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Speed Testing via the Linux Command Line

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

Last night I relocated a bunch of computer stuff – namely my home server and router – to our bedroom closet, which in a positive way got it more up and out of the way so that we only have to listen to fans spinning when we’re picking out clothes to wear, but in a not-so-positive way, it means that at least until I climb into the ceiling to run ethernet cables around the house, my rig in my office will be relying on wifi instead of a wired network connection for a while.

Now this didn’t really seem like much of a big deal until this morning I noticed that Verizon dropped its prices on the higher Internet tiers and now upgrading to 150 Mbps is only an extra $20 instead of $50!

And mind you, I don’t necessarily need most of that speed here at my desktop, but I am somewhat addicted to speed tests just to randomly remind me how awesome my Internet connection is these days, and not for nothing but speed tests over wifi kind of suck.

That said, my home server is still hard wired because it’s literally sitting right next to the router in the closet now, so a bit of quick Googling found this nifty post that provides a great walkthrough of how to run speed tests directly from the command line in your friendly, neighborhood linux box…

I already had Git installed, so it was maybe 30 seconds to pull down the speedtest-cli script and copy it into /usr/local/bin, then I was off to the races! I’m pretty much a sworn user of Speedtest.net, so to see that it was interfaced directly with them was an easy win. And the customization is neat, too, how you can either run in a default for the fastest host or choose your own, in addition to getting the link for your results badge to wear so proudly.

My favorite feature, though, is how simple they made batch testing so now you can actually pick multiple locations around the world and kick them all off in rapid succession. Though normally I default to my web host up in New Jersey because I think testing with a local server here is stupid when we don’t really have a lot of data centers here for major websites anyways, they were admittedly running a little slow this morning so it was neat to be able to also throw in LA and Miami as two other corners of the country to help round my test results out!

Now to see if I can find that promo where they were giving away the free router to upgrade to 150/150… 😛

Silly Monster Jammies

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

I’ve got to say, I see more and more of the very same silly sense of humor that I had when I was little in my son every day.

Tonight he was so well behaved while I had to be on a late night conference call in the other room, but when it was time to get him into his pajamas it was like he had flipped the switch over to full blown wacky! The jammies you see him in above are admittedly getting a little small for him, so I had a bit of trouble getting his feet into them to get him started. The first foot wasn’t too bad, but each time that I would try to get the other foot into place, he’d start wiggling and playfully poking at one foot with the other…

…which in these particular pajamas looked like a tiny, blue little monster was trying to get me…

…AND I JUST ABSOLUTELY LOST IT!!! 😀

Christopher is very much at this stage right now where he plays off of your emotions, so if you’re laughing, he’s laughing, and if he realizes that he’s the reason why you’re laughing … well, much like I know my pre-school teachers had to endure both years that they tried to temper my immature shenanigans, good luck getting him to stop once he really gets going!

It probably took me a solid five minutes to get the rest of those pajamas on – with several breaks included – because he just had me cracking up the entire time I was fighting with him, which honestly just made him act silly all the more. And it was kind of fantastic to see the little comedian playing off of my own amusement, even though he probably didn’t know exactly what it was that was making his Dad laugh his head off!

He just kept doing it anyways … because that’s what you do when you’re making people laugh.

Plex Streaming 101

Posted on October 6, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

For Plex proponents like myself, this video is a nice, simple walkthrough of the ways that Plex Media Server streams media to different devices both in your home and abroad.

I’ve been lucky up to this point in that the main devices that we use Plex on at home are two Samsung TVs and Plex Home Theater on my computer, all of which support DirectPlay. So far this has been a good configuration for us because even adding my sister-in-law remotely who occasionally needs to transcode due to receiving Internet speed, it hasn’t really affected simultaneous playback here at home. Nonetheless, I can see beefier processing power in our future eventually to help from buffering if we add any more relatives connecting in the same manner who all want to watch at the same time.

But hopefully by then I’ll have justified the bump up to a swanky rack-mount server boasting a sexy RAID configuration and a new motherboard that supports multiple processors! 😉

Recycling is Fundamental … or At Least It Should Be

Posted on October 5, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

Recycling has always been something that I’ve felt is pretty important, and it frustrates me how inconsistent we are about it as a society across the board.

