Marc’s Musings Reality from Marc’s point of view!

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Just picked up a new birdbath from Stone World Garden Decor in Cumming, GA. Thankfully, it came in two pieces ’cause it’s a lot heavier than it looks!

To give you a sense of it’s size, the diameter of the dish is about 2 feet and it stands about 18 inches off the ground. Our last (plastic) bird bath was impaled by a large branch Excalibur style. Unfortunately Mich removed the branch before I could get a shot of it ’cause it looked pretty bizzarre. No such fate is likely to befall this "mini behemoth".

Posted under General

Decided to try Voice over IP (VOIP) and have selected Vonage as my carrier.

So far, I must say that I’m pretty impressed. Everything I’ve wanted to configure so far is configurable and the line quality is much better than I expected.
I was on the phone yesterday while downloading some really large books from Audible.com for my iPod and could see the book downloads slow down but there was no perceptible degradation in the voice conversation.

The router they sent me was a Linksys RT31P2. I tried and tried to set it up so that it was outside of my current network (between my DSL modem and my Wireless router) as described in Vonage’s site. But eventually I had to concede that I really was making this more complicated than I needed to.

I checked out Broadband reports to see if they could shed some light on the configuration changes needed to make my current router not the gateway to the internet. But eventually needed to contact Vonage Tech support to get their advice on it. After all, they must face this issue dozens of times per day. Even though their website is loaded with useful information, it didn’t cover this little issue.

The Vonage guy was obviously in India - definitely the trend for CSRs these days but I was still surprised at how thick his accent was. It took a couple of tries to understand what he was saying. He assured me that I could put my new router inside my network and not have any ill effects due to bandwidth contention. He said if there were any bandwidth issues I could call back and we’d work them out.

It was definitely an easier solution than I was trying to implement and so far so good.

Posted under Tech Stuff

Cleaning out the house and I’ve got a few things that I don’t think I’d be able to sell on eBay but work. I thought I’d give folks an opportunity to check them out, let me know if you want any of these by sending me an email.

Posted under General

One of the e-publications that I receive is from EDUCAUSE. They were just reporting on the 153-odd business school applicants who were no longer being considered for admission because they had used a hacker’s instructions to gain access to the university admission records to see if they’d been accepted or not.

Some of the rejectees are whining now and claiming a “lapse in judgement” and similar excuses. As far as I can tell, one thing we need less of is unethical business people. Kudos to the universities for their stance!

Posted under Opinions

Just posted some pictures from our day trip to Jekyll island back in October. For some reason I thought I had already done this.

We landed at the Jekyll Island Airport which is non-towered and used our cell phone to call the Jekyll Island Club Hotel and they sent a van right over to pick us up.

We rented some bicycles from them, nothing spiffy, just single gear coaster-brake bikes that took a little getting used to, and did a pleasant cycle of the north end of the island.

The trip was partly for a getaway and partly to flex my wings by doing a longer flight in the Diamond DA-20 two seater aircraft. This is a new plane and is a delight to fly. I wish it had more cargo-carrying capacity so I could realistically look at it for a flight up to Canada, but everything’s a trade-off in aviation.

For this reason I expect that any serious trekking will be done in something like the venerable Piper Warrior II workhorse.

By the way, I’ve been to Hilton Head Island (just North of Jekyll Island) a couple of times and found it to be fairly cold and uninviting. It is very obvious that the locals don’t really want you there and they take pains to ensure that you know this. The beaches are largely inaccessible unless you are staying at one of the resorts or unless you know someone locally who can point you in the right direction.

A big exception were the local Hilton Head airport FBO folks at the Carolina Air Center they were great and if I ever do visit Hilton Head again it will be almost solely on the strength of their efforts.

Posted under Aviation, General

I have a number of GMail invites available. Anybody interested in one drop me a line at marcpilot@gmail.com, include your name as you want it in GMail and I’ll use your return address as the one for being notified of your new GMail account.

Posted under General

Can there be any doubt that Jennifer Love Hewitt is one of the most appealing women currently out there today? You can catch her in Maxim Magazine’s March 2005 edition.

Posted under General