Month: January 2006

Today is the first day of the lunar new year. This year is the year of the dog.

Last night we had a big new year’s dinner with lots of different foods, such as chicken soup, soba noodles, sashimi, sushi rolls, mushroom noodles, asparagus and cream cheese wrapped with smoked salmon, etc. For wine we had a 2001 Ridge Dusi Ranch Zinfandel, Moet Chandon Rose Champagne, and then at midnight R. Renaudin Champagne.

There’s been a fairly steady drizzle outside, so it’s been one of the quietest new years I’ve had here when it comes to firecrackers. That’s good for me! On a dry year we’ll have firecrackers going off until well after 1am, and then again starting around 5am. Yikes.

I’ve been playing around a lot with my OpenWRT router. I’ve got it set up to build a VPN to my network in Santa Clara, and ntpclient and cron are setup to sync the clock. The router I got is the Asus WL-500G Deluxe. It comes with 802.11g wireless, 5-port switch, 2 USB2 ports, 4MB of flash, 32MB of RAM, and a 200mhz CPU. It also has two serial ports built-in though there aren’t external connectors, so you would have to install those yourself. The USB ports can be used for a variety of purposes such as disk/flash, webcam, etc. This model is one of the best equipped routers that supports OpenWRT currently. Looks like it goes for around US$100 in the US, though I got mine for US$83 in Taiwan.

One of the interesting things about these routers is that there’s really nothing special about the ‘WAN’ port on them. All the ports are on the same internal switch and then VLANs are built so that the WAN port is on one VLAN and the LAN ports are on another VLAN. For example, on my router it has a 6 port switch built in. One port is for the wireless, one port for the WAN VLAN and four ports for the LAN VLAN. The default is that the LAN and wireless ports are bridged together. But the interesting thing with OpenWRT is that you can setup the VLANs however you want to segregate different nets, use a different port for WAN, or in the case of using it as an AP or a wireless bridge, you can make the WAN port a regular LAN port.

Anyways, it’s a fun toy to play around with.

I’d been taking the medicine the doctor gave me last time and things had been looking up. By the time the medicine ran out I only had a little bit of a runny nose left. Unfortunately this morning when I woke up the sore throat was back again. I went back to the doctor this afternoon. Though it was the same clinic it was a different doctor since they each take every other day. Doctor said the tonsillitis was back again. He was going to send me off with only 4 days worth of medicine even though it’s almost chinese new year and they won’t be open again until next Thursday, so I talked him into 6 days instead. Hopefully that’ll be enough to put the smack down on this bug.

In other news, I signed a franchise agreement with Subway this week and we’re about to finalize a new ten year lease on the shop. Then there’s gonna be remodeling and training and ordering of equipment to do.

I’ve also been playing a bit with OpenWRT. Some of the current broadband routers and wireless access points are actually very stripped down computers running Linux. Some folks have managed to implement a common OS that works on several of these models. The one I have has 4mb of flash as ‘disk’ and 32mb of RAM, which seems minuscule in this day and age, but it’s enough to have a fairly useful OS on it with about 2mb of ‘disk’ free. I loaded up openvpn on it, and that with its other required packages still leaves about 1mb left free. It’s complete enough that I’m thinking I’ll start using it as an Internet router instead of using a Solaris box. It’s got just enough power and flexibility to do what I want, and a lot simpler to manage.

Last weekend I got a runny nose which I was treating myself with decongestant. Later in the week it developed into a sore throat and ear ache. Thursday night I had trouble sleeping and felt hot. I finally went in to see an ENT on Friday and was diagnosed with tonsillitis. Now I’m on a course of antibiotics to get rid of it.

Please add a comment telling me which RSS Reader you use to read LJ. Also please tell me if the reader can handle authentication for friends-only posts sanely. (If you just read posts on the web site then you can skip this.)

The URL change for RSS feeds has broken RSS Bandit. There’s a few other quirks in this client that I’m not completely happy with, so I’m startig to look around at others, and usually starting with what other people are happy with is a good approach.

Thanks!

Went in to order a phone and adsl line for the new shop on Wednesday around 11:30am. Install was completed around 11:15am on Friday. Less than 48 hours start to finish. Impressive.

Number is +886-2-2568-3372. That also seems to spell out 2-LOUDER-2. Or 25-NUDES-2. Neither one is that great.

On the day that Apple introduces Intel CPU based Macs, their stock closes at $80.86.

(If you don’t get the significance of that, you aren’t a true computer geek.)

74, 1F Minquan East Road Section 2, Taipei 10469

Coming Soon: ??????

One of the legendary Ghibli ga Ippai LD box sets is up on ebay. If you still have a laserdisk player or are a hardcore collector, go take a look.

Yesterday my wife’s shop had their year end party (in this context ‘year end’ refers to the lunar year which ends on January 28 this year). This year they did a hot spring day at a hot spring resort in the hills above Tianmu, north of Taipei. We had a private dining room complete with KTV (Karaoke on a TV). Highlights of the lunch were the lobster, sashimi, and spicy scallops. These scallops were probably the biggest I’ve seen, all at over 2 inches in diameter. Brother Xie was there too and ordered a bottle of Johnny Walker Green Label (15 year blended) Whiskey which we actually managed to completely polish off. Over the afternoon various groups went out to visit the hot spring baths. We were also going to go to KTV in town in the evening with my mother-in-law, but my sister-in-law Elly wasn’t feeling well, so we stayed home and had a pizza from Julia’s instead.

Happy 2006, all.