People who are the most adamant about recycling like to make you think that it’s this simple thing that everyone can do to help the environment, but the truth is for a lot of people it’s actually anything but. Take my community, for example, which has a recycling program sponsored by our county. They just recently made a change to how they’re going to pick up – we used to just leave everything out in blue plastic bags and that was that, but now they’ve decided that the bags are too much of a hassle so we have to use a separate trash can specifically for recycling.

Many places, such as where I grew up in Michigan, give you a bin to leave out by the curb with your garbage each week, but here you’re required to buy your own as part of their new Choose and Use Your Own Container program.

Except for blue bags, if those were you’re particular container of choice… 😛

But I think what frustrates me more about our local program is when you peel back the layers and see just what they actually do and don’t take. I’ll even admit that I knew they wouldn’t take certain items for a while, but I’ve always snuck them in the bags anyways … hopefully as a gentle reminder that we’d like our local recycling program to be all inclusive! Now with the bags gone and my goods just loose in the container, however, I’ve taken to sorting everything out just to ensure that I don’t look out to see a pile of stuff that they won’t take laying in my yard after the garbage people come by… 🙁

Here’s what they won’t take:

newspapers (who doesn’t recycle newspapers?!)
paper or cardboard
styrofoam (see bullet #1 – isn’t this like one of the most common things to recycling?!?!)
plastic film or bags of any kind (including the 8 billion shopping bags you leave Walmart with every visit)
plastic utensils, plastic toys

Admittedly I don’t really care about the newspapers for me personally because we haven’t gotten a physical newspaper in ages, but cardboard … we get a ton of stuff from Amazon, so I’m always leaving out piles of broken down boxes for the trash – it would be nice. And styrofoam I just think is ridiculous … I’ve never heard of a recycling program not taking egg cartons, for god’s sake!

As for what they do take:

aluminum and metal food cans
glass containers
plastic containers (#1 – 5, #7)

And frankly, the last one is a perfect example of what I’m talking about when I say that it’s not easy enough because never before have I had to sort through my recycling to look for the little stamps on each plastic container – which aren’t always uniform and sometimes don’t exist altogether – to figure out which ones go in the trash and which ones are ok to recycle. It’s crazy! Mind you, I spent a few minutes and did it anyways because it’s personally important to me, but there are a lot of people out there who really don’t care one way or the other, and yet the only way that a recycling program is effective is if the vast majority of the population participates in it.

I know it may seem petty, but expecting people to sort out their plastics is an extra barrier to entry. Expecting them to take their newspapers and styrofoam somewhere else because curbside pickup won’t take them is an extra barrier. Hell, to an extent even requiring a separate garbage can is an extra step that I’m sure some people are just going to say, “Screw it – all this does is cost me time and money. Why should I bother?”

As it is, not everybody thinks kindly of recycling … as crazy of a notion as that might be to anyone who cares about our environment. Here’s an interesting set of five short interviews with people who don’t recycle and it’s mostly a mixture of not caring, not getting an incentive to care, or it seeming like too much of a hassle … these are the kind of people you’re up against when you add another rule or limitation to what your local recycling program will cover, and as you can see, it doesn’t take much to make somebody just throw in the towel and send it all to the dump when they’re not really invested in the cause to begin with…

For me, I think the most vivid justification for why I recycle is the memory of the couple of times that I’ve actually been to the dump myself. It’s always been to dispose of some bigger items that the garbage won’t pick up when we’re moving, and if driving up a giant pile of garbage to throw away your trash doesn’t make you see the need to recycle, I really don’t know what else will!

Just so much garbage – as far as the eye can see – with random bulldozers and heavy equipment trying to shuffle it around as best they can. I remember once being worried that my car was going to get stuck as I backed in to drop off an old table that Goodwill didn’t want, only to then watch a garbage truck buzz in and add another pile of junk to the sea of garbage like it was just another day’s work. Which it really was, because he’s a garbage man, and hauling away the crap we no longer want is what they do.

So I do like to pride myself for doing the best I can to recycle, and I’m happy to say that if you were to count the number of garbage vs. recycling bags that our household puts out each month, the recycling probably outnumbers the trash … which is a good start. And as much of a hassle as it is to sort my recycling and use a special bin and make special trips to recycle the stuff that I can’t get rid of at the curb, I’ll probably be one to take the extra time to do all of that, too, because environmental science and putting less into our local landfill is important to me.

That said, I don’t live in a bubble, so it’s really just as important to me that my neighbors recycle, too, and if right now it seems like it’s too difficult or complicated or time consuming to make it worth the hassle for them, then recycling needs to be made easier so that they’ll want to care more about it, too.

