Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I have the LinkSys CIT200 Skype phone that I got for Christmas last year.  A couple days ago the display on the phone simply said “DISCONNECTED” and no amount of fiddling would get the thing back online. I tried reinstalling the drivers, resetting the phone, switching USB ports, restarting the computer, everything that I could think of.
Then just now, I tried to turn off the phone itself by holding down the “end” button and it shut off correctly. I turned it back on and Skype was back online, no problems, ugh.  Just posting this here cause it seems that several people have this issue, so maybe this will help out somebody else down the line.

I’ve been looking forward to tonight for awhile now, it’s the season premiere of The Office, Grey’s Anatomy, and Six Degrees.  The Office is hilarious, I got addicted to Grey’s Anatomy last season (and I’m pissed that it’s on Thursdays now), and Erin says Six Degrees is a good show, she got to see the pilot at work I think.

I was also excited to see the new show from Aaron Sorkin “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” and it didn’t disappoint.  It’s funny to see so many people from The West Wing on the show, and it just doesn’t seem right to have “Josh” (Bradley Whitford) running the show without Sam Seaborn around, oh well
I wanted to get a DVR from Comcast so that I could record the shows if I wasn’t around to watch them, but they wanted me to upgrade to a bigger cable package in order to get a DVR (we just have basic cable so that we can get the local HD channels).  Whatever, less business for them.

In the ongoing story of Minneapolis providing citywide wifi access:

“Minneapolis officials have chosen an 11-year-old Minnetonka Internet service provider with some Wi-Fi experience to build a citywide wireless network. US Internet would build and operate the roughly $20 million Minneapolis Wi-Fi network and would offer consumers high-speed Internet service for $20 a month.”

…

“Under the proposed deal, the network would blanket the city with signals that could be received in 95 percent of outdoor locations and 90 percent of indoor locations.”

Minneapolis announced yesterday that they have selected US Internet to build out the city’s offering. I think this is going to be a great step forward for offering more Internet based mobile services. If you know that you can get reliable Internet service anywhere in the city, it opens up a whole set of services that you wouldn’t have thought of using before, mainly location based services. I’m most excited for the Skype possibilities.

Although I think this is a great move on the part of the city, I still won’t be signing up anytime soon, for a few reasons:

• I can’t justify paying $20 a month for wifi in a city that I neither live in (St. Paul), nor work in (Golden Valley).
• The bandwidth (1MB/second) doesn’t compare to cable service (although this might not matter for such uses as a Skype phone or other mobile services, but I wouldn’t recommend running a server on this connection :))
• I don’t have a Skype wifi phone to take advantage of the service

I’m more excited about this project because I believe there will be a tipping point where many cities will begin to offer wifi, making it ubiquitous, but the other cities will need to see it work for early adopters like Minneapolis before they will take the plunge.

It’s also funny to see Qwest do its best to run the project aground

At my previous job we got paid on a monthly schedule, I think it was the last week of the month, or the first week of the month, I can’t recall exactly.  At first I didn’t know if I would like this payment schedule as I had been used to getting paid every two weeks for all my other previous jobs in high school and college.  As it turns out, getting paid monthly is more convenient that getting paid every two weeks.

Nothing else in my life is on a bi-weekly schedule.  None of my bills, grocery store visits, mortgage, etc.  They’re all either monthly (bills, mortgage) or random (grocery store).  Getting paid once a month allowed me to more easily budget my cash flow because it lined up well with my fixed expenses.

I get paid twice a month currently, so I’m back to the “old” style of getting paid; the one nice thing about this is that I get paid on the same day as Erin, so it’s as if we’re getting one paycheck, rather than direct deposits happening on random days, there are just two days a month.

I would think that employers would see the benefits of paying their employees once a month because they are only running payroll half as many times a year.  In fact, that was the reason that I got paid monthly at my previous job, we were a startup and running payroll cost ‘x’ dollars, we could save that much money per month by just running payroll once instead of twice.

