Doing My Civic Duty

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

Tomorrow I have to show up for Kings County grand jury duty at 10:00 A.M. I’ve already put it off twice so I couldn’t get out of it this time. From what I can gather, this isn’t much like petit jury service like you see on TV. You serve for a fixed period of time (likely two weeks) rather than for a specific trial, and you hear as many presentations as you can get through in that time. Indictment is by a majority vote of 12 out of 23. There’s no voir dire, so you can’t sneak out by being snarky to the D.A., telling the judge that God told you to convict, or expressing your deep affection for the principle of jury nullification.
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Brown Lipped Snail

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Brown lipped snail on leaf
Brown Lipped Snail, Cepaea nemoralis
a.k.a Grove Snail, Banded Wood Snail, Striped Garden Snail
Floyd Bennett Field, 2007-09-23

This European invasive species comes in a variety of colors and styles. This is one of the plainer ones. These snails are edible, and are often used as escargot.

Common House Spider

Saturday, October 6th, 2007

Female house spider in web with egg sacs
Common House Spider, Achaearanea tepidariorum
Fort Tilden, Queens, 2007-09-23
Roughly the size of a nickel

We’re Back!

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Mokka mit Schlag, The Cafes, www.elharo.com, and beand.com are all restored to service after Wednesday night’s network outage. Please holler if you notice any problems. There may yet be a few glitches.

I still don’t know exactly what went wrong. I do know that at the time the network went down I had Warcraft, VOIP, BitTorrent and this server running simultaneously. However that’s not unusual. Based on what it took to eventually fix this, the mostly likely scenario is that Speakeasy/Covad failed. At one point I thought my internal router from D-Link had failed. I did buy a new Linksys router to replace it (A WRT54G. I wasn’t able to find a 54GL on short notice. :-( ). However installing the new router did not fix the problem. Speakeasy has shipped me a new DSL modem, but that has not yet arrived. What finally fixed the problem was Speakeasy asking Covad to do a “manual rebuild of the circuit”. Previously Speakeasy had done a “rebuild and reprovision” from their end, but apparently Covad can do something Speakeasy can’t. Next time I’ll know to ask for a manual rebuild if the initial rebuild fails. Not that I have any clue what any of this means. However it does seem undiagnosable apart from just doing it. The first two SpeakEasy reps I went through did not suggest the manual rebuild.
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Shopping for ISPs

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Speakeasy had yet another service outage while I was in Boston a couple of weeks ago and a smaller one this past weekend. Both times the problem was completely on their end, and the first and more serious one they didn’t notice until I told them about it a few hours into the outage. Now that they’ve been acquired by BestBuy I expect service will only get worse, so I’m looking for alternatives.

The two major providers in my area are Cablevision and Verizon, and they’re both about as trustworthy as a Republican who promises to cut government spending. However, it occurs to me that maybe I can counterbalance them against each other. Is there any device/software which will enable me to bind two separate and independent Internet connections? I’d like my network to use both Cablevision and Verizon or Speakeasy at the same time. If one goes down, the other would shoulder the full load. Otherwise traffic should be split between the two so I get the most bandwidth and lowest latency possible.

To make matters still more complex I want at least some static IPs to run public servers like this one, and I want full control of my local network: no silly rules about what devices I can or cannot connect or whom I can talk to at what speeds.

Of course, I’m not wedded to Cablevision and Verizon. I’d really rather not consider them at all; but I do need to at least have an alternative to Speakeasy ready for the next time it goes down. However if there are other options in Brooklyn, I’d be happy to consider them. RCN does not service this area though; and given my apartment’s non-existent view of any sky, neither is satellite. Possibly other wireless providers might work, but I need heavy bandwidth for web servers and downloading Linux CDs and such, so download-capped plans aren’t very plausible. Any suggestions?