it's still happening

Well the power company is still messing with me but I during my recent time off at home have noticed a trend. The voltage mainly spikes in the afternoon between 1 and 5pm. I don't know if I should even bother reporting the issue again, I just need to sit it out for a few more months and then I am outa here. In the mean time my refrigerator is spending so much time off that I am seeing around a 30% drop in my electricity bill. It doesn't seem to affect the food in there though so its a good thing I guess. This will make up for all the fuses I have been buying to fix my speakers.

Yes that many fuses + more have blown. Once I took up the camera I got trigger happy with the natural light and took some other photos of my ip power 9212 remote power and sensor boxes. A few years ago I hunted the internet high and low for them and placed my order at the first sign of them. I had grand visions of home automation with a computer sensing and controlling power around my apartment. They have yet to be used like so much of the other tech I have bought. I still have grand visions using x10 though.

Twelve Days of Christmas

Why are people talking about Christmas being over? I'm sure we all know the 12 days of Christmas song and few years ago upon further investigation I found out the 12 days starts on December 25th and goes on to January 5. So for those of you (like my parents) who leave up your decorations until Easter need to start taking them down on the 6th of January. My boss called me one day and dropped a bomb on me, he had a gift for me.. lol I must be doing something right or maybe his new wife strongly suggested[nagged] that he do it. Either way it made my day, thanks!

It has been way more than 12 days since I made a post so I'll just summarize all the updates that would have probably been posts if I wasn't so lazy in bullet form... yet again.

• I took some time off work to relax before the holidays only to find out the contractors the landlady sent over to renovate my place was ready for me. I was pretty much stuck at home the whole time as they fixed up the place and laid a fresh layer of dust over everything I owned along with drops of paint. On the plus side the place looks a lot nicer now. My parents are convinced she plans to raise the rent after she is finished.. I'm keeping my fingers crossed but even if she does, how bad could it be?
• As per usual the eating has been non-stop.. time to unbuckle the belt :p
• I went to a party that had a haagen-dazs stand.. this was a first for me. What was funny was I mentioned it to my sister and she said "I can't tell when last I went to a party and they didn't have one". I guess we live in two different worlds even though she only lives a few minutes from me.
• My standby duty starts today and goes on until next week Monday. Somehow I forgot this and was previously looking for somewhere to go on old years night. Oh well change of plans.
• Anybody that flips through tv on Christmas day knows that channel that has the yuletide log burning with Christmas carols playing for hours.. this year I taped dvded it. Yup this is probably the first time I made use of that cheap dvd recorder I bought from radio shack and was proud. Now I can listen to endless hours of Christmas music throughout all my 12 days of Christmas.
• I fixed one of the contractor's computer. After working for one too many days in my apartment and seeing all the boxes of electronic junk he figured I must know something about this computer thing so he approached me and I told him I would look at it for him. I fixed it for him and he offered money or at least to buy me a drink for fixing it.. I couldn't take a cent from him. I have long forgotten that there are people who don't really get the chance to use or know much about computers. I am glad he bought one for his kids so they can stay current.
  

Oh yeah happy new year when it comes.

Jamaican CES minus the E

So I decided to pass through the 2007 Digicel consumer electronics show last Saturday and yet again I feel robbed that I paid them a $400 cover fee + $100 parking fee. I figured that since they changed their venue from the normally packed Hilton Hotel to the National arena they would have improved the booths they had. If I wanted to see standing fans, fridges, chairs and insurance companies I would have gone to the plazas and done it for free.

The show was so lame that this "silver man" was reportedly the main highlight of the event. He did his robot dance, tore up a newspaper and like magic it came back whole! His silver body suit did nothing to hide every unsightly feature of his aged body and I could barely look as he did a few other mildly entertaining magic tricks. After the silverman's show digicel had a competition where a phone was the prize. This lucky fellow with his arms in the air won and he was quite deserving as he was previously owned one of those nokia flashlight phones. I was tempted to enter but I don't think my company would have appreciated that.
The fame girl on the right came up to me and asked me to give the turntables a try and after explaining to her that my music hand/eye/ear coordination left a lot to be desired she turned to begging me to play. After explaining to her how firm I was on my decision not to play I strongly encouraged her with my hand(pushed her over to them) to get one of the other patrons to play where she spent a few second talking to them, they say now then she comes back over to me. Her pursuit seemed endless so I went to talk to some other booth people and left her by the fame booth and I returned when she seemed to be more occupied. She came back over to plea with me just to come behind the table with her and she will play, I didn't have to do anything but just look. Something was very fishy with this situation, somehow she is trying to con me but I couldn't figure out what she was getting out of it. I wasn't born yesterday and I had a good enough view of the turntables from the side I was supposed to be on so I made haste and retreated from her booth.

This is the first time I was seeing a chat booth and I must say this was probably the only thing that impressed me at the expo. I got a phone call and when I went in there the blasting music and noise almost went away, they needed a few more of these and it would be perfect cause the next time I got a call I looked inside and somebody was already using it. They need a couple of these at every party, club and event.

Work is transforming me into another mindless drone

As I have mentioned before my lust for tech is dying a slow and painful death. Taylor2nd just highlighted it for me a while ago when he asked me how come I wasn't participating much anymore on a local tech forum that we use. I used to post and idle on that site all day, reading up all the new tech news hot off the press as it unfolds but work has gotten in the way now. I still load the page the first thing in the morning when I get to work but there is no guarantee that I will look back in that window for the next couple of hours.

Also a couple of weeks ago during a conversation with Taylor2nd I realized I have thrown away my BSD past. Currently I am using a 64bit-pure based port of Slackware Linux since AMD released their cheap AM2 64bit processors about 10 months ago. I must say it sucks the developers of flash/java plugins for FireFox have decided that there aren't enough users to care about getting them working on this platform so I have been browsing sites unable to see flash/java content.

The lack of java/flash support pushed me to download NetBSD3.1 x64 to install and abandon Linux once again. I have always liked NetBSD but never used it on my desktop because they lack support for key hardware as I would find out after installing, rebuilding the kernel, building X.org desktop and finding that there was no nvidia devices detected for my video card. This is the shit I went through in the 90's when trying to get X to work on redhat 4.x but I am now in the know that there is no way X on netbsd will work with my video card so I had to nix NetBSD x64 from my list of suitable desktop OS replacements.

At this point I could no go back to no flash/java support so I decided to give NetBSD 3.1 x86 a try. I installed, rebuilt the kernel, built X.org, no cigar.. the same video card problem popped up. I could always go FreeBSD x86, I know they support my hardware, but for some reason I have my mind set against it. I think I might end up throwing away x64 Linux for a i386 version of Slackware.. one step forward, two steps back.