It’s official, we are now second time home owners! Late yesterday we finally closed on the house I talked about long. Our furniture was delivered today and therefore we’ll be pretty busy the next week or so. It’s nice to have all the worries and troubles out of the way. I’m finally really excited about the house once again!

I do have one more issue to figure out, cable service. Fortunately Time Warner doesn’t exist here, but unfortunately Comcast does. So far I’m not sure which is worse. Anyway, I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with digital cable package and DVR. So the question now remains, what about internet service? It appears that they try to get you to lease your modem for $3/month, at least Time Warner gave you one to use for free. So now I’m thinking of buying my own cable modem, the Motorola SURFBoard SB5101 or SB5120. Does anyone own either of these? Once I get that, the service should be pretty good. Their standard connection is 6 Mbps and you can pay $10 extra for 8 Mbps. I’m still undecided on that as well. I better make up my mind soon as my home office depends on it.

With the upcoming move I’ve been considering how I will communicate with my colleagues back in Kansas City. I can easily forward my phone here to another number automatically, so everyone in KC should be able to call me just as before. However, I have realized that this could quickly eat up all of my cell phone minutes. Currently I do not use my work phone often at all, but I can see using a phone much more when I can’t walk down the hall to ask a simple question or have a longer conversation that wouldn’t work well in email.

I’ve come up with a few options to solve this. First, I could ask for a company cell phone just like most of the trainers out on the road all the time have. Obviously I wouldn’t have to worry about the minutes or the bill. The other option is to get another phone, but not a cell phone, one of those fancy internet phones. I’m not sure if the company would pick up the bill for this or not, but there are affordable plans, some even include unlimited minutes. I’ve looked at Vonage and Skype very briefly, but I’m still fairly new to all of this.

Are there any other options that I haven’t considered? If both options were free, which would you choose? I’m trying to keep my options open since I have no idea what will happen, but it’s never too early to start thinking about the future, right?

Sorry for two tech posts in a row, but according to my tracker over 50% of you (the readers) use Firefox to browse the web and I wanted to let you know that a new version is now available. If you didn’t already know, Firefox 2.0 offers even more tabbed browsing features, a built in spell check, and lots more. I’m a huge fan of the built in spell check, especially since English classes never really were my thing. In the past I ran Firefox plugins and even put my blog entries into Microsoft Word to be sure they were free of spelling errors.

For those who still use Internet Explorer I would highly encourage you to try Firefox out. Once you do you will never go back. I know that I haven’t.

Update: Even the Internet Explorer Team was happy about the release.

Today I stumbled upon a widget for the Yahoo! engine that plays the online Sirius streams. Since I got Sirius last Christmas I have listened to the streams almost every day at work, but I’ve never really be a fan of the official streaming web app. For starters, it doesn’t even display what artist/song you are listening to or playing on other stations. This makes it hard to switch between stations and most of the time I would just leave it set on one station for the entire day.

Now that I’ve installed this widget, I can not only see what’s playing but I can also have preset stations that I can tune to with the press of one button. In addition, the widget has Alerts that can be configured to alert you when a certain artist or song is on any of the stations. The functionality of this is much closer to my Starmate unit and much improved over the standard online player.

Download the widget here to begin using it now. Please note that it does require that the Yahoo! widget engine is installed as well.

For those of you without Sirius, be sure to take advantage of the free online trial, including 48 hours of Howard Stern starting tomorrow.

This may be old news to some folks in larger cities or those who visit bigger airports frequently, but I saw an iPod vending machine in the Indianapolis airport over the weekend. I’m not kidding, you can swipe your credit card in the machine and get your very own iPod nano or shuffle. I think it’s a great idea for the last minute gift, but imagine the disappointment when someone buys one of these for their flight only to realize that it not only needs to be charged but it also contains no music. Next up, kiosks to purchase songs to fill up your mp3 players.

