Yikes! Nearly three weeks without a major post or significant update to the site. Sorry about that, folks — I’ve been out and about, enjoying bits and pieces of the country I’ve never seen before, and touring around the Bahamas a little bit with the help of Carnival Cruise Lines.

There are detailed entries coming up in a few days to detail my trip to the Northeastern part of the U.S. and my trip to the Bahamas over the last two weeks of December, as lots of cool stuff happened and all of us had a really good time. My friends facilitated both the trip up north and the cruise, so my hat’s off to them both for being nice enough to include me in their holiday vacation plans.

In gadget-related news, my Linksys wireless router spontaneously croaked right in the middle of the vacation stuff, so I had to order a new router to replace it. Conveniently enough, I was able to order it before heading off on the cruise, and came home to find it waiting for me. I’m using an Asus WL-500g Premium router now, which has four times the flash memory and (I think) four times the RAM that the Linksys had, and a much better out-of-the-box firmware (that actually does everything I need it to, so I don’t even need to flash unofficial firmware onto it). It also has USB ports I can hang a printer and hard disk off of for instant printer sharing and network-attached storage. Since it runs Linux natively (instead of that hacked-up bullshit VxWorks crap Linksys uses now), it even understands ext2fs on disks, too. I’m officially impressed.

Linksys is off my “companies to buy from” list, given that the last two products I’ve gotten from them have died within a year. Ironically, an old 802.11b (slower than 802.11g) Linksys router, more than five years old, is purring like a kitten at my friends’ place. It’s only Linksys’ new gear that sucks, apparently, but of course that’s all you can really get these days.

My notebook’s got a new disk in it now, with the reinstall all taken care of; there’s room enough now for me to stick Linux back on it and give it a real fair shake this time. I’m also looking into switching over to Gizmo Project and Grand Central for my incoming and outgoing phone call stuff (switching away from Skype). Apart from working with generic SIP hardware (unlike Skype, which only works with Skype-approved gear), they’re a lot cheaper. In fact, combining Grand Central with Gizmo means I have a local phone number that can receive unlimited calls from regular phones (and it rings on my cell as well as my computers, so I can answer it where I want to), and that’s entirely free. Outbound calls are $0.019 per minute, so to match Skype’s pricing with their unlimited outbound calling plan, I’d have to spend more than 1,570 minutes on the phone over the year (that is, calling regular landlines or cell phones from the computer or SIP handset) before the unlimited plan becomes cheaper.

I don’t think I talked on the phone (via Skype) for more than about 400 minutes for the entire past year. I only paid $15 for the year, so it wasn’t a huge rip, but their price has since doubled and I just don’t use the phone that much.

Heh. Wow, this entry is random and all over the place, but suffice it to say I feel good and refreshed/relaxed from the vacations. Sea sickness doesn’t seem to affect me (at least, it didn’t on this cruise despite it hitting lots of others — we had some really rough seas on the way back on the last day of the cruise), and it was nice to unplug for a bit. Now it’s back to life as usual again

Also, for what it’s worth, happy new year!

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