Things with the Stuff.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/25/06 at 03:09:18 pm

It’s a good feeling being all caught up with bills and getting things done. This weekend was partly dedicated to getting a few things done…

For instance I decided to ditch my Dish Network service, I’ve been with them for nearly 3 years and I want to move onto something new. The reason for this is due to the fact that I’ve been tied into a 1 year contract in which I just recently escaped. You see with Dish Network if you move or make any major changes with your service they will reset your contract. With my DVR box slowly coming to its final death this weekend, I had my choice of getting a brand new DVR with a brand new contract, or getting rid of them.

We already have cable ran through the house, I cant live without the features the Dish DVR had to offer so I ordered a Tivo. They have a good deal going with their service where you can essentially get a box for next to nothing, so I went with it. I also ordered a compatible Linksys wireless adapter for the Tivo box off eBay. So I’ll be about to use the broadband connection rather then a phone line for all the neat content the Tivo service has to offer.

It seems like I get an itch for change fairly often, I was thinking about possibly changing cell phone providers since my contract is coming to an end with Sprint. I like the sprint service, and I like my PDA phone, but I’ve been looking into Nextel and the various phones and features they have to offer. Since it’s still Sprint, I wont be losing much except the high-speed data service (Nextel is still on iDEN), which I rarely use these days. We will see what happens.

Alright well, This day is quickly coming to an end, I better get something done.

Damage Control.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/18/06 at 11:09:02 am

Minnesota made national news this weekend with the severe thunderstorms and tornados we had which tore up a couple towns like Rogers and Elk River. I actually came across an MSNBC Article about a 10 year old girl that had died due to the home basically being blown down on top of her.

This storm has caused an endless plethora of problems when it comes to work. The lighting strikes caused many hardware failures for both cable customers and our own equipment. To top it off there were unrelated power and T1 outages over the weekend as well. But that’s not all; just now here in the office the road construction that’s going on outside caused a break in a Qwest fiber line, so our phones are now completely shut down. We came up with an out of the box workaround to the problem however, by using customer-issue VoIP adapters and forwarding the office phone lines it’s like nothing happened…almost.

It’s funny how we can develop such amazing technology, but such little effort is put into protecting it from things that happen so often.

Network Quandaries.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/17/06 at 08:09:04 pm

As a geek I always enjoy taking on a new project, especially if it’s related to overhauling a network or adding something new… Like what I accomplished this weekend. I picked up a brand new Linksys WRT54G on Friday after work, and I also received my FON WIFI Hotspot on Friday, which is also a Linksys WRT54G with modified firmware. I made the new Linksys my primary router, added the FON Hotspot, and I’m currently using the ‘Wireless Bridge’ feature on my older Belkin router to relocate the Vonage telephone service to the hallway. So I now have wireless VoIP telephone and I’m running 3 wireless APs in the home office (+geek ego).

While getting the new network going I decided to move my desks and computers around a little. I did this in preparation of the new 17’’ LCD I’ll be ordering at the end of next week. Another reason I wanted this done is to remove clutter from my desktop. I really despise clutter…*cringe*

On another note, the weekend has come to an end. When it comes to cleaning and getting chores and projects etc. done at home, I really did get a lot finished. However I would have liked to get some lazyness in before the weekend was out. Not that I’m dreading going back to work in the morning, in fact let’s see how long it takes before I start ranting about work, I think I’ve already smashed prior records.

It seems that I normally end my posts on a weird note, like that could have been the end right there and it would seem like something was missing. I noticed this when I was surfing around the internet reading other weblogs… Like this developer at Sun Microsystems, Dan Lacher he has this catch phrase that he ends every post with; “For What it’s worth.” I should look into doing something like that.

For What it’s worth.

Hey, where’s my Spam?

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/14/06 at 08:09:47 am

It surprises me that so many people use the email service that comes with their ISP rather then a 3rd party provider, especially with a small company like the one I employed by.

Everyone thinks that reliability is the issue with small ISPs… However I understand now that it’s really the effort it takes to get the problems fixed. All ISPs have problems, but unlike some we don’t have entire office buildings filled with IT people dedicated to fixing those problems.

So the email server here at my work has been intermittent all morning, there isn’t a whole lot we can do except deal with the business clients and such that are without their daily dose of Spam, inter-office forwards, and chain letters. I mean honestly, isn’t that what email is all about these days?

Join the FON Movement!

