I'm fairly confident I have my outdoor temperature sensor in the shade.  Maybe I should check.  Either way, as you can see, it was pretty hot today.

I was going to go swimming, but I figured the water would be a little too warm, like it was the last time it was this hot, last weekend.  So, I just went for a walk, and took some sunny photos.

In other news, it looks like my wardriving wireless card (SMC2532W-B/prism2.5) just stopped working.  I posted some stuff on Gentoo's forums awhile back, but didn't seem to get any response.  I recently tried the card on my work laptop that runs Windows XP, and got little or no signal to an AP sitting a couple meters away, even with an external antenna.  Guess hostap wasn't the culprit after all.

I'm thinking of picking up a new card for any projects I choose to pursue in the future.  Looks like a battery killer, too.  Neat!

Ok, that's my post for the week.  Hasta la semana próxima ...

Fun week.  Went to see a Charlotte Knights baseball game on Thursday with a bunch of coworkers.  It was great fun, even though they got whipped pretty badly.

Saw Fantastic Four earlier in the week, too.  I'm not sure what to think about it.  The special effects were good, the acting wasn't bad, but I don't think there was really any plot.  These guys didn't do much as superheroes, except for busting up Victor Von Doom and rescuing one guy who was going to take a jump.  They left the ending wide open for a sequel.  I don't know about it ...

In other news, I've been playing with a NetScreen 5GT I got recently.  I loaded ScreenOS 5.2r1 on it, and gave it a pretty stressful routing test: had it neighbor (OSPFv2) with two Quagga boxes on a little transit network of mine.  Passed nicely, even worked with MD5 authentication.  I currently have it running in transparent mode between my media/wireless router and my transit network (10.3.5.0/24).  (Look for "einstein" on my network map)

I need to get it to forward IPv6 traffic, but supposely this isn't supported in ScreenOS, yet.  Just my luck.

Oh, yeah.  I was going to try out Linux 2.6.12 this evening, but I stopped half way through menuconfig when I realized CONFIG_SND_BIT32_EMUL had been removed.  I doubt 32-bit apps would have produced sound on my amd64 system, if I had built it.  How rude.

I was bored today, so I made a map of my network.

I went jetskiing today at Lake Norman with a couple of coworkers.  It turned out to be great fun, even though I think it was a little early in the morning for some of us (me).  I suppose it was better in the morning though, traffic on the lake seemed to increase exponentially as t approached midday.

Also, the weather here lately has been a bit tropical; hot and sticky by noon and throughout the afternoon, with an electrical storm followed by brief periods of torrential downpours in the evenings.  This has made the insect and amphibian population restless, and I've been seeing a countless number of large beetles and frogs out and about.

Oh, yeah.  Don't try to assemble furniture when you're 1) tired 2) irritated.  It just comes out all ... wrong.

Haven't posted in awhile, figured I'd say something.

Parents were down in NC for the weekend, pretty nice of them to drop by.  I suck at decorating, so it was good to get some advise on the subject.  I now have fake plants, and lots of things on the wall.  Cool, I think.

Oh, and I spilled grapefruit juice all over my desk, and wrist pad.  That wasn't fun.  Just thought I would share that.

So, I sent my Canon PowerShot S60 to Illinois for repair.  I think I commented about this awhile back, but any zoomed-in image suffers from a glow effect.  I got the camera back today via FedEx, and the repair summary was "adjusted focus."  The picture is the same, blurry and messed up.

Great service, huh?  I have a little over a month to get this fixed, before my warranty is up, and my camera turns into a permanent $400 paperweight.

Oh, in other news VMware 5.0 is pretty neat.  Runs nicely on amd64, as well (w/32-bit compatibility).

I get back from the pool this evening, to find my connection to RPI to be rather laggy.  Traceroutes show that there have been some crappy topology changes on my route from SCRR-11426 (RR Charlotte) to RPI-AS (RPI) that have effectively changed the RTT from 32ms to around 68ms.

Since my WAN infrastructure (eh, two cable modems, colo at SagoNet, and a host at RPI) is almost completely fully-meshed at this point, I just tweaked some OSPF settings, and routed traffic through NJ.  So ...

64 bytes from starfire.prolixium.com (10.3.4.1): icmp_seq=29 ttl=63 time=79.6 ms
64 bytes from starfire.prolixium.com (10.3.4.1): icmp_seq=30 ttl=63 time=76.5 ms

(en, conf t ... etc.)

64 bytes from starfire.prolixium.com (10.3.4.1): icmp_seq=32 ttl=62 time=50.9 ms
64 bytes from starfire.prolixium.com (10.3.4.1): icmp_seq=33 ttl=62 time=49.7 ms

Don't VPN's rock?  Yes!  Do I need a life?  Yes!

There's something very weird going on in my condo, or the whole complex, maybe.

Every couple of hours, my WiFi connections will all drop, and I won't be able to connect to any (mine, or neighbors') AP's.  I figured it was just the congestion, since there are TONS of AP's around here.  Of course, they're all on channel 6 or 11, and I took 1.  I'm also considering moving completely to 802.11a.  2.4GHz is way too congested.

However, I've noticed that my Blackberry is dropping lots of calls recently, but only when I'm inside, here.  Today I was talking to a coworker, and I heard the A/C click on, and instantly the radio in my phone shut off, for whatever reason.

So, yea, I need to find out what's going on.  If it happens to be some component of the heating/cooling unit, I'll have to wrap that puppy in anti-WiFi tape.