The next generation of recyclers - playing in our new recycling bin... — The next generation of recyclers – playing in our new recycling bin…

Anything you have to say has already been said…

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

So I stumbled across this website called the Library of Babel last night, and it’s kind of freaky.

Essentially they’ve created an algorithm that has created every combination of letters … ever. Or at least up to 3,200 characters, for starters. But it’s all indexed, so whatever you type, there’s a page in this vast library that already says whatever you were going to say…

Like – this last paragraph that I just wrote – it can be found here:

Or even just completely made up nonsense that’s disappointingly not actually true:

Apparently the site is based on a short story by an author from Argentina written in 1941, well before the Internet was ever a public notion, which is kind of crazy to think of the notion prior to the architecture being available to actually make it a reality … a futurist in the true sense of the word!

Now granted, despite having a computer that can literally generate any text that could ever be conceived, it still takes the creativity of humans to bring the next Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings to be consumable by mankind … the crux of having everything is that you’ve got the literary classics surrounded by an almost infinite amount of garbage unless you already know what you’re searching for.

Even looking at only samples of 3,200 characters, the library currently contains 10⁴⁶⁷⁷ books of information, whereas there are estimated to be approx. 130 million books published in modern history today … to say that the meaningful texts available represent only a fraction of a fraction of the everything that this algorithm creates…

…but it’s still kind of a neat concept from a technical perspective, nonetheless.

14 Days of Self Control – Day #4 Check-In

Posted on October 4, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

So far I think things are going surprisingly well!

Avoiding junk food hasn’t been too bad … I think mostly because I’ve affirmed to myself that this is something that I just have to do, which is making it easier to steer clear of Dominos and Taco Bell and everywhere else that I normally go to avoid actually preparing my own food.

I’ve also basically convinced myself that I’m just not doing Halloween candy this year, which admittedly is more superfluous anyways. If I’ve already taken the steps to give up chips and pizza, saying no candy, too, really isn’t that big of a blip! 😉

Anyways, so far I’ve averaged about 1,000 – 1,200 calories per day, which is a lot less than I normally eat but as far as I can tell still an acceptable minimum as far as not starving oneself is concerned.

I also got in walks with the family for two of those days, so that’s a nice bonus. I still want to try to get in some yoga on the WiiFit today because I didn’t get around to it yesterday.

For my efforts thus far, the scale when I got up today said that I was down about 4 pounds!!! I’m trying not to get too caught up in the numbers because I know they’re going to fluctuate and water weight can be a quick loss when you’re first starting out, but it’s still encouraging to see the number going down after so many big changes to my diet all at once…

😀

14 Days of Self Control

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Scott / 3 Comments

I haven’t written about this in a while, but I really need to because it’s been too long.

I’m not at all happy about my body right now. In fact, the last couple of weeks it’s been kind of depressing. I feel super lethargic all of the time, walking not that far makes me winded and tired … even moreso when I’ve got a toddler in tow, and I haven’t really been sleeping well and wake up most of the time with aches and just generally feeling terrible.

And it admittedly scares me a little because if I look back over the years, I can see myself progressively getting worse and worse, past points that I never pictured myself getting. Like when I first moved down here in 2003, I weighed about 215 and wanted to lose 20 pounds … even something like 225 seemed so far away that it really wasn’t that bad, and yet eventually over the years I passed 225, and 235, and 250, and so on…

It’s kind of embarrassing – I don’t even want to say how bad it’s gotten.

Ok, fuck it – today I weighed in at 270 pounds.

Which is scary both for the number itself, not to mention that 300 pounds doesn’t seem all that far away, even though previously I would’ve thought about it like some sort of ridiculous weight that really fat people weigh, but not me…

…just like I once felt about 250 pounds, too. 😛

So I’m writing here both a little bit to vent and also to work through the plan I’ve been devising in my head to get myself on a better track. Even though I know that I need to exercise eventually, too, I’m not gaining weight due to a lack of exercise, but to all of the horrible food that I’ve been eating, and so even though I’m generally not a fan of diets, per se, in favor of lifestyle changes longterm, since I haven’t actually been able to do that myself, we’re going to try things a little different this time!

