Well – Cortana uses bing. And I just blocked bing at the firewall level. Fuck Microsoft – I want to see another anti-trust suit against them for this.

And I’m so tempted to block Akamai too – but they serve a lot of video content now damn it.

Gad it was awful. We get to Readville station which is pretty much just outside Boston and the train stops dead there. Not dead but just stops.

15 minutes goes by, I was reading the book “Newport Knights” by H.B. Loomis who is a friend of ours.  and it’s an entertaining romp through historical Newport and modern day Newport.

But that aside – about 20 minutes in they tell us it’s due to a medical emergency. Probably a cardiac event. The cruel bastard in me though, as I was getting text messages saying the train would be 20, then 30, then 40 minutes late, was just pack him up and leave him on the platform for the EMS to pick up. Hell you could even leave a conductor with an AED with the guy. But needless to say, I’m usually home by 6PM. I got home at 6:40PM.

But it gets worse. They sent a shorter train – so we were packed like sardines. No wonder someone had a cardiac event.

 

Had steaks sliced on the bias – seasoned with salt and pepper and seared in olive oil. I used the wok with the induction cooker – I love that thing for the wok – you can accurately control the temperature of the pan. It’s awesome.

Then the veggies, broccoli, carrot, and scallion tossed with olive oil, terryaki sauce and roasted.

And rice.

But the star of this show was a thing called Yum Yum Sauce. It’s essentially mayo, sriracha, roast paprika and salt. On that cooked beef – delicious.

But phones and networks as well. Got a report from the new boss that a phone in one of our conference rooms wasn’t working.

I checked and checked. Could not get this Polycom SoundStation 6000 to work. So I thought let’s plug it in somewhere else. Still didn’t work. My first inkling was to wonder if we hadn’t exhausted the DHCP range for the phones. I thought this because we’d seen the problem with a few IP-450’s too.

So I hard coded an IP address in the phone range to the Soundstation 6000 and plugged it into a jack I knew worked and voila  – phone came up no problem.

So I sent a ticket into our firewall maintenance vendor asking that I saw the range had a netmask of 255.255.255.252 and was a /22 range which meant for the range given it has 1022 available addresses.

So in the ticket I asked was it only give out one octets ranges and the rest weren’t being served out via DHCP. The answer was affirmative so the request was made to add the entirety of the 1022 addresses to the pool.

That solved the problem with most of the IP-450’s but the conference room – when they terminated the Ethernet they left long whips of cable that got stepped on, rolled on etc.

Got the wiring vendor to come in and correctly terminate the lines inside a plate on the floor jack.

So basically two issues – that involved both telecom and networking. And I solved it.

Or that I’ve already bought. My venerable Samsung SGH-T599N cell phone – the main volume is at zero space left. I ordered a new Samsung Galaxy Core Prime to replace it. The new phone sports same basic dimensions but four cores of processor power, plus 4.5GB of root space on the phone and will address up to 128GB on an SD card. But the form factor – I think it’s a tiny bit larger than my current. But I hate those huge phones – it looks so stupid.

For comparison here’s the SGH-T599N:

I see the difference – the new one is more squared off.

Second thing I had to get was a new backpack. One of the straps on mine broke and it’s a pity because I like this backpack. Now I’d originally gotten it on GearBest but it’s out of stock. And trying to place an order on Gearbest – it doesn’t like my card. So I’m thinking great have to pay $100 or more for a backpack that I like and then the bulb went off in my head – Amazon to the rescue. Yep got a new one on there.

Isn’t it purty?