Mt. Whitney, Here we Come Again!

As my friend said, we have unfinished business. Amazingly, the mountain is still there, so we will attempt another summit of Mt. Whitney this summer. We don't have our permits yet, but our plan is to hike it in mid-July, spending the night at Trail Camp this time. The extra three miles the first day will make the second day a little easier, but I'll need to train extra hard so I can carry a full backpack a total of six extra miles. Luckily I have already started training. I hope that his year we can do San Gorgonio as a warm-up hike. That would be an accomplishment all by itself.

Dell 2407WFP Monitor

I finally broke down and bought a 24 inch LCD monitor for my home computer. This replaces my 19 inch Sony CRT, which was, and still is, a great monitor with vivid colors and sharp text. However, it is big and bulky. Thin is now in. This new, sleek, flat LCD monitor takes less desk space and give me much more screen space. In fact, the monitor is blinding me as I write this because there is so much white, even after turning down the brightness. Currently I have it connected to my computer with an analog VGA connector at an astounding resolution of 1920x1200. My graphics card has a DVI connector, but it won't work at this high resolution. I'll need to buy a new graphics card with more power. Just for the fun of it, I connected my Mac Book Pro to this Dell via the DVI, and the Apple immediately took advantage of the extra screen. What it does is let you drag windows off the right side of the notebook screen and they appear on the external monitor. How neat! So you have two screen to work with at the same time. The monitor also will tilt 90 degrees, and then you can adjust your computer to display in portrait mode. I'll probably not do this much, but it would be good for looking a long documents or web pages. The next step is to connect my old computer to the Dell so I can get rid of my 17 inch Sony CRT (anybody want it?). That will free up more desk space and make my computer room look less cluttered. Unfortunately, the Dell has only one DVI and one VGA, so I'll need some kind of external box to switch back and forth, if they make such a thing.

Has Anybody Seen Me?

Yes, I am here, fighting off a would-be cold by getting lots of sleep. Everybody at work is sick, even the guy who never gets sick. People sneezing and coughing everywhere! Time to hide in a plastic bubble. Well, I won't go that far. However, I did have an eye exam last night and right on queue, I was told that I could use reading glasses. What is it about turning 40? My right eye got worse for distances and my left eye got worse for reading. I'll hold off on glasses as long as I can, even if they might help my eyes from getting worse. I didn't get LASIK just to wear glasses again. It has only been three years and life without irritating red marks on my nose and ears is good.

LOVE

My friend who organized the birthday Vegas trip for his wife managed to get 14 seats in a row to see LOVE. This was actually the first big show I've seen in Las Vegas. I never had an urge to see a Cirque du Soleil show, but everybody says they are great. Since this one had remixed music by The Beatles, I figured it would be good. And yes, I really like the show. It was a 90 minute visual and audio experience. Sir George Martin and Giles Martin did a great job of remixing these classic songs. There was so much happening at once, it was hard to see it all. Performers dancing on the stage, climbing ropes up high in the room and driving Beatles (the car) across the floor. I was told afterwards by someone who has seen many Cirque du Soleils, that they are normally mostly circus acts. This one had more stage performances, which was fine by me. I'm glad I got to see the show and I would recommend it to everyone.

Hard Rock Hotel In Las Vegas

As you might have guessed, I spent the weekend in Las Vegas. I couldn't blog about it before I left because it was a surprise birthday party and the person who it was for sometimes reads my blog. We (10 people) flew out there Friday evening, after having a nice dinner for the birthday girl here in town with everyone. In Vegas, we stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel, and in fact spent most of our time there. The only other casino we ventured to was The Mirage to see LOVE, the Cirque du Soleil with music by The Beatles. After the show we went back to the hotel to use our free passes to get into Body English, the popular dance club at the Hard Rock Hotel. However, even with VIP passes, we couldn't get passed the guy behind the velvet rope, seriously! Young women had no problem being waved in, but I guess we were too old. So the next night we tried again and succeeded, without slipping the doorman $100 like the people next to us did. The music was loud, drinks expensive and the dance floor crowed. So after 45 minutes we and our fun and left. Everybody turned in semi-early, and I actually woke up feeling fine, ready for the flight home. I guess I didn't party like a rock star. We all had a fun time, but as I always say, now it is time to get back to work.

I Work in a Crazy Neighborhood

So I'm driving to the gym after work yesterday and there is this old lady "driving" her electric wheelchair down the middle of a very busy street. She is swaying her head back and forth, as cars pile up behind her. This morning I had to walk past a bunch of hippies who were protesting the war, as they carried signs, bells and a coffin draped with a flag. I felt like saying "Get out of my way, I have a job to get to, something you hippies don't know about". Well, at least that gave everybody at work something to talk about. Then, driving home today, a man was standing by the road with a huge bag full of bagels, and he was breaking pieces off and throwing them into the air above the road for the seagulls to eat. The dirty birds were flying everywhere, dropping the bread all over the place. I'm glad I wasn't driving my Mustang, not that it is currently very clean. Of course, this is the same neighborhood where police shot and killed a man with a stick, a man banging on a window and a naked man riding a bike. So crazy people beware, the cops will shoot you if your not careful.