For the next two weeks, instead of trying little changes over time, I want to try holding myself to a very strict diet in hopes of shocking myself into realizing that this is something that I can actually do if I put my mind to it because frankly, otherwise I just haven’t been taking the little changes seriously and eating a healthy breakfast followed by a box of Tastykakes for lunch kind of defeats the purpose altogether!

Anyways, here’s the challenge:

The Nos…
- No carbs (or at least no doughy carbs … fruit and whatever is fine)
- No junk food … cookies, cakes, chips, candy, ice cream – basically, everything that I love
- No fast food
- No sugar cereal
- No eating after midnight
The Yeses…
- Lots of protein – chicken, shrimp, turkey, fish, maybe even steak
- Lots of fruit & vegetables
- Experimenting with new kinds of salads
- Gorging myself on tea

It’s going to be especially tough because it’s pumpkin season and I’m currently surrounded by donuts and cakes and other junk to review, but that’s all going to have to take a backseat for now … maybe I can review the healthier stuff or something, I don’t know.

I do know that I’m committing myself to hitting the grocery store more often because we have a habit of buying lots of diet food and then pitching it all in the trash after it spoils two weeks later, so maybe if I go with a single meal or two in mind (and spend less), it’ll be a bit easier.

We’ll see how this goes … of course I’m motivated today, but that’s how diets always go. Talk to me six hours from now when all I’ve had to eat was lettuce, tea, and a protein shake and see if I’m still on the wagon then!

Focus. Focus. Focus.

On Being Anti-Abortion vs. Anti-Planned Parenthood…

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

If so many Republicans are against abortion, why don’t they just push to make abortion illegal instead of trying to defund Planned Parenthood???

It seems like the more beneficial scenario across the board because that way Planned Parenthood could continue providing all of the other women’s health services that they offer and there would be no worry about state and federal funding going to support abortion because the process itself would be illegal … whereas if Planned Parenthood is defunded and can’t provide any of its services, other providers will still be able to offer abortions.

Mind you, I’m personally pro-choice and honestly have no problem with abortions being limited to the first trimester unless the mother’s life is in danger as our laws state today. It just begs the question to me of what those trying to defund Planned Parenthood are really after – do they truly not want abortion to exist because they believe it to be immoral or do they have some sort of vendetta specifically against Planned Parenthood and they simply refuse to see the forest for the trees?

I hate customer service.

Posted on September 28, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

Sometimes I feel like dealing with customer service departments makes me out to just be another grumbling asshole when in reality I just want an answer that makes sense.

Not the copy & paste response that isn’t even relevant to my problem.

Not one that is just blatantly guessing on your part.

I just want a legitimate answer that justifies the problem that I’m experiencing, and bonus points if you can actually help me to solve my problem, too!

I think part of my issue comes from having a developer’s mindset because when I see an issue with a company’s website that I have to interact with, I don’t simply want an apology for the inconvenience … I want to know what’s wrong so that other people don’t have the same problem in the future, too!

In a way, systems are easy because they’re consistent, or at least they should be. If designed properly, a website should look the same to me as it does to you … the 1,000th text message that you send should be delivered just as the first 999 were … when banking transactions don’t all post to your account in a consistent manner, that should be a red flag for anyone concerned about how the online banking system is working.

In my scenario, I scheduled five transfers from my checking account on Friday – when I woke up and looked in my account, four of the transactions were pending, but one was missing.

This seemed odd to me because when I do regular, unscheduled transfers, every transaction always shows as pending immediately regardless of where the transfer is going to.

…and mind you, these are all transfers within the same bank…

All in all, I talked with six representatives across different customer service departments – some had different explanations than others, some clearly didn’t want to be talking to me at all, and even the final supervisor that I spoke with couldn’t really say why it was happening but at least offered an alternative to what I was having an issue with.

I mean, I get that most customer service reps don’t understand their company’s systems well enough to identify where a process is failing. Hell, I’ve had issues where I’ve had to talk to multiple developers to get to the one who could speak accurately to their own application for building new ones! But regardless of your knowledge of a given system, I think it’s a fair suggestion that anyone should be able to recognize one of these things is not like the others to help identify when the system might be behaving incorrectly so that those with more know-how can investigate those types of scenarios in more detail.

And don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked in a call center myself so I totally get that a lot of people just don’t care because as soon as my call disconnects, they’ll have another pissed off customer in their ear to deal with next … but that shouldn’t be the gold standard because you can’t improve customer service through apathetic customer service representatives. Good customer service starts with identifying that a customer is upset and then dissecting their issue into something you can work with, whether it’s through education or process improvement or even a bug fix.

