Being offline for about a month taught me a couple of things:

1. An ISP’s help desk does not know a thing
2. Ranting at the help desk does work!
3. There are  a lot of companies involved to give me and maintain my Internet (4 to be precise)
4. Verminators on Discovery is a cool show
5. Dirty Jobs also.
6. I prefer Les more than Bear as a survival guy.
7. Dutch TV is horrible.
8. I am very edgy when I have no Internet for three weeks. Not good for my neighbourhood. In the fourth week I was more laid back.
9. Call with the mobile to an help desk is expensive
10. And again: an ISP’s help desk does not know a thing

First of all sorry for my late post.  I will try to do better in the future :-)

As stated in part 1 I am very good in losing things. So let me sum up what I lost last month

1. Pocket knife – I always carry with me my pocket knife. I got it for my birthday when I was a little boy and I still carry it around with me all the time. It can be handy in a lot of situations. I lost it after using it.  I apparently put it somewhere in a crate where a friend found it for me. Lost for about two weeks.
2. Diary – Next to my pocket knife I always carry a little diary book in my back pocket. I work in the IT  but I hate PDAs. With this little diary I do not forget any appointments. I put it in a bag while I needed to change trousers and I forgot where I had put it. Lost for about two weeks.
3. Cell phone – Yup cell phone :S I left it in a building where I rehearse. Fortunately it was a church, and thou shall not steal still applies. The owner emailed me that he found it. Lost for three days.

Luckily of the above  I found everything again. I still have not found my watch and Ipod yet. I had to go to the phone store to enable my subscription again that I had blocked when I lost it.  I left the store with a shiny new Nokia 5310 :-)

Well apparently my wireless post is not finished.. The ralink drivers ran fine for a while but then the lag spikes started again. The connection drops for one second once in like two minutes. In World of Warcraft it is not that big of a problem. But in Call of Duty fast connection is what you need all the time. (See my game post from a while back for more information on these games) resulting the networking cable being back in my hallway…  The laptop did not have problems so it must have been the usb adapter.

I ordered a Netgear WG311 adapter to see what a PCI card from a different company would do. Looking good at the moment *knock on wood*. When I am not leeching the news groups that is :P The connection is quite stable and fast. Lets hope it keeps it up that way.

It is announced! Wrath of the Lich King wil be in stores on November 13th. I am looking forward to this expansion pack. Finally I now have a date to look forward to. But first I will be on vacation of course.

A game that still has no “release date” for me is Call of Duty… I have ordered the game two weeks ago at play.com. But still I have not received it. I am quite anxious to start playing this game. I need to practice for the LAN parties that are planned in the near future.

Edit: Finally it CoD has arrived! Awesome game.

Since I live on my own, I was trying to have less cables as possible in my house. Every room had a phone wired to it. All are now removed and replaced by two simple DECT phones. Being a nerd, I need Internet. With the computer upstairs and the modem in the hall closet I decided to go wireless. So I bought a Linksys WRT54GL router and a couple of Linksys WUSB54GC adapters.

First thing that friends of mine told me that the router itself is awesome but the firmware is crap. And oh boy it was. First of all Linksys does not bother to update their drivers. When I started a torrent it would result have a complete lock up of my computer. I changed the firmware on the router to Tomato. My old dell work laptop and my ubuntu PC with the usb adapter worked fine. But my Vista desktop still had networking issues with a lot of lag spikes and sometimes just high latency. As a result I had an UTP cable lying in my hall to the closet to get some decent Internet. Very ugly but necessary.

This week I grew tired of it. My parents came by and I had to remove the cable to make the hall decent (and the rest of the house). I came across an article about using the chipset driver directly. And now I have a stable wireless connection..

In a nutshell, using linksys is okay, but use alternate drivers and firmware.

“Cyber-terrorists” as they call themselves… had defaced my precious blog. Bloody bastards. That should not have been that bad, just restore a backup, update your software you use on websites and you are done. But it turns out our backup drive had broken down probably because of the powersupply failure we had last week.

Anyways, we are back in business….again…

Like all other people I have bad habits. Tons even.. :-) One of my worst bad habit is that I forget stuff. To be precise: I forget where I put stuff. One moment I have an item, and the other moment it is gone, completely gone never to be found. It happens to car keys, bike keys (see two posts below) watches and removable fronts of car radios.

The worst thing I have lost is my ipod. Imagine losing a 350 bucks worth item. I went to my parents by car, hooked it on my trousers. When I wanted to go home I wanted to pick up my stuff, so I got me wallet, car keys… but no ipod. It was never to be found again. It probably fell of my trousers while I was walking to my car. I had to buy a new one.

Last item which a have lost is the removable front of my car radio. Since my old radio was stolen from me and my experience with my ipod I had serious worries. I lost it after going to the MacDonalds with friends. After 5 days, just before I need my car again to drive to work (I am so lost without music while driving) my neighbours turned up with the item! I stashed it away at their place..

Anyways I really enjoyed my ride to work again! :D