I decided a couple of days ago that I want to compete (finish) a triathlon. So I’ve set a goal to do at least one triathlon next spring/summer. I’d like to do it early, sometime in May, so that if I like it I can do at least one more that summer.

I found a list of triathlons in Minnesota that I can select from. I’m going to pick a shorter one to try at first. The one that looked good was one in White Bear lake, with a 600 yard swim, 13 mile bike, and 3.1 mile run. When I go running I usually do about 3 miles, so I thought that was a good length to start with.

I was at Lifetime last night for my first gym visit since deciding to do a triathlon. Swimming is effen hard. I have a lot of work to do.

I have to laugh as I write this. I’m sitting in a local Dunn Bros. coffee shop, doing some studying before my certification test later this morning. Dunn Bros has replaced Caribou as my favorite coffee shop because of the free Wifi they’ve got at most locations.

As I sit here and study, there is a woman sitting across from me with one of those nice Apple wide screen laptops. The problem is, she can’t get connected to the Wifi for the life of her! She asked me if I was connected, and I said “yeah, it just picked it right up.” She’s been moving around the coffee shop trying to find a better signal or something, it’s funny I guess sometimes an Apple doesn’t “just work.” It’s even more humorous because it’s a completely unsecured wireless network, something that you should be able to connect to by accident
UPDATE: The woman asked the staff for some help, so a cashier and a manager both came out to hack on her laptop to try and troubleshoot, I wish I had a camera

Erin and I were heading to her parents’ cabin in northern Minnesota for the long weekend on Friday night, when we hit a deer on Hwy 371, just north of Little Falls, where 10 and 371 split apart. I hit the deer on the passenger side fender and the grill area, so the damage could have been way worse. And luckily, Erin’s parents just happened to be about 5 miles behind us on the road, so when we called them, we just had them pull over and pick us up so we could continue on to the cabin.

The car is still in Little Falls getting worked on, I just paid the car off in March, but thankfully I kept the comprehensive insurance so I’ll just have to pay the $500 deductible instead of the whole bill.

Since Erin had the rest of the week off of work, our friends Becky and Rett graciously let us borrow their car for a couple days so Erin could have a car during the day. (Thanks!)
All in all, for hitting a deer it was actually rather painless (for us, not the deer).

I haven’t ever gotten too excited over podcasts, for some reason they never really interested me too much, I would rather just read my content.  But I want to try some out, I’m gonna try to listen to them while I’m at the gym, so I wanted to know if anyone can recommend any decent ones?  I’d like some techie stuff, but if you know of one that good outside the realm of tech stuff, let me know about those too

It’s my birthday today.  Didn’t really do much, especially given that its a Thursday; Erin and I grabbed a late dinner at the Happy Gnome in St. Paul.  Sounds like the Muddy Pig around the corner is a better place, at least thats what Justin would have you think over at the beeradvocate.com, however the Happy Gnome did have a Surly on tap, just not the Surly Bender that I like the best.

We sat outside at the Happy Gnome, given that it was a great evening to sit outside, and we’re coming up on the longest day of the year, so it stayed light until we left around 9:30.  It’s a nice outside place to eat cause they have nice fences to block the sounds of traffic and the wind.

All in all, a good birthday, we’ll save the crazy celebrating for Casey’s big bash tomorrow night at Nye’s

I’ve found that I have a weird usage pattern within Bloglines.  When I come across something that I find interesting, and I don’t have time to read it, I’ll save it for reading later.  If I DO have time to read it, I’ll read it, and then still save it for later viewing, as if to tell myself that this article is important.  I did just that 5 minutes ago with Steve Eichert’s latest post about the query api that he’s been working on, I read the entire post, but since I found it interesting, I saved it.

After I’ve read a post and its still saved, I’ll keep it saved for as long I feel is necessary to remind myself about it.  I don’t do this consciously, I just keep it saved for some weird OCD-like reason.  Once I feel like I have sufficiently remembered the post, its contents, and the location of it (who posted it), I’ll unsave it.

This actually seems to work pretty well, because articles that I want to find later on, I can easily recall who wrote them, and once I know that a quick stop to google and I’ve got it.