I’ve spent some time today reading the blog of Anousheh Ansari, the first female space tourist. She is currently inside the International Space Station and has been writing frequent entries to her blog from space! I was amazed when first hearing of this. I’m aware of the fact that wordpress can be configured to add entries sent to a particular email address. Although they do not have Internet access on the ISS yet (that I’m aware of), emails are sent and received three times daily. Regardless of how it’s done, her blog entries paint a vivid picture of what it must be like to spend some time in space. Be sure to browse the blog archvies for September to read all of the entries.

A couple of days ago, I replaced the brake light switch in the Jetta AGAIN! I can’t believe after making four revisions to this part, VW still messed something up and had to produce a fifth version. Over the weekend, I noticed the brake lights were stuck on and I immediately knew the problem. I took out the switch I put in a year ago and tried to reset it. When I reinstalled it the lights were still stuck on, so I took the switch out again and left it out. Probably not the best idea, but we only drove the car a few times without the switch, and thus without the brake lights working at all.

I did a little research on the net and stumbled upon the exact same forum that provided the instructions the first time I needed them. The most recent posts on the subject were mentioning a version E of the part. I looked at my disconnected part and saw that I had version D, which was the latest version available when I bought it. I can’t believe that they had to make any change to this part, and what’s worse is they won’t refund any of my money. I’m just glad I’ve done the repair myself and not had to pay for labor. It’s a good thing the car isn’t an automatic, otherwise I couldn’t have got the car out of park with the bad part installed.

In other VW news, the Rabbit is back…

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but I now have remote desktop setup on my computers at home so I can connect to them from work or any other place that has a connection to the Internet. Brilliant! I got the idea from my buddy Nate who I was hanging out with this past weekend. We were at the airport and he was connecting into his PC when this idea hit me. I thought, “why don’t I have that setup?” So that’s what I did yesterday.

The tricky part was trying to figure out which computer to connect to, since I do have two of them. I decided to connect into my PC where I do most of my work, the newer machine. This was done easily since I already have a domain name that points to that machine. At the same time though I wanted to be able to connect to my web server, so I could restart Apache if needed or edit my configuration. It was at that point that I realized all I needed to do was setup remote desktop on that machine as well. Once I connect in to my newer machine I can then remote desktop to the web server and have full control there.

It’s kind of slow, but I’m not sure how I ever lived without this!

I have a new enemy and its name is Cymphonix. I guess that we’ve had one of their Network Composer devices installed here at work for a week or two now. At first it didn’t cause too many problems for me, but I was told by other employees that their streaming music was no longer working. Luckily the streams that I use via my Sirius subscription are still working to this day (knock on wood).

I soon realized that I was no longer able to download mp3 files, which isn’t that big of a deal since I obviously have other ways of listening to music. Something strange started happening yesterday though. I was not able to get to oarsa.org:

Blocked Content Analysis: Gambling

I then browsed over here to edpaffjr.com:

Blocked Content Analysis: Alcohol and Tobacco

What the hell? It’s obvious to me that they either have a monkey doing their website categorization or they are using some sort of real-time filtering. Perhaps the device can read what’s on a page and then decide to block it or not. Obviously O.A.R.’s song “That Was A Crazy Game Of Poker” could lead to the gambling categorization, and that’s what first led me to this theory.

Regardless, I’m sure this product aims at increasing productivity. I’m not sure if the result is going to be reached though, especially after I just spent the last half hour of my lunch trying to research how the filtering is done. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but hopefully I’ll be able to view these obviously “safe for work” sites in the future.

With Kim in Iowa overnight last night, I took advantage of the situation by eating Chipotle for dinner and then working at my computers for the rest of the night. I finally finished my project of moving my web server from Phil’s old machine, to Ringo (my old machine). I immediately noticed a slight improvement in overall performance. Upon further investigation, I noticed significant improvement involving my upcoming redesigned site. Now that this design is not horribly slow, I can continue on and hopefully release it in the future.

What does this mean for you? Absolutely nothing…well hopefully. I don’t think I missed anything when moving everything from one computer to the other, but there is a slight chance that I did. If you notice anything strange, please let me know about it. In the meantime, enjoy the slightly faster website!