I do apologize about that. I’m trying to wrap up all the loose ends before we go on vacation for three weeks, and Man, are there a bunch of loose ends. In the words of Pee Wee Herman: “It’s like trying to unravel a big cableknit sweater that someone just keeps knitting….and knitting….and knitting….”

The pièce de résistance so far was finally—hopefully—getting a WiFi problem up at my boss’ house solved. The problem has been twofold: one, the idjits that wired the house put in perhaps a tenth as many Ethernet jacks as I asked them to, so we have been sorely limited as to where we could place WiFi access points. Two, the house is so incredibly well-built, with 18 inch thick walls, dense foam insulation, aluminum studs and probably some sort of metallic lath in the wall that trying to get packet radio through them is an exercise in futility. With the help of David our network Ronin, I was able to get an Ethernet jack wired into the spare pairs on the phone in the main living area. I then hung up a Senao ECB-8610S, a six hundred milliwatt access point (if you need raw WiFi power and don’t want to splice HAM Radio amplifiers into your system, these babies are definitely the way to go) and hid it behind a Mardi Gras mask on the wall. For the first time since the house went online, laptops get 90–100% signal strength pretty much anywhere on the first floor of the house, which is where the party usually is. Thank God. You simply cannot know how mush of a burr under my saddle—or a pineapple up my ass—this problem has been.

Anyway, I don’t have much to write about at the moment, but I thought I would pass along something sent to me by my Mom-in-Law. ZipSkinny is a Web site that aggregates US Census Bureau data to give you an advanced demographic picture of any zip code you enter into it. The author apparently jsut did it as a sort ot PHP/MySQL experiment, but it is truly an amazing tool/toy. Check it out.

Next time you hear from me, I’ll likely be posting from next to the pool in my parents’ back yard. 😛