nerdnet

Sometimes things just come together at exactly the right time... The company I have worked with for just over 5 just had its US operations bought out by another company. The transfer took place April 15th, and I had no idea if the new company would pick me up. Even if they did, I am tired of so much travel. I had just finished up six weeks in Virginia on March 31st before we headed down to Jeep Safari. Luckily, while I was in Virginia I interviewed over the phone with a company here in Oregon, and when I got home I had two more interviews with them before they decided to make me an offer. I am now officially employed here in Oregon! I am proud to announce that I am now the network engineer for Davis Tool. I started a working there a couple of days ago and so far I am very impressed with them, and their desire to use open source tools and operating systems. My first task is to map and inventory the network and start making improvements and recommend new infrastructure. Time to stretch my nerd muscles!

We have a room at one end of our small house that has become somewhat of an office / spare bedroom for us. I use a DGL-4300 wireless access point for our wireless LAN, and for whatever reason running it from that room makes it impossible for wireless clients to connect well from anywhere else in the house. The same seemed to be true when we put the access point in our upstairs bedroom. I finally got things working the best from the downstairs living room (getting the Tivo to talk to it via wireless was another nightmare entirely!) I still needed a good connection from the router to the office upstairs at the other end of the house, so I decided to try out the D-Link DHP-301 kit for powerline Ethernet.

Yep, I am. Just not being very good about posting updates. For the last 6 weeks I was in Virginia working on a microwave network for Ericsson. I flew back home and we loaded up the Jeep for a trip down to Moab for Easter Jeep Safari 2007. We met up with our friends Tony, Con, Mike and Carolyn, Chuck and Michelle and Savanah. They had arranged a condo down there and we stayed with them. This was by far better than staying in a hotel. We hope to do it again next year. As always, it was a blast and it went way too fast. Back home, I am on the job hunt.

I just headed back east to work on a project in Virginia. I discovered that I needed a small USB cable for my printer and headed to CompUSA to see what they had. To my surprise, all I could find was Belkin cables, and every one of them cost more than twenty dollars. A salesperson approached me offering assistance, and I asked him if they had any other USB cables. He told me that the Belkin cables were the only ones they had in the store. I pointed out that on the CompUSA website they listed a six foot USB cable for less than 2.00, and that I refused to pay twenty dollars or more for a six foot cable with four conductors and some shielding. He seemed annoyed at this and would assist me no further. I took my business to a local electronics store and picked up a fine USB cable for about three dollars. My concern is this: what does the average consumer do who doesn't know any better?