Zeno's Paradox: Post-Thanksgiving Entry

Zeno's Paradox

November 29, 2002 - Post-Thanksgiving Entry

So, it's Black Friday and everyone else is home doing post turkey day activities or shopping 'til they are dropping. The author, however, writes this from his cube at work...

First off, Thanksgiving... Arun came over yesterday around 2:00 PM and we started our cooking. It wasn't much at first, as the turkey breast had to be thawed before cooking. Thus, we submerged the bird in a pot of cold water and let it defrost for around an hour and half. In the meantime, we started "Gone With the Wind" and managed to get through one side of the disc (thanks for the disc, luv) before having to cook the turkey.

Looking back, cooking the turkey was not half the struggle that I've seen it made out to be. We preheated the oven, threw it in, noted the time, and started another movie while it cooked. The turkey was finished half-way through the movie and we stopped the film to get food. It was pretty good and satisfying. I now have plenty of leftovers.

In other news, I had a power-surge this morning that has rendered my 802.11b wireless network inoperable. Everything else seems to be fine and I can access the access point through normal means, but for some reason my Airport-equipped Powerbook cannot see my Linksys WAP11 access point. From what I can tell, both pieces of equipment are operating as expected, they are just not seeing each other. I may purchase a PCMCIA 802.11b wireless card for the iPaq later on (this evening, perhaps) in order to have something to test the equipment. I'm expecting that it's just a configuration snafu -- I had problems initially getting the Powerbook and WAP11 to talk -- but we'll see soon. The plus side to having to purchase such a card is that I can now resume 802.11b application development on the PocketPC platform. I have a program written that interfaces with NMEA 0813-compatible GPS receivers for covertly detecting wireless networks but I'm missing the wireless capabilities. This development may resume as soon as I get a card. I don't know which card to get, so this process may take a bit longer than normal. I would also need to dust off the iPaq and get it back up to speed with respect to software and applications. However, should this project get completed, I would be able to walk around with the iPaq in my pocket, a pair of earbuds connected to the audio out and I would be able to find these networks without anyone the wiser. I don't know what I would do with such access -- but the fun's in the finding.

Related to wardriving (or warwalking in my case) as a hi-tech hobby, I also stumbled across the phenomenon known as geocaching. It's basically a hi-tech version of hide and seek where people publish the location of "geocaches" and the challenge is to find how to get to the place. The entire "sport" is extremely interesting as is the culture surrounding it. I was sad to notice that there don't appear to be any caches in Evanston. I may have to change that.

So, when I'm not actually composing blog entries today, I'll continue working on the Oyez stuff. I received some corrections from the SCOTUS with respect to some of the QuickTime-VR movies we have of the justices' chambers. I've updated those, and I expect to continue working on quashing Perl scripts with JSP pages. I have a couple of sections complete, so I'll start to phase those in today in order to test the idea. It should go well and not be an issue. However, I've been coding these things for the past week without any testing, so some bugs are apt to pop up. I think that the best way to do this is to replace one section, make sure that it appears to be working, then run my linkchecker over the site. It'll be a time-intensive process with lots of waiting, but I have 802.11b card purchase to research.

Will write more later... Must get to work.

Posted by br284 at 11:12 AM

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