Loud City, Bright Lights

Generally, living in a city is really cool. I was counting today and I've got 8 bookstores within two blocks of me during my mile and a half walk to work. I could add at least four more if I went a half mile or so out of my way in various directions. The YMCA that I try and work out at every other day is on that route too. There's a lot of great restaurants within a stone's throw and public transportation is almost as decent as it gets in the United States, land of rugged individuals who don't know how to use subway tokens.

However, at least once a week when I am groggily awoken from sound sleep a couple of hours too early I'm reminded of the price I pay: noise. This morning we had garbage trunks trundling up the streets, neighbors chainsawing trees, and a car alarm going off every couple of minutes, all before 9am.

Yeah, I like to stay up late and sleep late, but still a little more quiet in the morning would be nice.

Ah well. Life is full of compromises.

Computer Update

Well, I pretty much had to rip erzo 3.0 apart to get all the components I needed for the new machine. I can't believe the design of the old box. For a start, a cable from the power supply was permanent sodered into the board, so there was no way to replace it (hence the initial problem & decision to replace the entire unit). Moving up from there, there were some permanent metal plates in front of some of the screws. I had to take the entire machine apart piece by piece to get everything I wanted and there was some hammering and bending involved. Screwdrivers are great levers.

Unfortunately erzo 4.0 isn't 100% yet. Something in the new box interferes with my second network card, and so the machine isn't acting as a router yet. My network cards are old ISA cards which depend on hand-set IRQs and memory space, and that's been a bad design in PCs pretty much forever. Well, now I'm paying for that design thanks to something in how this new computer or its BIOS is put together. Fortunately we have surplus network cards at work, and so I'll be able to install one or two plug-and-play PCI cards which should work better and hopefully resolve my difficulties.

And then I'll be able to surf the net again at home, from anything other than the server itself.

Oh, and do serious work, of course.

PacBell Violating Your Privacy

PacBell is trying to trick you into giving your OK for them to start distributing information on your calling patterns; they'll be able to give it not just to all of their subsidaries, but also to any communications company they have reasonable equity in (10% equity is the magic number). For example, if they had an interest in Yahoo!, they'd be able to tell Yahoo! all about you.

If you throw out all the crap that they stuff into your phone bill every month, you missed your option to "opt-out" of this practice and PacBell is right now getting ready to sell info on whether you call phone sex lines or posh restaurants; on whether you seem to be home at 10am or 10pm.

Here's the story, including phone numbers and URLs that you can use to opt out:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/27/BU199268.DTL

Here's a follow-up from today, which is quite interesting for the fact that it details PacBell customer support reps being told to call the previous column "shady":
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/12/04/BU139983.DTL

"All we want is to educate consumers so they can make decisions for themselves," says John Britton, a rep for the company. I think he meant brainwash. Buy PacBell products. Discontinue your other long-distance, local, internet, and cable options. We know better than you.

Historical Catan Review (I)

Another of my board game reviews was posted at RPGnet today. This one's on a German historical supplement for the Settlers of Catan game:

• The Settlers of Catan, Historical Scenarios I: Cheops and Alexander the Great
  

Oh, erzo 4.0 works now. Just an hour or so of work with the new plug-n-play network card donated by work. Whew.