CRAZ8

In my search for better DSL service, I visited a number of sites to check availability. One of those was Covad.

As part of the availability checks, they need your phone number. Of all the sites I visited, only Covad chose to use this phone number to start calling to try to make the sale. They’ve called every two days for the last week, but with no caller-id being displayed, we leave the voice mail to deal with them.

Is this just rude to re-purpose the information I gave them?

WSU has two cheese making courses running early in 2006. The registration for these is now open.

WSU Cheese Making

The Farmstead/Artisan course is very similar to the one Lisa and I took at the University of Idaho in September.

Some notes on that course are here

I just uploaded my Ambient Orb library to RubyForge, and the code is now available as a gem to all Ruby programmers.

Check it out here

I sync’d to the latest Rails code today to get the 1.0 RC2 version. The only issues I had were the ones mentioned in the documentation – rakefile and environment.rb major changes.

I did have to perform some editing to move forward my ActiveRecord patch for multiple databases, but that is to be expected when making that type of change.

My code is running as I expected, and it may even be performing better (I just haven’t got to the point of measuring it yet). I look forward to getting SwitchTower all setup with my virtual server farm in the near future.

Check it out

Adam has a serious message here: Speaking Up

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is a more lighthearted way of covering some of the points Adam raises.

My DSL upload speed sucks. 100-150 kbps is as good as it gets for my alleged 768 kbps upload connection. Verizon technical support tells me two things:

1. Our system says I am getting 416 kbps
2. We don’t do support for upload speeds

Their reasoning is that if the download speed is Ok, then the upload speed will be Ok too. That’s it, you’re on your own.

I’ve done as much testing as I can here, and it still seems to me to be a problem in the Verizon network, but the first line of tech support is designed to avoid actually helping me. Thanks to dslreports.com, I now have the phone number of some uber-support group at Verizon that has helped people in the past.

Perhaps I can switch to Comcast?

It seems not. To get cable to my home will cost me $6500 for Comcast to extend their system close enough to my house to send a signal.

What about other DSL providers? They all use the same Verizon infrastructure and charge a lot more money for less speed.

Why is upload speed suddenly so important? Slingbox! Without decent upload speed, Slingbox isn’t useful outside my house.

Derek just sent me a link to a Firefox extension that performs validation of the HTML of the current page.

Unlike most, it does this without sending the HTML to an external site, so I can use it for my internal web pages. Also, it does this for every page and displays an icon in the status bar.

Very cool.

HTML Validation Extension

Here’s an interesting optical illusion

Our two day adventure in making cheese is almost over, all we need to do now is drive home. We met some great people and learnt a great deal about how to make cheese for small scale production.

The hands on part was great, split into 8 groups, we made two different cheeses – feta and havarti. I was in a group making the feta and Lisa made the other. Being able to see what other people were doing differently, whilst following the same instructions was very informative. All of the cheeses turned out to be edible, but some were better than others. Our feta was a little over-salted (my fault), but tasted ok later on the second day.

Dave Potter taught us all about starters and cultures, this can be a very technical area, and it did seem that way for most people, but knowing the process that is going on will help us control it better. Dave also did a section on how to control the process, which things can be changed, what happens to other parts if you do change them.

The key thing with any question about making cheese is: It Depends! There are so many different ways of doing any one part of the process that you just have to do it yourself to learn it. Also, as we saw earlier, everyone follows instructions differently, so there is rarely a definititive answer.

I just noticed that the flyer for this course has four pictures of Leon of Llangloffan Farmhouse Cheese making his cheese on the front.

Coincidence? I don’t think so…

Right in the middle of a blog about corporate stuff, there’s some posts about cheese.

Two Gems From Neal’s Yard Diary

Its also here: http://www.ninemoons.typepad.com/the_cheese_forum/2005/08/two_gems_from_n.html