Three-Letter Acronyms & Four-Letter Words

Summer Vacation is over.

The flight from Detroit was ok, but the landing in Dallas was horrible.

The drive from Dallas to Austin wasn't too bad. Gina and I stopped in Waco and had dinner at the Cracker Barrel.

Gina got home about 5 minutes or so before me.

I was greeted by several happy pups when I opened the door.

I popped the first Harry Potter movie into the DVD player as Gina finished reading the last Harry Potter book.

She won't tell me the ending. She wants me to read the book. I think I can handle reading the last 150 pages, I had been reading over her shoulder on the plane and got to about the last 150.

Well, it is time for bed, gotta go to work in the morning.

Laterz

Today, I gave my mom and David the gift of wireless internet.

For X-mas I gave my mom and David the gift of high-speed internet, via Yahoo! DSL.

Unfortunately, my mom's computer didn't have an Ethernet card. Notably, she never needed one before, the computer does have a shiny 56K modem.

However, the computer that I gave David did have an Ethernet card, as it was my old Dell, that had been hooked up to my cable modem at one point. My mom's computer however, was an HP that came as a bundle.

Moving on, on the way over to mom's we stopped at Best Buy and purchased a Linksys Wireless 54G router (with Speedbooster, LOL) and a Belking 54G usb stick wireless NIC.

Now, normally I would never, ever buy any networking gear for a home office other than Linksys. However, I really just didn't want to pay $60 for a wifi usb stick, the Belkin was $29.99. And as I have said before 'It is all made in the same plan in China anyway.'

I mean, honestly if you look at some of the high-tech gadgetry out there you will see that they have very similar form factors and that it is all just branding.

Back to the wifi adventure.

I got the wireless router online (not that it is any sort of technical achievement), I turned on the WEP security and I also rigged it so that the router does the PPPoE rather than the DSL modem. As this is the same setup that I have at the house. I didn't want my mom to have to deal the same fluke modem issues that I dealt with from time-to-time.

I will admit, in my haste to plug everything in I didn't pay attention fully and had plugged David's Ethernet cord into the WAN port and the DSL line into a regular router port. Oops!

I first got my laptop online as to make sure that everything was working as it should and to enable me to mess with the DSL modem and the router. I showed my mom how to enter in the WEP encryption key, should she need to show anybody how for next time.

After finishing up that WEP training, I installed her Belkin NIC and let her establish the internet connection (ie put in the WEP key).

She was online, high-speed style from her desktop. First time ever. She has been using David's computer for the last few months, which I am sure has been a pain.

I had thought about drop shipping her a router and a wireless NIC. But I was pretty sure that the steps necessary to get all of this running completely smoothly might be a little overwhelming.

This brings us to iGoogle, formerly known as 'Google Personalized Homepage'. I am not sure that I really like either name. I guess iGoogle is a little easier to say.

I showed my mom how to setup 'Feeds' so that she can have an easier time telling if I have updated my Blog. Notably, she picked on me for not having updated since the 21st.

After having showed her how to add a feed, she managed to show me something new (I had stepped away and wasn't watching her for a couple of minutes). She had found the 'Themes' for iGoogle. She had picked a theme that was fairly cute and also had an interesting aspect to it, because of the fact that the them has sort of a horizon look to it. They integrated the sun and moon part of the horizon to work off your local time zone, I am willing to bet that they have even worked it out so that the moon shows up according to the 'known' phases of the moon for your area.

The idea is that the sun or moon will be shown in the approx location of where they should be on the horizon for your area, cute and neat.

At this point I figured that I should see if mom wanted to blog. I know that she has enjoyed my Blog and as a whole I find Blogs to be a fairly good medium for sharing news and opinions about things.

My mom tends to be a private person. So unfortunately for all you out there that might want to read it, she has used Blogger's security features to limit the reading of the blog to invitation only.

This will likely mean only family and immediate friends. I am trying to convince her to run two blogs, one private and one public. This way she can post up her artwork and what not on the public side. I think My mom has a lot of good opinions, knowledge and art to share with the folks on the Internet.

One step at a time though, one step at a time.

She has wandered off to find some art work that she has been doing in class. So I better close out this post.

