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.

Ouch last post was from November…. A lot of things happened since then. You may even say major things.

First of all, I have met a very lovely girlfriend. If one thing in my life is taking up time in a very positive way. It is her. We live 200 km from eachother resulting in only seeing eachother every weekend.

I have now been living in my own house. With the house comes the garden, which of course needs my attention. My father and I have build a platform which now holds my bike. There is of course still some room for a nice barbecue with friends. And the house it self needs to be cleaned from time to time.

I am now responsible for the music we are playing in our orchestra. So in my house sheets of music are stashed everywere. Which still needs to be sorted.

I am still taking lessons learning the bass guitar. Me not having much time, means progress in learning is slow. But me and the teacher are still have fun.

And finally I started a new job at the University of Groningen as a software engineer. So I left ASTRON. So no more fancy pictures anymore from business trips and nice telescopes. But instead I now have a far more stable job closer to home.

In a nutshell a lot of things has happenend keeping me away from my keyboard.