Christmas is Over

Well, Christmas ended some time ago, but I finally took down my decorations today, thus ending the holiday season for me. It is always fun to decorate my house for Christmas and very depressing to take the decorations down. My living room looks so empty, without the tree, lights and tinsel.

New Computer Toys

Yesterday I went shopping for various computer accessories, including a wireless router, Bluetooth mouse and memory. I first went to the store where I bought my PC last year, Datel, to find out if I could add another gigabyte of RAM to my computer and they said yes. So I bought the RAM to give my PC a total of 2 gigabytes of RAM. After all, I couldn't let my Apple computer have more memory than my PC.

Then it was off to Fry's Electronics to buy a Bluetooth Mouse for my Mac. I went to Fry's because I knew they would have a good selection of mice to choose from. In fact, they had too many mice. I spent almost 30 minutes try to decide which one to buy, and I finally decided on a Kensington mouse. I had never heard of this brand, but I liked the mouse because it was small, light weight and had all the features I was looking for, such as three buttons, scrolling wheel and an "off" switch to save battery life. It didn't take too much to get the mouse working, I just had to turn in on and then get the Mac to recognize the device. The mouse seems to work well, and it is a lot better than using the laptop's finger pad. I also like how the Mac automatically handled the right mouse button and scroll wheel. The standard Apple mouse has only one button, and I really like being able to use the right button to bring up menus with options such as "Copy" and "Select", just like on a PC running Windows. The one annoyance is that once the mouse is "asleep", it takes about 30 seconds before it turns on, but I can live with that.

My last purchase was a wireless router. I had researched routers online and found that for every model and brand, there were really good and bad reviews. It seems people either claimed that their router was terrible or it was the best, leaving the average score 5 out of 10. So at Fry's I looked at routers from Linksys, D-Link and Netgear. Then a salesman asked if I needed help, which they rarely do at the store. I told him my delima and he suggested the D-Link WBR-2310, which was on sale. It had the features I wanted, mainly security related, plus it was a "rangebooster G" router, which claims to double the speed of the normal 54Mbps (megabits per second). However, to use this feature, you need to have wireless card on your PC/laptop with the same capability, which I don't. Maybe in the future. So, I went ahead and bought it.

Setting up the router was relatively easy. It comes with a CD, and when you run the install program, it steps you though connecting the router, starting off with disconnecting your current router. Then, it installed a program called Network Magic. I didn't realize that this application was not necessary, so I installed it. It provides an easy interface to maintain your computer network and wireless router. However, it wants to take over control of your networking completely. I wanted to access a shared folder on my PC from my Mac, which I had done before, but Network Magic wanted me to convert the folder to a Network Magic folder, and then install Network Magic on all computers connected to my network. I really didn't want to do this, so I uninstall the program and suddenly my Mac could once again access the folder on the PC. Lesson learned.

After getting all three of my computers connected, including by wireless with my Mac, I made my router more secure by disabling the broadcast of my SSID (service set identifier). This keeps other (neighbor's) wireless devices from detecting and using my router. Then I set it up to only allow my computers to use the router by limiting access by MAC address (a unique, 12 digit code embedded in every network card). Then I enabled password protected WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), which requires a password to connect to my router. After I finished, I was still able to use the wireless connection with my Apple. Today, I took my Mac into the living room, located about 30 feet and one wall away, and the connection was good. I tested the speed using a web site called DSL Reports, to test my connection speed to the Internet. Now this number can vary depending on the time of day, but my download speed was 4332 Kbps (541 Kbytes/sec) and my upload speed was 357 Kbps (46 Kbytes/sec). That wasn't too bad.

Hope you found some of this information helpful, and I hope I can now finally enjoy the world of wireless computing.

Fun With Wireless Connections

I have finally entered the world of wireless computing. My new computer has a built-in wireless adapter. Currently I have it connected directly to my non-wireless router for Internet access, but soon I'll buy a wireless router so I can use the laptop anywhere in the house. However, for the fun of it I checked to see if there were any wireless connections already available, and there were! Four of them. In fact, I was able to connect to 3 of the 4 and access the Internet. Only one asked for a password - it had WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) enabled, the others were open to the public. I guess I have three neighbors that don't know about securing their wireless connections, or they don't care. Now, of course, I'm not going to use their connection, because it really isn't legal, some say. There is still much debate on that. I think of it like if a neighbor's fruit tree is growing over the fence into your yard, you can pick the fruit that is on your property. So my neighbor's wireless frequencies are on my property, therefor I should be able to "pick" them. If you have a wireless router, you should enable WEP, choose a good, strong password, and also limit access by MAC (not related to Apple) address, so only your computers can use it. Hopefully soon I'll be able to take my own advice and test this theory.

National Day of Mourning

Turns out I have today off work, but I didn't find out until lunch time, after driving home from the desert, waking early and spending four hours working. Oh well. It was my fault for not calling my boss on Friday. Now I hope to make the best of this warm, sunny day.

New Year's Day 2007

More fun with the camera and special effects.

Welcome 2007

A few minutes after midnight, 2007.