TravelPod

I’m currently planning a 31 day Amtrak trip to WWDC and back. In a circuitous fashion. I’m going to test out TravelPod.com when I take my trip. From the little work I’ve done with it so far, the only benefit it has over WordPress is its location awareness. It’s much harder to edit. I’ll likely … Read more

Preamble

Some students in NYC produce an homage to the Preamble of the United States Constitution: (HD) A More Perfect Union from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo. And you’ll have to make your own connection to how this ended up in my head… “I have to admit,” he said, “that I’m one of those people that still … Read more

Smelly Stuff

I’m not going to mention the words in text (the spiders will find them and send more people here), but I have daily visitors looking for the word in the image below.  It leads them to an “in the news” post I made five years ago. I’m not sure if it’s weird or it’s reassuring … Read more

AirPort Utility Bypass for Bit Torrent

I was recently reminded that because I was so busy this year and didn’t make it to SXSW, that I had forgotten about the SXSW Bit Torrent.  I went looking and it didn’t take long to find that some had indeed put one together for 2009.

I was quickly reminded that the AirPort Extreme Base Station by default protects me from the wilds of the Internet and to get the torrent running you have to bypass the ports and directly map them to your inside computer.

I found an old write-up to tell me how to do it, but it’s very out of date. I figured it out from there, but anyone who’s non-technical likely couldn’t.

I’m not going to take the time right now to explain the details again.  But you should be able to follow his text and my screen shots to get the gritty work done and allow you to bypass your default firewall with the current 5.4.1 Airport Utility.

A few days from now I’ll have more music than I need and it will likely take me months to sift through it all.  But I do have a new, big media drive just waiting.

So, here are the screen shots, if you have any questions, let me know!

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Natural Gas Usage

Center Point Energy’s web site is stupid for not providing me the ability to schedule a payment. They send me the bill two weeks in advance and I can either “pay now” or try to remember to pay closer to the date, forget about it, pay late, get reported for late payments, get dinged on my credit score …

One thing they do have is this nifty histogram of my natural gas usage. I lost my water heater in June, and that was the only thing using gas. I didn’t much notice it at the time, but I was paying something for a small leak that bloomed into a massive leak one friday night in August.

My very leaky house peaks at heater usage in December and January obviously.

Gas Usage Histogram
Gas Usage Histogram

And if you’d like to see what that costs me, here in Houston, here’s that data…

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Buzz and Bacevich

The juxtaposition of two videos I saw today is eerily representative of the current state of American affairs. The national hero, Buzz Aldrin, speaking on the future of space travel. It all sounds great, unless you listen to more that five contiguous words and try to make a coherent concept out of them. Obviously Xeni … Read more