Monday, October 22, 2007

Retail

It's coming up on the retail season again. The time when some of us crazy birds look forward to Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving (or sometimes the night of Thanksgiving)), and retailers look forward to extra profit! Then there are others who dread the season altogether because of the crowds. I never mind crowds too much. In fact I find it kind of exciting to be caught up in the rush of people.

But what I find humorous in the last couple of years has been the commentary on Black Friday prices. Any good comsumer knows that it pays dividends to wait to make electronics purchases until that day. Prices are literally SLASHED in some cases. I bought my HDTV last year on that day because I saved 30%. Awesome. But every year, analysts and retailers start their commentary early. Saying price drops will not be as severe as the last year, and that things should be more reasonable. Then Wal-Mart comes out with a flat-panel TV priced 30% below cost or something ridiculous like that.

Me? I'll wait to see the fun unfold. I'll be there with the newspapers after filling my stomach with an insane amount of turkey. Plotting. Planning. Getting the best deals.

-M

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Routers

Well, I figure it's about time to bump my blog. It'd been a while since the last update.

So what's new? well, right now I am looking at router firmwares. I have a Netgear MR814v2 router at home, and I work with its predecessor, the MR814 at another location. At home, I had a consistant problem connecting my work laptop to my wireless network. It would connect for a while, and then eventually just crash the router, requiring a hard reboot. I just figured they were incompatible. Well, I found out quite by accident that they were, but it could be fixed.

I was playing with opening some ports in my router for VNC recently, to work on a computer remotely. I happened to look at the firmware upgrade page, which prompted me to see if I had the latest version. Turns out, my firmware was several years old. In fact, the most recent update is years old too, but newer than what I had. So I went through the process of upgrading the firmware, which was fairly annoying because I had to reset all of the settings and put them in again. Anywho, it turns out that the old firmware was incompatible with centrino-based wireless systems! D'oh! So after the upgrade, all is good :)

Now I just look at the possibility of getting a router I can flash with some custom firmware for added functionality ;^)

Monday, October 8, 2007

Oh My Goodness.

So this morning I was up fairly early (which means I got up when my alarm went off). While I was drinking my coffee and getting ready for my day, I turned on the TV. Now, I have a High-Def TV, so I tend to watch programs that are in HD, or at least favor them. So despite my inclination to watch something related to money or the economy
on CNN or something, I turned to Good Morning America in HD.
The show was mostly good, a little hurried I thought, but covered a variety of stories, and kept up the pace fairly well.

Then they got to a story about giving laptops to poverty-stricken children. My first thoughts were "why do children in poverty need laptops" and "I'll bet that these aren't even U.S. Children". Well, I was right about the second part (and probably the first). There is an organization called "One Laptop per Child" which manufactures low-cost, durable laptops designed for children.

Ok, first, why the heck do kids need laptops? I never had one, and I'm fine. Second, why not educate our own children? Why not send these laptops to impoverished children in the US? Does this company not realize that we could benefit from them? Why do we keep breeding talent elsewhere in the world. Listen, Outsourcing is already a problem! Why educate a global community? Do we need more cheap telemarketers??!!?!

Well, their CEO, Nicholas Negroponte was being interviewed, and at one point, the interviewer asks "What impact would you like to see in 5-10 years". His answer was something along the line of "poverty will be eliminated, and there will be world peace".

Hold the Phone!!! Ok, as a believer, this is pretty scary and exciting at the same time, because this is literally a sign of the apocalypse. It's exciting because it may mean the end is near, but it is scary because this man, whose name is frighteningly similar to Nicolai Carpathia (Character of the AntiChrist from the "Left Behind" series) is from a european nation touting world peace. Look into it. This isn't stuff to just throw around on a morning interview.


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