Working great…except for one odd thing…every time my mother-in-law calls, it drops the call, and even had to reboot the router once. Strange…maybe it has a M-I-L filter 😉
Vonage update…Mother-in-Law filter?
Leave a reply
Author Archives: joel
Vonage, day 1…
So far, so good! Number ported first thing today. Got a email transcription of a voice mail from the Terminix guy (my dog kept him pinned in his truck, he said, and please reschedule when the dog is in the house) and I knew it was working! I’m sure she was wagging her tail while barking.
Anyway, after hearing about good Vonage experiences from many of my geek friends, I ordered it. We’d switched from Roadrunner (phone, TV, ISP) back in June to AT&T Uverse (TV, ISP) and AT&T phone. AT&T’s Uverse VoIP is now available here, but it seemed that the time was right to go to something that would be more portable (and hopefully even a touch cheaper). Install was totally plug & play, into a wired ethernet port on the Uverse 2-Wire router.
I like the “visual voice mail” feature. I’ve got a Google Voice number, and find Google’s equivalent very handy. I know I’ll get a lot of use out of this. Set the voice mail to email both Jan and I.
Turtles!
On vacation this week (actually since July 31) at Emerald Isle, NC. We’ve been having a great time, but this is the first time we’ve been here in August in a while, and the first time we’ve really paid attention to the hatches of sea turtles. Over the many years we’ve come here, we’ve seen turtle nests, several each summer. However, we actually saw several turtles extracted from nests that had boiled (hatched) three nights previously, and we invested several hours sitting, waiting at two nests. We missed one, as it boiled several hours after we’d left the beach one evening.
Tonight, though, we got lucky! First, we saw 16 turtles dug out of an earlier nest. Cool! This was about 6:15PM. Then, we settled in for the evening watch. It’s really not bad to sit and wait, as the beach cools, and the surf pounds a few feet away. At about 9:30PM, seasoned volunteers began to see signs of impending hatching. This continued for the next 45 minutes, until in one push, the whole nest (count was 118 turtles) “boiled” up and headed down a causeway constructed by the volunteers. This path is needed to keep the turtles from fanning out on the beach and ensures that most will successfully reach the water.
I’ll do it again next year, but I’m glad I don’t have to sit up tomorrow; I’m losing my beauty sleep 😉
Why can’t we be logical and reasonable and get along?
I probably should be more active in the political process than I am…I try not to throw gasoline on the virtual fires with hyperbole and vitriol. I was catching up on reading the online version of the NYTimes (gee, too bad I couldn’t get my Sunday Times delivered to me on vacation) and two articles in particular struck me…one on the health care debate, and one on the Twitter DDoS attack. Both seem to be variations on a theme. If you are loud and noxious in your verbiage (voice or virtual), then you keep civil and rational political discourse from helping to achieve real, viable solutions to our problems.
The health care system in this country isn’t perfect. It does cost too much. I’m fortunate in that I have good health care coverage, and will have it in retirement, but we need to think beyond our own wallets. Lots of things need to change…and yes, I agree that tort reform is one of those things, along with universal coverage. Is a government-run system the right answer? I don’t know. Maybe we should try it and see. Medicare seems to have very satisfied customers, even those who don’t know it’s a government program 🙂 However, because the actions of a minority of folks with more volume than thoughtfulness drown out discussion, we can’t have the conversation we need to have. The Twitter DDoS is the same sort of thing. The Russians and Georgians have substantive differences that need to be talked out; engaging in polemics and doing things to shut down a rational speaker (from what little I know of the debate) while ignoring the collateral damage is irresponsible. Is it reasonable to just yell louder than the other guy? No. Do we have to tolerate those with different opinions than our own? Yes. The Norman Rockwell ideal of civil respect for the opinions of all is not the world of today, I fear. Does it really bother you to let others talk?
Beach vacation…
We’re now a few days into our 2 week beach vacation, and beginning to be very mellow. Even the dogs are mellow 😉 . Arrived at EI late evening on 7/31. Somewhat hectic as cleanup by #1 son from previous weekend left a few gaps 😉 . Windy with some t-storms over the weekend, but the plants were all happy to get a good soaking. Our neighbors came down for a few days, arriving Sunday. Enjoyed fellowship, good food and good wine. Jan cooked shrimp cakes (think great crab cakes but made with shrimp) on Sunday, a paella on Monday, and Galen cooked a great venison roast on Tuesday. Sunday evening we saw the “Turtle Patrol” clearing out the last few baby loggerheads from a nest that hatched last week. Took the boat to Bear Island (aka Hammocks Beach SP) on Tuesday and Wednesday. On Wednesday, we saw the tracks where a turtle had come up the night before to lay a late season nest. Perfect weather. Tuesday, there was one other boat at Bear Inlet. Wednesday, we had it to ourselves in the morning. In the early afternoon, though, a flotilla arrived, and we decided to come on back to the house where more wine was chilling.