It doesn’t neither of us any good for you to just say, “I don’t know what else to say – that’s just how it works…” unless you’re looking to keep your complaint level high.

It reminds me of another situation that I had earlier this year – I was driving home one day and noticed that one of the signs leading onto the interstate was wrong.

Huh?!

I even drove back that way a second time to double-check myself before saying anything. They were doing a lot of construction around a new interchange, and the arrow definitely indicated that one lane was split for both north and south … even though it really only went south.

So after mulling over who to even report that kind of thing to, I found a contact on the Florida DOT website for our area and explained the situation … to which I got a fairly curt reply stating that I was incorrect because the guy’s field engineers said that it was fine.

The next day I drove down and took pictures.

A few more days passed before he finally replied again that the road had just been reconfigured and now matched the sign overhead, so everything was ok. I drove through one more time, and he was correct.

But how hard would it have been to just say that they were in the middle of changing things over and the sign had gotten updated before the lines were repainted on the road???

I know that customer service is often depicted as a shit job that nobody likes because it’s nothing but people complaining at you all day long, but what if you were to take a step back and put yourself in the shoes of the person on the other end of the line?

Be the guy who got on the interstate going the wrong way because the sign was wrong.

Be the guy who wondered all weekend if his mortgage payment got pulled from somebody else’s account by mistake.

And then don’t just gloss over this issues with an “Oops!” – actually take the next step towards solving them so that they don’t have to happen all over again.

It’s the difference between “Give us a break – the sign’s fixed now!” and “Sorry about that – we’ll make sure our contractors know to cover up those parts of the signs that aren’t correct until the new lanes are opened to prevent that in the future…”

Or “Yeah, I can see why you would expect all of your online transfers to appear the same. This is how our system behaves today, but let me open a ticket with our development team so they can look into changing that.”

The more you act like you actually want to fix my issue from happening again, the less I’ll sound like just another grumbling asshole when I’m explaining it to you.

…mainly because hopefully it won’t be the sixth time I’ve had to explain the same issue over and over again to apathetic ears that are just counting down the time until their next break… 😛

Dream Journal : More Fragments

Posted on September 21, 2015 by Scott / 0 Comment

I was Superman.

An evil super villain had just stolen a nuclear-powered shark and was hauling it away … for mischievous purposes … on top of a borrowed cruise ship full of passengers.

At some point during pursuit, he pulled the entire ship underwater, which miraculously didn’t flood the ship but simply threatened to do so and trapped everyone inside. With that, I dove underwater to get the ship back, however in the back of my mind I had pictured Lois Lane dying and having to go back in time to save her, so in hindsight I probably could’ve just done that from the beginning to save us all some time!

Anyways, it took a while for me to remember whether Superman (me) could breathe underwater, but after deciding that I could, I fought some random magic guy before eventually catching up to the ship. I somehow managed to get inside without bringing any water with me, and then got everyone to help me move all of the heavy stuff to one side or the other to help balance the ship.

Presumably this was to help with something that I was about to do to save them, but maybe it was just to keep them all busy so they wouldn’t panic as much.

* * * * * * * * * *

We had just rented a new house and I was carrying things in from the curb when it started raining outside.

The h0use was kind of set into the side of a hill, so it had all sorts of neat landscaping around it that unfortunately made it really hard to just walk a straight line from one place to another.

When I finally made it back to the car, I had the kind realization that I would pull it into the garage for my wife … no idea why I hadn’t done that in the first place to make hauling things inside easier … but after driving around the block and then coming inside again, I couldn’t figure out how to get to the actual garage even though I knew there was one!

Inside my Dad offered to help me come look, and together we opened a door that seemed garage-worthy, only to be greeted by a garage that was very much not empty because it happened to be filled with something like a dozen dogs. Some of them were really nasty, too, and even though I managed to close the door in their faces, they still came running around from another hallway and we all went outside to figure out where in the hell all of these dogs were coming from…

Outside was a couple with even more dogs on leashes citing that they had permission from the landlord to use the property for their dog business. I explained that we had just rented the home and there was nothing in the lease about a dog business sharing the property, so we fought until the police finally came.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was trying to go out to the movies and my wife was asking who I was going to go with … like on a date.

Apparently my first choice was some redhead, followed by another girl, and then I had the thought of going with my actual wife instead.

She seemed happy with my decision.