I signed up and got my Clearwire modem after work today and had a frustrating time getting a signal with it. This upset me greatly. Not because it didn’t work, but because it forced me to read the instructions. Step one is to plug the AC adapter into the modem and try plugging it into various outlets around the house while noting signal strength. In an act reminiscent of meticulously tweaking rabbit ears to fine-tune saturday morning cartoons, I wandered around my condo, modem in hand, testing every placement that would work. Essentially anything close to a window will work best so I put it on the window sill in my room.
It’s not getting a perfect signal (as indicated by the 4 out of 5 lights), but it’s working like a champ so far. I hopped on a DC++ hub and queued about 20GB worth of comics, music videos and movies to download. I’m either going to download myself retarded or I’ll end up with a rather nasty email from clearwire. We’ll see. If you can get clearwire in your area, I highly recommend it.
I’ve been stuck with my local shitty, overpriced cable for the past two years ever since ACS rolled out their limitless dsl that’s still not available on my street. Here dsl is better across the board. You’re not forced to get every communication medium under the sun in order to get decent speeds. I mean, forcing people to sign up for an $80 package of digital cable, cell phone service, local and long distance in order to get cable any faster than 1Mb? That’s criminal. The package comes with cable, but it’s your grandma’s cable internet running at about 256Kb down. If you want anything faster it’s an added $30/month. Assholes.
Clearwire was just rolled out here in AK (in my town at least. eat it valley!). WiMax internet up to 1.5Mb for $5 more per month than a 512Mb cable or dsl connection with no monthly bandwidth limit. I’m ditching cable no question.
I was going to sign up for it today after work, but some guy had to leave early to pick his sick kid up from school and he took the modem cabinet keys with him. It’ll have to wait until after work tomorrow.
Finally got my car paid off today. I read the average car buyer gets 60 month financing from a bank or automotive lender and, on average, refinances at least once extending the loan to around 72 months. I bought my car in late November of ‘02 and paid it off in a little under three years. One financing was required in order to get my mortgage because despite the fact that I could (and obviously did) afford both payments, it didn’t look good on paper to seemingly stretch my finances so thin. Making overpayments on the original loan boosted my credit score high enough to where I qualified for pretty much any mortgage I could afford. Now that it’s paid off years early I’m eager to find out where I stand currently. I’ll have to wait a month or so and see where I’m at.
My mod chip showed up today. I decided on picking up the latest and greatest Xecuter 3 from modchip.ca. Not too expensive, North American operation which made non-credit card payment easier, faster shipping and thus highly recommended. As my complete lack of luck would dictate I have THE ONLY version of the xbox comes from the factory with the modchip adapter pinholes pre-filled with solder. With a complete lack of solder-related tools aside from a soldering iron big enough to weld sheet metal I had little to no way to desolder the holes.
After not being able to find anything small enough to fit through the holes I ended up tearing apart an old 2.5″ notebook to IDE hard drive adapter for it’s pins. Three and a half hours later I had managed to desolder all 14 holes and not burn through any traces with my nearly flaming soldering iron. Everything else from there was a sinch. Pin header was soldered on, wires connected, adapter installed, moment of truth. Powered it up and the Xecuter logo glowed a bright blue indicating the mod was working perfectly. Now all I need to do is track down the docs on what I need to do to install the software required to get dvd-r games to run on it and later to install linux on it. This ought to keep me occupied for a while…
The other day a guy I’ve regularly helped out with linux issues read my post on the whole Wine/WineX/Cedega thing and offered me access to his TransGaming account as thanks. It’s a year subscription so hell if I’m gonna turn that down. I’ve since spent the better part of this week installing, configuring, testing, fixing code, reconfiguring, uninstalling, reinstalling and I still haven’t gotten a single game to run. Granted I don’t have any of the latest and greatest games that undoubtedly TransGaming is putting all of their efforts into supporting, but I find it a little odd that NOTHING will run. Every time I install a game i get the same wine: Unhandled exception, starting debugger... error. Everything is working fine hardware wise. Installers with 3D content work flawlessly, but the games refuse to run. I can’t seem to find generalized documentation or howtos amidst of the mountains of World of Warcraft shite so if anyone has Cedega 4.4.3 with or without Point2Play 2.0.3 running games on Slackware 10.2, let me know. At least I know the free Wine will play fallout 1/2 and most other games just fine…
My take on the matter is echoed almost perfectly by threads on TransGaming’s own forum. TransGaming hyped WineX 4.0 as being the breakthrough in seamless windows gaming on linux that it’s clearly not. They only support the games in the media spotlight and as soon as they’re not the latest and greatest they drop them completely whether they’re working 100% or not. It’s pretty clear their only intention is to support the latest games in order to seduce more would-be linux converts into paying for Cedega with wildly exaggerated hype only to drop them as soon as their game of choice isn’t generating revenue. I’m really disappointed in Cedega, but at least I got to try it for free which is a lot more than most people can say. I’ll hold onto the account until Cedega 5.0 is released in about two week. If that flops and doesn’t work with a much wider range of games, TransGaming is going to see a huge decline in profits.
