Silflay Hraka

Kehaar’s traveling again. I’m sitting in Charlotte Douglass International airport and I’m pleasantly surprised to find that they have free wireless internet access. I thought I’d use the free connection to post an update for those of you wondering where the hell I’ve been for the last few weeks.

The short answer is that I haven’t been anywhere, especially if you define “anywhere” as “anywhere in which I have both the time to blog and access to the internet”. I moved into a new apartment right before the new year and haven’t been able to wrangle an internet connection worth a damn since. I can get a tentative connection to an unsecured wireless network from one inconvenient corner of my home, but only in the later hours of the evening and only if I stand on one leg and hold the laptop at arm’s length. Blogging is not something I particularly desire to do in those circumstances.

Comcast has been out twice to install my internet service but hasn’t been able to get the cable connection working due to “faulty wiring” and “calling the wrong number instead of the number I gave them as my preference and thereby not keeping their damned appointment with me even though I took three hours off of work to wait for the bastards”. Deciding I’d given them enough of my precious time, I told them they could keep their “service” for all I cared. I can get other internet access and I don’t watch TV anyway. The cable was located in the dining room anyway and I would’ve had to run literally hundreds of feet of coaxial cable in order to get it to the den. I’m actually looking forward to not having television again. I am more productive without it.

On to AT&T DSL but they can’t seem to figure out which apartment I’m in and won’t be able to activate my service until Wednesday of next week at the earliest. This didn’t prevent me from going to Best Buy last night and buying a $75.00 DSL modem. I was a hair’s breadth from also buying a $280 dollar wireless router from Linksys but I managed to convince a buddy of mine to talk me out of it. In my move, I discovered that I own enough networking gear to maintain a small to medium sized business. Another router I do not need. But it was black and shiny and had lots of little antennas and looked a little bit like the robot from “Lost in Space” and I coveted it greatly.

I’ve been craving lots of technical gear lately. Routers, laptops, desktops, hard drives, media servers, wi-fi phones, LCD televisions…you name it, I’ve had an urge to buy it of late. I blame it on my mid-life crisis. I figure it’s probably a proxy for having a wife and kids. Kind of like getting a puppy. It’s something with which you can develop a relationship. So far I’ve been able to talk myself out of spending the four or five-thousand dollars it would take to buy everything I want but I know it’s just a matter of time. Since I won’t have cable, I’ll need to set up a sophisticated network in order to stream movies from my laptop to my television on those rare occasions that I get the jones to vegitate in front of the boob tube.

Anyway, I’m off to Boston now to visit Black Sheep and his family. Camp Girl * (formerly known as “Short & Curly” in this space and also known as “There’s No Way In Hell You’re Calling Me Short & Curly, I Don’t Care How F*cking Funny You Think It Is, Mister.”) will be there and we’ll attempt skiing tomorrow, if the weather allows. So far traveling has been better this time around, even though it started at 3:45 a.m. and even though the weather threatens snow. My gates have been closer and I even sat on the second row for once. I figure I’m doomed and I’ll be stuck in Boston on the return trip.

Stay tuned for more. Kehaar out.