Sorry for the lull around here lately.  I’ve moved to Pittsburgh and am quite busy with unpacking and getting appliances and job-hunting and myriad other such goodies.

I could say a lot about how cool it is here, and I probably will as time goes on.  For now though, I’ll just say that it’s a very un-citylike city.  It’s nothing at all like Philadelphia, for instance.  I suppose the main reason is that it’s tiny by comparison; it has only one-fifth the population and certainly looks very small and non-intimidating compared to Philly.

Pittsburgh does have a real-city skyline though, and so far that’s one of my favorite features.  It’s really cool to be on the south side of the Liberty Tunnel (oh yeah, the tunnels, another cool thing), where it’s very rural/suburban, and then drive through the tunnel to see the beautiful skyline towering directly in front of you.  And that’s doubly cool at night.  I hope to get some good photos of the city from up on Mount Washington soon.  (Mount Washington is a small town within Pittsburgh that has quite a bit of elevation, and it sits pretty much directly above center city with some great overlooks.)

In closing, let me just say that the abbreviation for Pittsburgh is "Pgh."  I think we can all agree that as far as abbreviations go, that’s about as unstoppable as it gets.

The new Armor For Sleep album is really good.  Check out this track from it.

Over the past few days I’ve taken a lot of photos:

Ducks and Fog on K-Milk Pond Clouds and Skies and Shiloh Treeline at Dusk

Finally, check out this awesome error I got from one of the ancient Mac OS9 systems at work:

"An unexpected error occurred, because an error of type -110 occurred."

Every once in a while, Dell has these big half-price sales on their computers, which last only a day or sometimes only a few hours.  There’s one going on today.  For example:

Inspiron 9300
$1,568
Use Coupon Code: VRSG541NMGQ800
To get $750 off your system price.
Apply coupon code at checkout!

If you’re in the market for a new notebook computer, today might be your lucky day.

You can find more details in this ARS article.

I noticed you referencing Dutchland Diesel.

Hoorah ! those dudes are from my neck of the woods, Rock on

A while ago I wrote about a Belkin router that I had bought, namely about the fact that it was utter garbage as is Belkin’s tech support.  In its place I purchased a Netgear WGR614 v5 router (the v5 is the white one).  This has been much better with just a few minor flaws, until recently.

The first minor flaw was that when you first plug it in, it enters a setup mode where it tries to detect your connection type (static, dynamic, PPPoE, etc), but it detected mine incorrectly.  This wouldn’t be a big deal except it provides no way for you to bypass this auto-config wizard.  So I’m stuck with "static" and I have to enter my static IP address, which of course I don’t know since I don’t actually HAVE a static IP address.  But this is literally my only option so I enter some bogus numbers.  After trying to use my bogus numbers to get online, the router tells me it can’t connect, and FINALLY it tells me that I can visit this URL to manually set up the router.  There should be a link to that URL on the very first page.

But again, that’s a relatively minor problem.  The bigger problem I’m having now is that every 2 weeks or so the router just locks up.  It no longer routes and it’s not even pingable; the only option is to power-cycle it.  I frequently need to access my home systems from remote locations so this is a big problem for me.  If I were sitting next to it when it happens I could just reset it, but from miles away there is no solution.

I’ve been looking for a firmware update on their site but there hasn’t been one since I bought the router.  And actually, in the changelog for the current firmware, it says something to the effect of "fixed random lockups" that had been occurring in the previous version.  Yeah, I guess not.

It looks like I’ll be switching back to D-Link’s routers.  I have always used them with pretty much no problems, but the Belkin one that I tried was dirt cheap (and made of dirt, apparently), and this Netgear one is sooo sweet-looking on the outside.  I guess I should have known better than to be swayed by its exterior charm though.  A bulky D-Link router that works is better than a pretty Netgear one that doesn’t.

So this blog’s archives page is now organized by date, instead of just by post number.  It looks much nicer, and it’s more in line with most other web-publishing systems too.

Help!  I used to have a great photo app that you designed called (I think)  "Make Photo Webpage".  But my computer crashed, I had to wipe it clean and reload Windows from scratch and now I don’t have it any more - and it doesn’t seem to be on your website.  Is there any way you can tell me how to do it again?

Those of you who post around here should notice that it’s a lot faster now.

Previously, whenever a new post or reply was created, the weblog would email me a zip file containing all the posts ever made on my site.  (Yes, I am a backup fanatic.)  There are now nearly 800 posts though, and all those posts total about 1 megabyte, and emailing a 1-megabyte file is taking my server about 15-20 seconds.

So now, the weblog will only send that big email once per day.  If you’re the lucky first poster of the day, then you’ll still feel the slowdown between clicking the "post" button and your post appearing.  But all other posts/replies will be ~instant now.

I also cleaned up the help page so it’s now Easier Than Ever(TM) to include links and other formatting in your posts.