Oh yeah, I did upgrade them to Firefox 2 while I was here. I have pushed Firefox on my all of my parents. So far everyone likes it. Mostly I did it because it is a bit more virus resistant (proof) than IE.

Laterz

(I have to write up a post about the adventures in Detroit that Gina and I had the last couple of days, that will have to wait until tomorrow).

If I was a person who thrived on the night life and going to the clubs on a Friday night. I might get a little bummed about having to drive back to Austin on Friday nights. For those that don't know it already, I spend a wee-bit of time in Dallas on a monthly basis.

I would say that on a to-date cycle that it has been an avg of probably every other week I am in Dallas. As there were months upon months that I did not leave Austin. However, of the course of the last year it has been consistently every other week, and lately it has been almost every week.

I usually only spend 2 days or so. Normally I prefer to spend be in Austin on Monday. Tuesday night I would drive up to Dallas. Spend Wednesday in Dallas. Thursday around 5 or so packup and head back to Austin. Friday all day in Austin.

Starting and ending the work week in your home city seems to be a bit more comfortable to me. Ending the week in another city makes the weekend seem a little shorter. I think it seems shorter because of the fact that I just spent 3 hours in a car and it is usually around 9 or 9:30 when I get home.

Now, I know this may sound like I'm whining about traveling for work. I am not, I am quite used to it by now, so no worries. I will say that I find it personally ironic that I drive so much now adays, since I HATED driving before.

I also find it personally ironic that I now know as much about the city of Dallas as I do. On some level I almost feel like I know Dallas better than Austin. Mainly because of the fact that I don't spend a lot of time in downtown Austin. As a matter of fact, I don't spend much time in Austin south of 183 and Burnet. I go to the office and I go home.

We shop along that route, CostCo is on the northbound side of the 183 near Great Hills Trail. There are two Home Depots near 183. There are four movie theatres, my favorite being The Alamo Drafthouse. One major mall off of 183, only about 2.5 miles from the house.

All of this means that we don't have to go across town to shop for the house or for ourselves. So it is nice to live in the suburbs.

Growing up in Lansing things were different. There were only two malls, the Lansing and the Merridian mall. The Lansing mall was the ghetto mall. They have managed to fix up the Lansing mall pretty well. The Merridian mall has always been the fancy mall and still is.

Well the Merridian mall is out in East Lansing (technically I think it is in Okemos right near the Haslett border.) And the Lansing mall is on the west side of Lansing.

There were several small cities surrounding Lansing. Nothing like the cities that sprawl around Austin, all of which pale in comparison to the cities that surround Dallas.

In Lansing you have East Lansing, Okemos, Haslett, Dewitt, Diamondale, Holt and Grand Ledge.

In Austin you have Cedar Park, Lakeway, Westlake, Round Rock, Pfluegerville, Dripping Springs, Manor (and a few others).

In Dallas I know of Frisco, Plano, Richardson, Garland, The Colony, Addison, Carrollton and many more.

What does all of this mean?

In Lansing you might have lived in the one of the burbs, but you probably shop and go out to eat in Lansing (or East Lansing) and you probably work in Lansing.

In Austin you can live in one of the burbs and maybe you shop in Austin, but you probably go out to eat in Austin and your probably work in Austin.

In Dallas, you can live in the burbs, shop in the burbs, eat in the burbs and work in the burbs.

I have found myself describing Dallas lately as a textbook definition of "urban sprawl". There are parts of the greater Dallas area that you can drive through and wonder to yourself why is there this big open field here? Why isn't the burb like 5 miles closer to town?

Why is it that there is a ten to twelve story office building out here in what looks like the middle of nowhere, when compared to downtown Dallas?

Anyway, I have to say that I like the city of Dallas. However, I don't know if I would every truly want to live there. It has it's advantages in the fact that there are WAY more cool places to eat and the downtown area feels like it has more culture. Of course Austin has a ton of culture too, maybe Dallas' culture seems like more because it is different than Austin.

Either way, I like Austin and Dallas way more than Lansing. And for those of you who are still in Lansing, sorry about that. I don't like Lansing it feels burned out, especially since they are demolishing the GM plants now.

I still like Michigan, especially norther Michigan up near the Coscarelli Cottage. That whole area is great.