A class-reductionist, or so I’ve been told in a discussion on feminism and women’s rights throughout history. As if there aren’t enough -isms and -ists out there already, that one was completely new to me. My point in the discussion was that feminism in the workforce and specifically capitalist feminism is just plain silly. I don’t see the point in fighting for equal wage oppression under the ruling class. That’s where I was so neatly labeled (could have been the third Emma Goldman quote that spurred it).
It was explained to me that a “class-reductionist” is someone who boils all of society’s ills down to class-conflict or merely the fact that classes exist. The fact of the matter is that it’s true. Whether you consider it Marxist or not there is class oppression and classes are there whether people want to see them or not. With the fragile state of the American economy and Bush’s subsequent decimation of the middle class it’s become a social taboo to discuss classes in this country. People look at you like you’re some kind of conspiracy spouting psycho while priests exclaim how “It’s in the Bible! It’s meant to be!”. I would also contest that the people who refuse to admit class-war is a reality are the people who know themselves to be a lower class than they’d like themselves to be in.
I guess the real arguement is whether or not female oppression comes from classism, but that’s a very complicated discussion. Parecon states that they are seperate oppressions that intersect and interact, but I don’t agree with that. There was oppression of women in feudal times as well as pre-feudal times. Some people would like to simplify it down to male chauvenism or sexism, but I don’t agree with that either. Emma Goldman said “No social revolution without female liberation, no female liberation without social revolution”, but I think the goal of the revolution specifically has to be women’s rights and the destruction of the class system or else it’s doomed to failure. Women’s oppression just changes each time there is a revolution.
The only hope for humanity is the inception of a truely classless society. It’s already been proven they work. The Iriquois nation in North America and Canada was a real classless society where women lost power only after european imperialists came over. They were also pre-industrialist, pre-bourgeois. It would stand to reason that the modern class system came with the bourgeoise revolution.
I know. I never thought I’d ever say those words either, but hell, it’s impressive hardware and it runs linux! The new guy at work overheard me talking about console modding. I said the only reason I’d buy an xbox would be to mod it to install linux and xbmc (and to play a healthy amount of pirated games because I’ll be damned before micro$hit gets a single one of my hard earned dollars). I also added that it would have to most likely be post-360 launch when pawn shops are forced to lower prices even further. He offered up the console, four games, extra controller and memory card for $50 and I sure as hell wouldn’t pass that up.
Now all I have to do is determine the modchip I need and figure out where to get it. This will most likely force me to buy a new soldering iron too since the one I have is old and crappy. Actually, I don’t even know where I got it.
What a fantastic week. Monday is payday and Wednesday is dividend day. It’s a paltry $845.76 this year thanks to Governor “Fuckballs” Murkowski, but hell, I’ll take what I can get. First I’m getting my car paid off the beginning of next month and then it’s all the strippers and beer I can handle!
If only it were a million dollars I could do two chicks at the same time…
