It occurred to me that I haven't blogged in quite some time.  So, here you go!

House

I moved into my townhouse in West Seattle about a month ago.  The house itself is about eight (8) years old so there's not much I'm going to change or replace right off the bat.  My fiancée has one or two things to say about the color schemes in some of the rooms, though, so there will be painting in the future.  It's in the High Point community, which is still expanding rapidly and there are lots of new townhouses and single family houses being built.  Unpacking took awhile but I'm more or less settled, now.  I do need to buy some more furniture in the future since I have roughly 450 more square footage than I did in Charlotte.

I managed to get lucky with the cabling.  All of the rooms in the house are wired for Cat5e and are already punched down in a central Leviton telecom panel in the closet of the master bedroom:

There's also a second port in several rooms that is wired for Cat5e but all of those ports are wired together.  I ended up connecting my old Linksys PAP2T to those ports for analog phone compatibility, which I've actually used a bit.  I ended up putting my Juniper EX2200-C and ALIX box in the closet, as well:

I haven't turned up my lab yet, since I was told I shouldn't be putting any loud things in the bedroom closet.

Comcast

Ah, Comcast.  I started off with xfinity 50/10 HSD and basic cable, which seemed fine until I realized I couldn't get more than one public IPv4 address.  Back in Charlotte I was able to get the CPE limit increased to three (3) so I could have two firewalls as well as a Linux box connected to the Internet.  After a long call with a fairly clueful CSR, he informed me that they no longer are able to increase the CPE limits for residential HSD and I'd have to get business class, which I did.

I got the same 50/10 service from Comcast Business but with a static /29.  They wouldn't let me use my own modem because I was getting a static assignment so they gave me a Comcast-branded NETGEAR CG3000DCR.  I suspect this is because of how they inject the /29 into their network, which is probably via RIP.  The speed is fine and the latency to the CMTS isn't too bad, although it seems to bounce around a bit:

Here's a traceroute showing that nice paid peering between Comcast and Netflix:

Start: Thu May  8 20:34:26 2014
HOST: starfire                                          Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1.|-- 10.1.10.1                                          0.0%     8    0.4   0.4   0.4   0.6   0.0
  2.|-- 73.98.180.1                                        0.0%     8    8.7   8.5   7.2  10.0   0.7
  3.|-- te-0-2-0-5-ur07.burien.wa.seattle.comcast.net      0.0%     8    9.7   9.5   7.6  11.1   0.9
  4.|-- be-1-ur08.burien.wa.seattle.comcast.net            0.0%     8    9.5   9.5   8.2  10.6   0.5
  5.|-- ae-1-0-ar03.seattle.wa.seattle.comcast.net         0.0%     8    9.7   9.6   8.5  10.9   0.7
  6.|-- he-1-3-0-0-10-cr01.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net    0.0%     8   10.3  11.7   9.3  18.2   2.8
  7.|-- he-0-13-0-0-cr01.sanjose.ca.ibone.comcast.net      0.0%     8   29.4  28.9  26.8  31.8   1.9
  8.|-- he-0-11-0-0-pe03.11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net  0.0%     8   27.0  37.1  26.9 103.8  27.0
  9.|-- as2906-c-0.sanjose.ibone.comcast.net               0.0%     8   69.0  68.4  61.2  79.2   5.3
 10.|-- 198.45.56.12                                       0.0%     8   69.3  67.8  63.8  70.3   2.2

They also let me set my own PTR records, which is nice, although they offer no self-service way of doing this.  I had to call them up.  Oh.. and I must say there is a night & day difference between residential and commercial phone support.

Unfortunately, while Comcast does support IPv6 on the xfinity side of the house they do not yet support it for their commercial offering, so I'm still tunneling.

That being said, I had a bit of a headache when I tried to cancel the HSD portion of my xfinity residential service.  At first when I canceled the service everything seemed fine.  However, the CableCARD tied to my account (connected to the ATI DCT on my Windows Media Center PC) magically stopped working around the same time.  I had to call them bad and they admitted they "made a mistake" when they were canceling my HSD account.  That's fine.  However, a few days later after I sold my old Motorola SB6141 to someone at work, I come to find out that the cable modem is still tied to my account.  Again I had to call them and tell them to take it off my account.  Surprisingly, my CableCARD and Motorola HD box didn't break this time.

Work

The commute from West Seattle isn't as bad as everyone had warned.  If I leave at around 07:00 I can be in the parking garage in around 18 minutes.  From there it's a short 5-6 minute walk to the office and I can be at my desk by 07:30.  I haven't quite figured out the best time to leave the office but it seems to take me anywhere from 25 to 30 minutes from the parking deck to my garage.  Regardless, nothing as infuriating as I-485 back in Charlotte!

Work is fairly challenging and my first project is almost done.  Amazon sure puts the wireless industry to shame with the sheer number of acronyms, nicknames, and proprietary lingo that is used for various things.  I'm certainly having fun, so far!  Yes, we are still hiring.

Climate

The first two warm days were last week and it got up to 29.4°C before I opened up the windows and cooled it down.  I'm going to try the first summer without any air conditioning and then figure out if I need to get central AC or a portable unit for next year.

Anyway, the spring is fairly nice out here!  It's nice and green, now:

The pollen is practically nonexistant compared to Charlotte.  In fact, I haven't noticed any of it and, as a result, I've managed to skip my seasonal allergies completely, which is nice.

Other Stuff

I think there's a bug in Mutt 1.5.23.  Ever since I upgraded from 1.5.21 I've noticed doing a full-text message search is horribly slow.  I think it may have to do with Debian bug 745532.

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