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/13/06 at 03:09:05 pm

I finally had a chance to sit down and order my Fon Social router yesterday. Fon is a WIFI community dedicated to bringing wireless Internet access to… Everywhere, the world. Basically you join the community, and if you want to share with the others you can pick up a Fon Social Router for $5.00 USD plus shipping, which is basically a modified Linksys wireless router with the Fon firmware. Once you register the router with Fon you will get a couple options…

The first option is to become a ‘Bill’ and make some money off your new access point, as a Bill you get half of what the end user pays for Internet access. The 2nd option is to become a ‘Linus’, and have free access to all of the Fon routers around the globe (the end user or ‘Alien’ as their called pays the same rate either way). I will likely become a Linus due to the fact that my access point will be located in such a remote area. I’m more likely to use another Fon router in the cities or somewhere, then to get rich off of my own.

You will notice a new Fon button here on the website. Click the button and you can see the precise location of where the new router will be located. It should be up and running within the next couple weeks depending on the shipping time. To learn more about the Fon project, Click Here.

Back to Winter.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/11/06 at 11:09:44 am

If I ever end up having any children, Hopefully they grow up like this kid, because he knows what’s important when it comes to attending school.

Back to school season is definitely in full swing, which means fall is here and winter is quickly on its way. The overnight temperatures are getting down to the 40’s now… Just think, by spring us Minnesotans will be begging for those kinds of temperatures. Speaking of winter and back to school, I’ll be going back to class here soon too, ugh.

I’ve sat and thought about it and I really don’t know which season I prefer. Honestly I would be happy if every day was gloomy, wet, and semi cold like it has been for the past week or so. I’m not a big fan of nature, the sun, or extremely warm and/or artic temperatures… I should look into moving to somewhere like Portland or Seattle.

On a good note, the occupational whining has come to a dead stop as you may have noticed. The new job is going over real well, I’m finally doing the work I love, I’m not being taken advantage of or being treated unfairly as I have become a custom to. It’s a nice feeling, not minding coming back to work on Monday. I’m definitely learning a lot of new things here, some of the work I’m doing is at the peak of my knowledge so it’s challenging, which I enjoy… it definitely keeps me busy.

Life Analytics

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/08/06 at 09:09:05 am

I was running Urchin here on the site with my last host; Urchin is analytics software that was recently bought out by Google. So now with the new host I have installed the new Google Analytics. It’s really great tracking software, the details it goes into and the way it presents the information, all from such a short line of code embedded in the pages… It’s amazing.

I think it would be neat to have analytics software for life. If we ever get the ability to install software and somehow run it on ourselves, I think some sort of tracking software for the things that happen in life and the emotions they cause would be at the top of the list along with a built in calculator and GPS. I wonder what the human brain clocks out at in terms of processing power…

I decided to take some time here at work and go through every post to fix the issues the database transfer caused. So the squares and oddly placed question marks should be a problem of the past. I could have designed a system to pull the unrecognized characters from the SQL database and replace them with working ones however by the time I were to have figured out how to effectively use the query functions I could have manually done most of the posts.

I actually didn’t mind going through the posts, it was like going through a bunch of good and bad times over the least year and a half or so. I noticed that I use certain words or figures of speech quite often throughout the posts. I also tend to misspell certain words, you can tell which posts I wrote up in Word and which I did just within WordPress…

Anyway, I suppose I’ll get back to work.

Hosts and Question Marks.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 09/06/06 at 08:09:41 am

It seems like I haven’t been around in a while but it’s really just the opposite. Over the past week I’ve been busy securing a new host for my growing plethora of websites. Marklangenfeld.com is officially moved over to my own VPS with RackFirm. After nearly 5 years of hosting with MediaGroup1, I have disbanded and went on my own… Back to paying for hosting *cringes*…

Unfortunately I had some quirks moving the SQL database over to the new host. These ‘quirks’ have affected nearly every post on the site. If you look closely you will see a lot of the punctuation like quotation marks and such have turned into question marks, or little squares depending on which web browser your using. This is a problem with the encoding the database used when it was exported and re-imported. WordPress claims they use UTF8 encoding, when in reality they use a proprietary hybrid that isn’t fully UTF8 compatible. I tried a couple other encoding schemes and a few other ways of exporting the database but they failed to work as well.

In order to fix the issues I’ll have to go through every post and replace the unknown characters with UTF8 compatible ones, which basically means going through and putting quotations and periods everywhere. I have close to a couple hundred posts on here so I don’t think it will be possible to go though and fix every one but I’ll do my best to get the more recent posts repaired.

On another note, with the new server and hosting I launched a new website. I wanted a good backend domain for DNS servers and future usage with the new server and I’ll be hosting a few clients so I decided to make a nice little website with some information and resources for any people that I host. Also it wouldn’t hurt to attract a couple more people who need web hosting so the server could pay for itself… So I present Evolution Inter.net Solutions – Private Shared Web Hosting.

Take a look around, tell me what you think. In the mean time I’m going to get back to work.

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