Tempus Fugit

Married life is good. I don’t have to cook all my meals. Things I neglect to do are sometimes magically done when I’m not looking. And my bathroom isn’t disgusting.

Plus, hot wife.

So Sarah and I returned from our honeymoon tan and relaxed. We pretty much just got buzzed and laid out at the pool or the beach. Sometimes nothingness is appreciated.

We’ve been in our new house for two weeks. It’s starting to come together and feel like a home. My office is a disaster… mostly because it’s full of about 6 trash bags full of clothes that I have to wash, dry, sort and hang.

My big announcement for June will be made on the morning of May 28th. That’ll be exciting.

The cats have finally gotten used to the house. Though they still haven’t quite figured out that the wood laminate floors are not for running. And if they are for running, they’re not for stopping. In fact, if the floors are for running, the walls end up being for stopping. There’s a lot of “tap tap tap tap… skiff… BAM!”

Like others, I’m in the process of switching our house over to CFLs (you know… the “swirly” bulbs that use less energy and last longer). I ordered some candelabra base bulbs over the Internet for about $4 each (haven’t seen them in any stores). One big bonus is that CFLs put out less heat, which saves on my cooling energy cost.

All of this is done for economic reasons, of course. I’m all for preserving the environment and reducing polution… but I’m a pragmatist. Or a pessimist. Maybe both. But in any case, people aren’t going to “save the world” out of altruism. They’re going to save the world because the short-term tangible benefits of doing so outweigh the short-term tangible costs. I’ll change my light bulbs in order to save a couple hundred dollars a year. I will not pay a premium for recycled paper that isn’t as good as the cheaper “pre-consumer content” paper. See how that works? It is for this reason that the real friends of the environment are not global warming fear mongers or the carbon-offset-selling guilt trippers, but the economists and the technologists that figure out how to tie environmental carelessness with economic carelessness and leverage the free market into an environmental benefit.

Al Gore: 0. CFL bulbs: 1.

In other news, after a few days of relatively slow (but not unbearable) Internet access through my Treo (Verizon EVDO at about 1mbps), I got permanent Internet service installed. Sarah and I weren’t really interested in television service, and the local cable operator (Brighthouse) wouldn’t sell me their higher tier Internet services without television service. So screw them, I went with Verizon FIOS. It’s under $50 a month for 20mbps/5mbps. Fastest I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. The downstream is nice, but the upstream is what really makes me smile. I likes me a fast upload.

What’s really interesting to me is that the fiber terminates in the garage and the signal then travels over the existing coax system in the house using something called MoCA. There’s a MoCA router in my office that takes the signal from the coax and distributes it over WiFi and ethernet. But from what I can tell, it also redistributes it back over the coax. So once they’re available, I should be able to buy a MoCA ethernet bridge and turn any coax jack in my house into an ethernet port running at 100mbps. Pretty sexy. But honestly, since it is such a small house, I’ll probably just get an 802.11n WAP and plug that into one of my MoCA router’s ports.

While I’m not thrilled about having to use Verizon’s provided MoCA router (was hoping to be able to use a WRT54G with GPL’s firmware), I can’t complain about the machine. It is an Actiontec MI424WR, and it’s stable, and feature-filled. The web admin is quite nice, and it does all the stuff I want, including advanced port forwarding, static IP assignment for known MAC addresses, B/G/mixed WiFi, advanced QOS management. I was pleasantly surprised to find such a powerful and capable box coming with the install.

And holy hot dog on a stick, BitTorrent flies

Okay, back to work. I’ll start blogging again, I promise.