Galen & Sandra have headed back home today. We’ve done a bit of cleanup around the house this morning, after having a 3-latte breakfast. Plan to go down to the beach in a couple hours when the tide is low and go for a nice walk with Jan. Probably swim some today as well, after Jeff gets up.
More company this weekend, as Jason & Jenny are coming for a few days. My sister is fixing dinner (her famous crabcakes) at her house in Swansboro on Sunday. Will probably go to Bear Island on Sunday, and then a couple days next week as well. We’ve got a new 2-person float that we’ll use to pull folks down the ICW 😉
I could get used to being on vacation…this is good stuff!
Bassclave 2009
Another Bassclave has come and gone. What a great time! Left Chapel Hill at ~6:45PM on Thursday June 25. Arrived at the Greenbrier River Campground (on WV63, about half-way between Roncerverte and Alderson) about 11:15PM. Drew Nix was waiting up for me, but most of the encampment had turned in for the evening, as most folks had floated on Thursday…
Woke up early, and got my gear ready to go. A big group of us (7) decided to float from Second Creek to the campground, about 7 river miles. We got the campground staff to drive us to Second Creek (took about 30 minutes to wind around the mountains and get to the put-in). I put on a chartreuse popper and started working the banks. I started catching fish pretty quickly. It was a good day, catching at least 30 bass. They weren’t big, with the best one about 13″, but satisfying. Also caught probably twice that many red-eyes and a handful of bream. It was nice to finish at the campground, just pick up the boat and walk 50 yards to the camp! Enjoyed the company of my fellow fishers. I’d met most before, but had not met Jerry or Hector. Great to renew old friendships and make new ones.
On Saturday, we planned to float from the campground about 4 miles downstream. Dale and Henry drove their vehicles to the take out, with Hector bringing them back. We slipped into the water and enjoyed what’s probably the most scenic part of the river, with many nice rapids and great river views. I tried the poppers again, but they weren’t working for me (though Jim had a great day with poppers…go figure!). I switched to a crayfish and started catching fish regularly. Again landed about 30 bass and about that many red-eyes. More small fish, but several 11-12″ bass, especially toward the end of the float. Shuttled back to camp and we all fixed dinner for a pot-luck. Good stories around the “circle” as we enjoyed near-perfect weather.
Sunday, I went with Steve to fish for trout at Second Creek. There’s a C&R section just a few miles up from the Greenbrier. I fished about 2 hours before heading home. I had a good morning, landing a 15″ rainbow and two 12″ rainbows. Caught all on a soft hackle nymph. I’ll come back to Second Creek again! I’d forgotten how much fun a nice rainbow was on the 3wt.
All in all, a wonderful trip. Pictures are available here.
More on U-verse…
I’ve now figured out how to keep my old Apple Airport happy with the new AT&T setup. The way things were set up before, the Airport was plugged into my Time Warner cable modem, and thus was directly exposed to the ‘net. I had one port forward set up, to a RHL virtual machine running in Parallels on my iMac. This RHL box runs a WAIS server (freeWAIS-sf) with 20 years of postings to a flyfishing listserver indexed for searching. By putting the Airport into the “Enhanced DMZ” of the 2wire router, it shares the external IP of the native router, and the port forward from the ‘net to the VM works fine. Updated the Dynamic DNS link and it’s good to go!
By the way, the marketing foo from AT&T says that they only support 10 concurrent devices, but the 2wire box was set up to issue 200 DHCP leases. That was worrying me when I heard about the limit of “10 devices” but it looks like it’s not a hard limit. Also, AT&T does not try to keep you from pwning your own router, you can go in and make changes to the whole “home network” IP configuration. If you are curious about the box, the model I have (3800) is apparently very much like the 2700. The manual for the 2700 is here.
First impressions, AT&T U-verse
We’ve now had AT&T U-verse for about 48 hours. Retired our Time-Warner service. We have cable and internet; when I placed the order, VoIP was not available, but it seems it came available this week. I’ll put in an order next week to switch the traditional phone service to U-verse VoIP and consolidate all.
