbohydrates. I encourage you to listen to the segment and draw your own conclusions. The book sounded interesting so I went to Amazon.ca to look it up and found it at a price of $20.13. With shipping and tax it came to $27.59. To check whether the purchasing power of the Canadian dollar had been reflected at Amazon I went to Amazon.com where the same book was priced at $18.45. With shipping included I could buy it for $27.43 U.S. I wasn't really surprised. The only reason I didn't buy it from Amazon.com was that the currency conversion fee on my credit card would have made it a wash in the end anyways.

I noticed the same price discrepancy this week when looking for a Novatel Wireless Merlin XU870 3G HSDPA 3.6/7.2 Mbps ExpressCard. Expansys.com has it for $379.95 on their U.S. website, $399.95 on their Canadian website. Both sites show 21 in stock, I bet they only have one warehouse and whether I buy in the U.S. or Canada their cost is the same.

You might have heard about the big tempest in the teapot over the release of an HD DVD code earlier this year. Geoff Smith made a song about it and Cali Lewis of Geekbrief.tvpodcast.

I always seem to get my great ideas for blog post when I'm in the car. I figure I won't forget them but when it comes time to sit down and write they have vanished from my head.

I have recently been looking around for a new printer to help break my families addiction to Lexmark ink-jet printer cartridges. More expensive than the finest perfume I keep finding exhausted printer cartridges strewn all over the house. I was looking for an inexpensive monochrome laser printer and have pretty much settled on the Brother HL2040 which Tigerdirect sells for about $120 but last time I was in the store they didn't have any in stock. I was in Grand and Toy last night and found a Lexmark E120N network printer marked down to $117 and I almost bought it until I realized that the toner cartridge it shipped with was only good for 500 pages and refill cartridges are $85 and are only good for 2000 pages. The Brother cartridges are $62 and are good for 2500 pages. I have never been able to get our Linux computer to connect to the Windows XP home box where the Lexmark ink-jet was installed so I was looking at network printers but wasn't prepared for the big step up in price. Tigerdirect had the network version of the 2040 on sale for $122 yesterday but I didn't have the time to make it to the store and I figured that they wouldn't have any in stock anyways. I had went in there previously to look at the Brother 2040 and they didn't have any printers on the floor at all. Imagine my surprise when I went on their website today and saw it still at $122 which is $60 lower than the normal selling price. I decided that it was worth the drive. Image my surprise when I get to the store and see a stack of printers. Imagine my disappointment when I see the price is $185. I pulled out my trusty Crackberry to make sure that I had seen the price from the website correctly, enter the Tigerdirect.ca URL and wait, the screen goes white and nothing happens. Sigh, the previous night the same thing had happened when I had tried to look up printer information on the Lexmark at the mall. The Crackberry said I had signal but the page wasn't loading. The previous night I had pulled the battery and reset the Crackberry which had seemed to help but I was suspicious of the signal meter. I went outside to see if I could get a better signal but it was still unresponsive. While waiting oldest son was fidgeting as only a 15 year old can. He was with me because I had taken him to have his hair cut before he looked too much like cousin It from the Munsters. I resorted to the low tech method of calling my wife and getting her to look it up on the website for me. She verified that I had not been imagining things so I went back inside and asked the sales guy. He took the price sign with him and told me that I was right and that the correct price was $122 and we are now the proud owner of a networked laser printer that works great from both Windows and Linux. I expect it will have paid for itself in 6 months.

I have four full garbage cans in the garage that I dragged out to the curb on Friday morning expecting to be picked up. Evidently I had my weeks wrong because when I came home from work they were still there. We are now on a biweekly garbage pickup schedule with recyclable and organics picked up weekly. I would have been much happier with two cans every week. Separating out the organics seems to have attracted fruit flies. I bought a package of new high tech flypaper today to try and keep them under control. It's a sticky plastic square with pictures of fruit on it. I was hoping to find one of those old retro coils that hang from the ceiling but was unsuccessful.

By the way, the Crackberry seems to be working fine now.

I have been underwhelmed with the TV offerings this fall. Other than new episodes of Tripping the Rift and Pushing Daisies there is nothing new I am watching. Darn I forgot Chuck and Reaper, my guess would be that Reaper won't make it through a full season. The new season of Heroes has also not impressed. It seems that half of every show is subtitles and a show that used to speed by now drags like a square wheeled cart. The only part are like is the part with Hiro and his adventures in feudal Japan. I also tried watching Dirty, Sexy Money but didn't find it compelling enough to keep up with.

Saturday's Argos game was a blast. The Argos won, the band split up and a small group of us wandered the stadium reprising the Argonotes stchick of seasons past. There was our standard trouble finding a new way to get off the field at the end of the game. I wandered down to Harbourfront where I had parked my car and bought a chicken curry hoping to reprise the experience of curry and chips from Ameen's takeaway in Newcastle. Sadly the experience was not very satisfying. I ate it sitting down on the windblown waterfront where the tour boats were docked awaiting the return of summer. Winter is coming, you can feel it in the air. This weekend it's off camping again, maybe it will snow.