The rotten gift

The biggest birthday disappointment was the gift I bought myself.

I wanted to network the xbox in the livingroom with the router in the office. Wireless tends to be sub-optimal since German house construction is mainly concrete-based, which impedes the wireless signal.

Running Cat5 through the house is impractical again based on the walls being solid concrete in the areas I want to network.

So I thought I would give Powerline networking a try. This is using the electrical cabling in the house to carry the signal. Since our house is only 2 years old, and Germans tend to use rather robust building materials, I thought this would work out well.

I went with Netgear and bought the HD Powerline Ethernet kit, which claimed 200MPS speeds on the box.
From a set up perspective, it worked like a dream. Plugged in the modules, connected my network cables, and everything detected everything else no problem. I was happy, at least for the first minutes.

Then I noticed the connection were being lost and regained over and over again between modules... and the speeds were slooooooowwww. I installed and ran diagnostic software and found the living room module was only getting 4 MBPS. I unplugged and replugged and saw performance increase to 28MBPS, which is still far far from 200. The connection dropping/reconnecting was also too terrible to deal with, so it all went back to the store.

I dont know if the issue was my wiring, or the modules, but I decided to go the wireless route instead.

I purchased the much overpriced MS Wireless Xbox Adaptor.
Again, set up was a breeze and worked right away. I just have the already expected problem that reception was not that strong. I only get 1 bar of signal strength in the living room, but it is working.

I am not sure if changing my router to a better one would improve things, or possibly adding a repeater someplace in the middle. Eventually I will get it all sorted, but I was really hoping for a wired solution with some high speed, so I could better stream video and audio.

Happy Birthday to Me

Thanks to everyone who sent me Birthday greetings over the weekend, it was good to hear from you all.

I thought I would share what I received as gifts this year.

Here is the card Claudia made from her and Liam. Liam is in full dinosaur mode, so this is our family as dinosaurs. I am the big one.
Liam also made a picture for me. According to him, it is a dragon with the sun over it, and my name (papa) written there.
Next gift was two nice shirts. They are quite summery and I hope we have weather soon where I can wear them. It is still very much sweater weather now.
I also received the next two books in the "wheel of time" series. I think I have 3000+ pages of unread books right now, so I should be sorted for a little while now.
I was also given the next two Futurama DVDs. As an enormous futurama fanboy, this was a very welcome addition to the library.
And for no reason whatsoever, a hand puppet of a sheep. There was no logic or reason behind this other than it looks funny, and I have to say it is perhaps the perfect gift.
I also recieved contributions to my Canada flight, and this years technology purchase, which I will go into detail on in the next post.

Return of the Wonderphone

Well thanks to the good folks at Ebay, I have been re-united with my beloved HP iPAQ 514 Voice Messenger. I had some pretty long dark days there, wandering the streets of Germany phone-less. I did not know what to do or where to turn.

After bidding on and losing a surprising number of auctions for a three year old phone model, I managed to snag one for 60 Euro. I had paid 99 for my original one, and I know the original MRSP was 299, so 60 seemed like an OK price to pay. My original limit was 50, but after missing out on quite a few chances, I raised my bar just a little.
I was actually quite considering a move to the iPhone based entirely on jealousy of Ryan's. It almost causes me physical pain to know someone so close to me that is enjoying the sexiest piece of technology in the market right now. You can actually get one in Germany for 59 Euro, then 24 per month on contract. The only thing that deterred me was getting into any contract at all. I like my pay-as-you-go plan. A prepaid iphone in Germany is 499 Euro. No.

Maybe when the next version of the iPhone is released I will consider it again. At least if I get the NEXT iPhone i will be able to put on an air of technological superiority and wave it in front of Ryan's puny 3G version.

My job in a nutshell

If people ask me what I do this Dilbert comic sums it up many many instances...

The Budding Artist

Like many parents, I surely think that my child is the greatest, smartest, best kid in the world at everything.

Today I would like to showcase his artistic talent. Liam is only three and he drew this picture yesterday. I think it is pretty impressive. Trees with leaves, clouds, the sun, and some sort of animal with four legs, eyes and a mouth.

Liam really likes drawing and I think we go through a ream of paper every month or so, I really encourage him to draw as much as he wants, I think it is nice.

Hockey Hockey and some stereotypes

I have played hockey over here with the same club for quite a few years. In the past few, the weekly sessions have become the Russians against the non-Russians. As I was out on the ice last night, I realized that there are a lot of very very stereotypical names in the game.

See if you can look at the below lists and figure out which Team is Russian and which is German/Canadian/Czech/Swedish.

Team #1
Ivan
Sergei
Alexei #1
Alexei #1
Valeri
Kirill
Sascha
Konstantin

Team #2
Fraser
Simon
Otto
Achim
Helmut
Wilhelm
Juergen
Ove
Simon

Canada Bound

So, I have just purchased a ticket to Canada. I will be returning to the great white north for a brief visit on May 21-27. I am sure the time will be pretty packed since it is so short, but I would of course love to see as many as you as I can when I am over.

The unbelievable thing is that I bought the ticket with my airmiles saved over the last years... however a "free ticket" to Canada still costs a few hundred dollars in taxes and fees. I doubt I will bother with the free flights again, a charter flight is still cheaper than a free one on air Canada.

New Sweater

My tremendously talented wife knit a sweater for Liam. One of the best features of this sweater is that it has a hood that makes Liam look like a little elf.

The little elf enjoyed his sweater a great deal as is clear in these pictures.