So far, I’m satisfied. The install was not entirely smooth. The installer was here for most of the day, and I need to have them come back out and replace one cable run (the set is pixelating badly). I got a bit frustrated with the internet tech support folks, as they wouldn’t/couldn’t answer my questions about hooking up my existing Apple Airport and network. I didn’t use any bad words, but I did make loud noises about bringing back Time-Warner ;-). That did get me a bit more attention, and enough additional information that things are OK now. I will be making a few more changes, though, as I don’t have things fully set up like I want. First, the Airport is set up in double NAT. I may want to put the Airport into the DMZ of the U-verse 2Wire router, as I want to to IP passthrough to a web server. Alternatively, I may be able to just pass port 80 traffic to the Airport, and then its port forwarding will go to right place. I think I know what to configure but I need to read up more on it. I need to go grab the manual for the router, if I can find the right one…seems like 2Wire doesn’t have a manual for the 3800 online, but from what I can tell from scanning the forums, the 2700 manual is very close. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow when the family is not watching TV, as I don’t yet know what changes force a router reboot.
One thing that appears to be resolved it that I was told by the AT&T folks that they only allowed 10 active DHCP leases…which as most folks know is not enough in today’s world. I’ve probably got at least 15 things that want an address today, and more in the future. I believe from my reading that this is a marketing limit, not a hard limit, best as I can tell from looking at the router configuration pages. That’s why I have kept the Airport inline. I may be able to retire the Airport if that’s so…this will evolve!
One thing that I was somewhat worried about was the Aruba AP61 I have that builds a GRE tunnel back to my office network. It didn’t work through the double NAT, but when plugged into a port on the 2Wire router, it works fine.
I am very pleased with the bandwidth. I ordered the high end option, which is 18Mb downstream and 1.5Mb upstream. That appears to be about what I’m getting…maybe just a smidgen less…the Speakeasy.net speed test is showing 17.3 down and 1.45 up; empirical observations seem to confirm that it’s fast. The presentation of all services is IP-based, with configuration of 25Mb down and 2Mb up for the system aggregate. This is coming to my house on copper pairs that were buried ~1988. It’s copper from the DSLAM as well. The tech ran a new wire (RJ-11 termination) to my office that brings all the bits in. From there, the way it works is that you have 4 ethernet ports and wireless (b/g) for data, 2 VoIP ports (not currently in use in my config), and a coax for HomePNA (for the TV boxes). The coax runs back to the distribution splitter for your old cable system and feeds that. Two of my systems are working great (though one required a new RG-6 cable run); one that the tech thought was working is really unwatchable right now, and will also need a replacement cable as the RG-59 that was in the house is not up to the job). One system has a DVR, and the other boxes are slaves, and can feed from the storage (fairly generous disk) there. One thing is that the only system that can pause live TV is the one with the DVR, but that makes sense. You must have a box @ $5/mo. for every TV; there is no basic cable equivalent.
One thing I really like is the web control of the DVR through the Yahoo portal. It’s very easy to use, and I’ going through and setting up movie after movie to record. Don’t know if I’ll have time to watch any ;-). I have not tried to access it through a mobile browser, but supposedly, that works well.
The bottom line is that we’ve got many more TV channels, better/innovative features for that, and better Internet for about the same bux as Time-Warner. We’ll tweak the channel lineup after the summer and see what we’re really watching, and maybe shave a few dollars off…we started with the primo package.
I’ll keep this updated as it moves along…all for now!
My blackberry lives!
After a week of being blackberry-less, I think I’ve finally gotten moved back into the replacement-replacement blackberry. The first one they sent was dead (apparently the Alltel warranty repair folks had put a board in a replacement frame that had been “killed”). Next replacement arrived exactly a week after my unfortunate adventure with an OS update. Well, I’ve learned my lesson on this. The blackberry is a very sensitive beast, and while I like to keep current and have new features/functionality, I’ll wait until Alltel/Verizon certifies things so I can get support, since I’ve determined that I like less not having a working device. A week with my old RAZR has restored caution. Good thing I had a backup before I started all this foo!
Brickberry…
Oh well, I didn’t follow the old adage, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and I tried to do an update on my Blackberry. I backed it up (all the databases) and then started the upgrade process. It went fine for a while, but then hung while reloading the operating system. Attempting to restart the Blackberry got the dreaded white screen of death. I did what I knew, googled a bit, poked thru the Crackberry forums, and gave up and called Alltel for advice. Got a very knowledgeable tech support person, who walked me thru some steps to try and reload a basic OS on the Blackberry. No luck :-(. Fortunately, the device is still under warranty, and they are sending me a new one. It’s due to arrive by the 19th. For now, I’m back to using a dumb phone ;-).
It will take me a while to get things put back together, I fear…I have a list of 20 apps that I want to reload and reconfigure…too bad that the Blackberry doesn’t save the apps as well as the data when you do a backup.