Found a better way to mount hardware on wood telco setups, large cable staples above and below the device and re-usable cable ties strung between. Now just waiting on verizon to install the loop and I can patch the DSL in and we're live.

Several friends suggested rope lighting when they saw pictures of the cabinets in my new kitchen. While wandering through the lighting section at Ikea last week, I found these little beauties: (I should take a picture of the actual units to put here)
Basically 4 12-16" long plastic strips with about 8 or so surface mount white LEDs that can be used individually or ganged together to make a longer bar. at $40 for a kit, I was hesitant to buy enough to do everything without testing first. Just another excuse to visit the home furnishing carnival that is Ikea.



They actually aren't quite as bright as the camera phone photo makes them out to be but still look great, the shade of white is rather pure and doesnt have the muddy purple/blue that early white LEDs sported.

And here I thought I was going to need to pull network cable through the walls in my new condo, I found after a second look behind one of the wall plates that not only was I blessed with more than crappy phone lines but that 2 pulls of cat 5e network cable have already been run to every room in the place. A quick trip to You Do It for supplies and now all the wall jacks have been properly installed and patched.



I even got a patch panel for the basement, as a network engineer, my home is going to be done right! Now comes the wait for Speakeasy to get Verizon to run lines to my place and stop mooching off the neighbor's unsecured wireless for a connection. Then the place can be considered "livable" and I can move in ;)

After some more tests and an OS reinstall, I brought the MacBook back to an Apple store and had them replace it. Haven't had a freeze or blackout since. I guess I just got a dud.

After a bunch of asking, we finally got my company to offer a laptop loan program for our work laptops and promptly aquired a new MacBook Pro. The first few days were quite frustrating: amazingly fast when working then suddenly the screen would go black. After a couple calls to apple and a bit of argueing with the mac "genius" at the apple store, I was able to get them to swap out my memory (they would do an outright exchange but only if I brought back my packaging which I left at home) despite the fact that they firmly believed that my problem was the hard drive. Lo and behold, no more blackout crashes, however I still have had a few freezes since the ram replacement (full on screen lock and reboot required) once when compiling GIMP and messing around with a large SVN update, once when trying to pair my bluetooth phone (subsequently worked the second try) and once when plugging in my usb mouse...still not convinced that there is a hardware problem at this point but this 1.0 is off to bit of a shaky start stability wise, maybe all those crashes corrupted my OS install...

Stability issues aside, this thing is fast. I can run WoW amazingly well on the built in graphics hardware, intel native apps launch in a blink and web browsing finally feels as fast as it does on my athalon 64 based PC. (Bear in mind this is an upgrade from a heavily modified dual 500 g4 and an 866mhz 12" powerbook so just about any new mac, intel or PPC would probably feel pretty fast. Also of note was the fact that the built in compiler seems to make use of both cores. If these remaining crases are just driver/software related, I'm looking forward to this being a great product, rosetta runs PPC apps pretty seamlessly (they either seem to work just fine or not work at all) and most of the important stuff is either available in universal binary or I can compile it myself (such as GIMPshop)