marusin.com

I don’t want this to be the typical apologetic post that myself and every other blogger in the world (did I just lump myself into a group? oy!) write after you can count on one hand how many times someone has updated their site over the course of a year.

What I do want to say is that I really miss writing here and really need to kick myself in the behind to start creating some more content / media in my / about my life. I feel like this piece has been missing from my days lately and while I’ve been “so busy”, for some reason I haven’t had the motivation to fire up MarsEdit or login to WordPress to post something… Finally, rather than him-hawing about a post and what to write about, I figured why not just typing and so here I am.

It’s been a very busy summer as I’m sure it has been for you, my (still) loyal reader(s). We’ve been continuing to remodel rooms in our new house (been here just over a year now) and between a few vacations and the occasional business trip for work, I feel like I blinked once and the summer is now over.

Here’s hoping that the crisp air that is right around the corner motivates me to take things a bit slower, not feel so rushed, enjoy my family and maybe provide some encouragement to open up my blogging client and share a bit of what’s going on in my life or what I think is interesting with you, my (amazingly fantastic) loyal reader(s).

That wasn’t so hard! :)

unfortunately not the version where Michael Stipe gives some background on the song (as mentioned below), but I’ll take some circa 1985 R.E.M. any day…

Be forewarned. I’m feeling nostalgic for some reason tonight…

Below is a transcript to the background of the R.E.M. song, “Live and How to Live It” from an unknown bootleg that I used to have. I can’t even begin to recall how many times I listened to this show (and specifically the intro into this song) during my college years…

“A man had a house, he built a wall down the middle of it, he had an apartment on this side, he had an apartment on this side. In this apartment he had furniture, clothes, food, books… a cat. In this apartment he had different food, different clothes, different furniture, different books. And a gerbil. He would live over on this side for a while, until he got tired of it, then he would take off his clothes and put his books down on the counter, and he’d move over to this side for a while until he got tired of it and then move back over to this side and he flip-flopped back and forth until he died.

When he died they went back in this part over here and in the closet they found these books piled up, from the floor to the ceiling, packed in, and it was this book that he wrote and every single copy of the book that was ever printed was in there, he never gave one away or showed it to anybody so nobody ever knew that he wrote it. He just kept it there. And the name of the book was Life and How to Live It.”

and here are the lyrics…

Burn bright through the night, two pockets lead the way
Two doors to go between the wall was raised today
Two doors remain before your others and your own
Keep these books well stocked away and take your happy home

(chorus)
My carpenter’s out and running about, talking to the street
My pockets are out and running about
Barking in the street to tell what I have hidden there

Burn bright through the night, two pockets lead the way
Two doors to go between the wall was raised today
Raise the walls and shout its flaws, a carpenter should rest
So that when you tire of one side the other serves you best

(repeat chorus)

The hills ringing hear the words in time
Listen to the holler, listen to my walls within my tongue
Can’t you see you made my ears go tin?
The air quicken tension building inference suddenly
Life and how to live it

Raise the walls and shout its flaws, a carpenter should rest
So that when you tire of one side the other serves you best
Read about the wisdom lost, a knock, a knock, a knock
A secret knock one hammer’s locked the other wisdom lost

(repeat chorus)

My carpenter’s out and running about, barking in the, listen to the holler
My pockets are out and running about
Barking in the street to tell what I have hidden there

Listen, listen to the holler,
If I write a book it will be called “Life and How to Live It”

So you updated your iPhone to version 2.0 (or bought a new 3g iPhone) and want to take a screenshot of your desktop (is that what you would call it on an iPhone)?

Easy.

Click the Power Button (top of the phone) and the Home Button (front of the phone) at the same time. The screen will flash and the picture will be added to your Camera Roll… Cool trick! :)

whoah.

woof.

I have to swap my desktop wallpaper frequently just to keep things exciting. I think my current one is going to stick around for a while…

We haven’t talked about Phish around here for years, but it appears that Rolling Stone might give us a reason to…

“When Phish broke up, I made some comment about how I’m not gonna go around playing ‘You Enjoy Myself’ for the rest of my life,” Anastasio said with a laugh. “And it’s so funny because Fish and Mike and Page have been talking to each other a lot lately and now — it’s not that I can’t believe that I said that, but its symbolic of how much I lost my mind or how much I lost my bearings or something. Because at this point in time I would give my left nut to play that song five times in a row every day until I die. I certainly thought about that while I was in jail.”

via Live Music Blog

So I am on vacation right now and the unthinkable happened after we checked into our place: there was NO wifi available. The hotel didn’t have wifi available at all (welcome to 1990). No coffee shops or residences in the area where I could see their network. Not a thing.

Luckily my dad has a Sprint EVDO card that he uses to get online with his MacBook, but I didn’t want to have to depend on using his computer during our whole trip. I got to thinking about how we could share his connection and immediately fired up the “Internet Sharing” functionality that is available in Mac OS X.

I flipped open the “Internet Sharing” preference pane, selected to share his EVDO connection through Airport and immediately went to my machine. I saw the new network that was created, immediately connected to the network (thinking “how easy was this?) and… nothing.

I went back into the Network Preference Pane on my computer and saw that while I was connected to my dad’s “Airport Network”, I was not getting a real IP address (getting one of those nasty 169.x.x.x self-assigned addresses). Those are no fun to deal with ever and was thinking “now what?”.

After poking around the network configuration on my dad’s computer, I finally saw that he too had a self-assigned IP address for his Airport. It turns out that the Sprint EVDO card actually uses PPP to connect and there’s no real place to specify an IP address. I decided to flip back to the configuration of his Airport and give him a hard-coded IP address (opting with the ever popular 192.168.1.1). From there I went back to my computer and gave myself a hard-coded IP address (going with the next logical address of 192.168.1.2). I added my dad’s IP of 192.168.1.1 for the Router field within the preference pane and then… nothing.

So now I was getting frustrated and just out of pure frustration, I fired up Terminal and tried to ping my dad’s computer. No problems… Ok, cool. Now for kicks I decided to ping the IP address of the Router that gets populated when he connects through EVDO. Guess what? I was hitting it! It was all coming together now. I had Internet connectivity, I just didn’t have any DNS configured.

I quickly fired up OpenDNS.com (on my dad’s computer, remember I still couldn’t resolve URLs), got the two OpenDNS DNS addresses (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 for those keeping score at home), applied my Network changes and the rest was history.

I know this is a long story but I wanted to put this out here for two reasons…

1.) I wanted to make sure that I put this somewhere so if I ever have to do it again, I’ll remember how to set things up.

2.) Just to prove how great the Mac OS is. I don’t think there’d be anyway to do this on Windows… If there is, I’d love to know. :)

Last week while perusing the web (no doubt wasting time and/or avoiding something important), I decided to checkout the website of a great little indie bookstore named Anderson’s Bookshop which is located in our town.

They tend to have a good rotation of authors come in for readings and book signings. I was very surprised when I discovered that Cory Doctorow would be in town to do a reading and signing of his newest book, Little Brother (and yes that link will take you to the full version to download for free ~ and yes it’s legal ~ you can buy it or download it).

For those not familiar (and what the hell is wrong with you), Cory is one of my favorite authors and is famous for his activism in the areas or Digital Rights Management and Copyrights (hence being able to download his books for your use) and also co-editing one of the most popular blogs around: BoingBoing.net.

It was nice to meet someone that you’ve read for years and shake their hand. There was a nice sized crowd tonight and Cory made sure to take time to talk to everyone who came to see him. Kinda fun that this all happened less than 5 minutes from my house.

And who said cool things don’t happen in the suburbs? :)