dave astels

We all have Nintendo DS Lites now. One of the cool features of the DS is built-in wifi and internet gaming. The one gotcha is that it’s slow wifi, and with limited configurability. We want to play around with the wifi features, but don’t want to slow down or open up our in house network(s). So Nancy grabbed one of the spare WAPs and went about setting it up in the living-room exclusively for gaming use. How geeky is that. That makes 4 wifi networks in the house (the other 3 are due to a combination of the size of the house (not big.. just long) and the lame reception of my powerbook).

Now, Nancy is not one to do a half hearted job… especially when network cables are involved. Here she is installing the WAP. FYI that’s a 12 foot ladder.	And here’s a shot of the cluster of WAPs/antennas.

Update: The Netgear didn’t work out… so we used the Airport Extreme we had leftover.. it worked fine and we’re gaming online. See you on the WFC.

Nancy’s been at it again. From her blog:

The mouse that scrolled…: “Roar is not quite it… it really is the mouse that scrolled.

As long as I can remember, I have been a trackball user. I like my trackball. I try other mice but always seem to gravitate back to using the trackball. I have a wireless Logitech trackball that I really like, but for some reason, the scrolling wasn’t working. For this reason, I had sadly tucked it away and used my wired trackball - also by Logitech.

While rummaging in the office yesterday, I re-discovered my cordless trackball and thought I’d give it another go. I downloaded the special ‘Logitech Command Center’ (LCC) for OS X and tried tweaking the trackball settings. Everything seemed to work - except for scrolling!

At first I thought it was something to do with OS X, but the click part of the wheel worked fine, and the LCC was recognizing that it did, in fact, have a scroll wheel. I took it apart and cleaned the wheel, the spokes, etc. - still nothing. UGH. I took my corded trackball apart and had a look inside, it looked pretty much the same, and scrolling worked on that one… so… I came up with a brilliant plan.

Looks like it’s time to take it apart…

Read the rest on Nancy’s blog.

Tuesday morning my laptop died.. no not my Powerbook.. that would have completely unexpected… the Windows ThinkPad I use for my current client… courtesy of said client. It just wouldn’t boot. Something about an unmountable drive.. bluescreen but it didn’t stay in place long enough to read before it valiantly, yet futilely, tried to boot again.

Not good. I wasn’t heading back to Chicago & the client for almost a week. Was I dead in the water? Could I not work for the week?

Well.. Nancy to the rescue! It took most of the day, but she eventually found some bad sectors, blocked them out, etc and got the thing to boot again. No data loss.. nothing acting odd. It’s been behaving itself all week so far.

So we had 4G iPod cradles from my earlier iPod (one came with the iPod, then I got a stereo connect kit). So when we got 5G iPods they sort of fit.. then we got hardshell cases to prevent scratching.. and the cradles no longer fit.

Not to be defeated by this, nancy just spent the evening sawing, Dremeling, and carving to make the necessary adjustments (aka hacks) to the cradles to make them fit once more.

She took some pics and expect she’ll be blogging about the process.

As we were having dinner at the Montreal airport… does Nancy wonder about how the kids are doing? Did they remember their house keys? Did her folks pick them up ok? Did they remember to take their stuff? Or even how the dog was making out at her folks? Nope.

“I wonder how my kernel build made out?

After SD West, Nancy & I spent Saturday on the VTA and CalTrain and in San Francisco.

So what does she do on her first visit to the city? Well, we head up 4th Street from the CalTrian station, stop for a latte at Whole Foods, then proceed directly to The Apple Store at 4th & Market. After leisurely browsing & buying a couple things we head down (um.. up.. over… toward the Bay Bridge) Market Street… and discover a CompUSA. Now Nancy has heard tales a-plenty of CompUSA from my time last year in the Detroit area where my hotel was practically across a parking lot from a CompUSA. So we spent another many minutes wandering about in geeked out bliss. Keep in mind that FutureShop (something akin to Circuit City) is the most technically immersive experience in our area.

That over with we proceeded to have fun wandering through Chinatown, and up the hill to a stunning view of the Bay. We stopped at The Stinking Rose for dinner on the way. Then downtown again to catch the 8:00 train back to Santa Clara.

I liked my iBook so much that I got another one

Well.. not exactly.. really

I had a 14″ iBook 60G/1.25G/superdrive/802.11g. My new one is the same except it’s completely loaded… same thing but with an 80G disk and built-in bluetooth. Nancy scoffed at me somewhat … with my gushing Macheadedness… but then we beefed up her old (circa late 2000) iMac with a gig of ram & an 80G disk she started playing around with it. So one thing led to another as they so often do. I bought a second iBook, handed my previous one (only 2 months old) on to Nancy and we’ll ripple laptops (albeit Windows based) through the food chain.

Nancy will be writing about her “Switch” elsewhere. BTW, just so that she is completely clean of the taint of Microsoft, I picked up a Palm Tungsten T5 (like mine) to replace her iPaq PPC. So she’s gone from Linux/PPC to OS X/Palm… though her server farm is still running Debian.

This is mostly for people who know me but might be behind on what’s been going on.

To start with, my marriage (of 14 years) finally fell apart in summer 2003, in the midst of my sojourn working in Northern Virginia.

Fast forward to March 2004. I decide to leave Adaption Software (which I started with Pat Welsh) and join ThoughtWorks. I finished with Adaption in early July, and started at ThoughtWorks in late July.

July was an interesting month, I bought a house in semi-rural Nova Scotia (about 15 minutes down the highway from where I was before), bought a nice, new Nissan Pathfinder, and met & fell in love with a fabulous woman (Nancy Blenkhorn. Nancy is simply amazing. Anyone else have a girlfriend with her own server farm? Or who can set up their wifi for them? And of course, she’s beautiful, sexy, and fun too.

The house took a while to get furnished and “homey”, but it’s comfortable now, and very cozy.

Fast forward to the present. DiamlerChrysler made it worth my while to leave ThoughtWorks to stay when our involvement ended. So I’m contracting relatively drectly to DiamlerChrysler now, onsite in Detroit every other week. Part of the deal was being able to work from home part of the time.

So I’ve set up shop at home, and replaced my ThoughtWorks issued WinDoze laptop with a shiney white 14″ iBook G4, as per my last posting.