Don't Back Down

Just how bad is the outlook for Social Security? Check out this story about a 96-year old crack dealer and her accomplices (all around 60 years old). Or this one, about a 92-year old bank robber.

Maybe they are just frustrated about all the awards being passed out and not getting their "props".

Then again, at least they aren't as bad off as this guy, who happened to die at the hospital and laid there for 17 hours before someone noticed. Hospital staff apparently thought he was sleeping.

As you may recall, I settled on Trillian (Pro) not too long ago as my primary instant messaging client. Well, it always bothered me that Trillian wouldn't be quite as responsive as I'd like. The dang thing would just sit there when I clicked on it and tried to restore it from the system tray. More often than not, I'd get an error message of some kind when shutting down, saying that Trillian had a message display of some sort that wasn't responding.

It wasn't that this affected my usage - it really didn't, other than the occasional extra click to dismiss the error dialog. But it did settle somewhere into my brain and remind me on a fairly regular basis that I still wasn't quite happy with it. So I decided to try Gaim once again. I have to say that thus far, I'm pretty happy with the results. It's way more responsive than Trillian and it seems to have a smaller memory footprint to boot.

So it was with interest that I read this bit on encrypting IM protocols (thanks Rob). After reading, and dwelling on it for a day or so, I decided that I wasn't going to worry about encryption just yet. Naturally, life has a way of changing your plans. When I woke up yesterday morning I read this wonderful story telling me that AIM is declaring that messages are its territory. Slashdot reports that AOL says this may not be the case with IM.

My response? I installed the encryption. I haven't yet decided to drop conversations without encryption, mostly because I'm not sure of the interoperability of Gaim with other methods, but it's likely it will happen in the near future, or on any conversations that I don't want shared with the world. I'm perfectly able to share my information with the world when I'd like to do so, thank you very much, and this allows me to continue to make the choice for myself. If AIM decides to post an encrypted conversation of mine, so be it - but this ought to remove some of the reason that they might want to do so.

If you communicate with me via IM, please keep this in mind - encrypted communications may be a requirement at some point in the not-too-distant future.

This year I'm holding the first annual DBD NCAA basketball tournament pool. I'm banking on being the only participant, though I might be able to con my wife into it, too. If there happens to be anyone out there who'd like to join, feel free. I have no prizes to distribute, and that would probably be a questionable practice anyway, but I will be happy to prominently feature your name and a link of your choice (blogs only please) here on the site if you are the winner.

To play along, visit Tournament Pick'em at Yahoo! Sports. Go through the sign up process (it is free, just need to answer a couple questions), then elect to join a private group. When you get there, enter group number 58177 with a password of dbd. That's pretty much it for the joining process. Once you're in the group, simply make your picks and sit back and watch the tournament. Your day in the sun is just around the corner!

I recently (as in yesterday) upgraded from residential Road Runner to Road Runner "Business Class". Thus far, it seems that I'm paying something more than twice the rate in exchange for a static IP address and perhaps two-thirds of the bandwidth while downloading (uploading seems to be about the same). That just doesn't seem right.

Nonetheless, it gave me headache upon headache because I was having a very difficult time getting Vonage to work. That is to say, when I simply plugged my Vonage router into the new modem (which is allegedly required for the static IP address), it wouldn't work. Rather, it wouldn't work with any sort of speed. My downloading bandwidth dropped to where it was generally quite a bit below 1 mbps. I had around 5 mbps with the residential service.

Finally I figured out that by placing a simple router between the Vonage router and the new modem, it worked. True, I only receive 3 mbps while downloading, but that's actually the rate advertised, so I really can't complain. So because of this, I can only assume that the RT31P2 (the Vonage router) doesn't like having a static IP address. When it picks it up dynamically, from either my residential modem or from the router, it works like a champ. Go figure.

On a related note: The Vonage VoIP Speed Test is pretty cool. It's not much different from any of those other tests - but the display is much nicer. And it rarely seems to be busy, like so many other servers are when you try to run the test.

And for a final tip, if you reset the Linksys WAP11 to factory settings, the default IP address - it is static - is 192.168.1.251. Go figure. I guess they figured that wouldn't conflict with any other devices on the good old default 192.168.1 subnet or something. For me, it was a royal pain to get to until I found that little gem of information.