Mike Jandreau

Writer.Musician. MovieSnob. Web Guy.

I feel compelled to post something. Mainly because I’m bored silly.

Let’s see, what’s going on…   I finished the website for Christine’s aunt (http://www.kathydiamant.com). I’ve also been fine tuning some applications that I’ve written for personal use.

I’ve got a “Task tracking” system that I put together, and have been fine tuning. As well as an invoicing system that I use to bill my clients.   Both of which I’ve done some pretty major overhauling to recently, to bring them up to speed with some of the newer stuff I’ve learned since writing them.

Did some work for a new client in Florida, helping her write some conditional statements to display different CSS styles, based on the browser.   I’m hoping she’s got more work to farm out to me in the future. The more the merrier.

In the “boring life of…” part of my life:   our lease is up in 2 months. We’re debating whether or not we can afford to buy a house yet, with Christine out of work, or if we should move to another apartment.   Our apartment’s sucked since the people who live upstairs moved in. I swear the hell they’re dinosaurs (only in weight, not in age), or they were just never taught how to walk like human beings.   Oh, and they’re opening a road 10 feet outside our window in the next few weeks.   And our rent is ridiculous, too.

I want to buy a house, but we may not be financially ready for that yet. Who knows, we’ll see.

I decided what my next project’s going to be, which will be a lot of work.   I’m going to re-record the entire audio track from The Prestige, which is one of my favorite movies.   My re-recording will be the “spoiler filled” version, and contain dialogue that will pinpoint the spoilers throughout, making it blatently obvious what the ending holds.   I have no idea if these is even possible to do, with the technology I’ve currently got, but who knows.   I’m sure someone’d file a lawsuit and tell me to knock it off, as soon as it was put online.   Who knows.   I think it’d be interesting to do.   I’ll probably never do it, because it’s a lot of work.

That’s about it, just pluggin’ away at life, on a daily basis.   Commute, work, lunch, work, commute, dinner, bed.   Rinse, and repeat.   Somedays it seems like are never gonna end.

We finally made the jump from Wireless G to Wireless N yesterday, and I’m glad we did.

My D-Link (DI-524) did it’s job for quite a few years, but it was time to get the “latest and the greatest” at home.   The new laptop I got for work had Wireless N built in, so I used it as an excuse to get the new networking gear for home, to utilize it.   That, and I broke the wireless adaptor on our media center Saturday night.

So, we trekked over to Best Buy, and picked up a Linksys WRT600N, (2) Linksys WRT600U, and a 1TB Western Digital MyBook external hard drive.

I remember when I set up the D-link. It was my first experience in setting up a wireless network, and I had to literally fight with My X-box 360, and Tivos (all three of them) to get them on the network.   I feared that the Linksys would be the same thing.

Luckily, Linksys is friggen amazing, and was beyond easy to use.

I’ll admit, at first, it was annoying that the installer software for your PC that they give you, isn’t 64-bit compatable.   That threw me for a loop, but I worked around it.

I had the router up (which looks awesomely like a robot, and Christine’s dubbed it the ‘command center’) and my PC connected to it, in about 10 minutes, including unpacking it.

Christine’s laptop, my laptop, and the media center were on the network about 20 minutes later.   The three Tivos, PlayStation 3, Wii, and X-box 360 joined the network about 45 minutes later.

Not one device got the dreaded “can’t connect” error, which was super-awesome compared to my experience with the D-link router.

So the best part of Wireless N, specifically the WRT600N router?   Two different bands.   2.4 Ghz, and 5.0 Ghz.   So, any device using your network can be assigned to a different band, for “less interference”.   I set all the PCs up using the 5.0 Ghz band, and the other electronics on the 2.4Ghz.

The wireless PCs in the house now get 270 mbps.   On the old G router, 54 mbps was the cap.   So, assuming that I can really get 270 mbps, that’s five times faster.   And forget the wired connection through gigabit ports.   I love it.

The other benefit of this new router, is that there’s a USB port right in the back, where my new terabyte external drive is connected.     So any PC on the network can get to the files, and store/share from it.   Amazing.

Linksys, also, has better communcation between different operating systems.   With the D-link, my Vista machine couldn’t talk to any of the three XP machines we’ve got, and vise versa.   They couldn’t share a printer either.   Linksys doesn’t care.   I can connect to any machine in the house now, as well as share the printer without having to do anything out of the ordinary.   That alone was worth the price of the new router.   It was such a pain to have to have Christine email me a file that she needed me to review, or a photo to resize, etc.   Now she can just dump them to a shared drive, and I can grab it from there.

The wireless networking of the 1TB drive is also nice.   Knowing that I can store all the digital photos I take with my new camera (Digital Rebel XTi, Canon rules) without worrying about running out of space, or bogging my PC down, is awesome.   Burning photos to DVD is great, but keeping them readily accessible is priceless.

It seems like every other week, WordPress releases a new version of their awesome software. That’s a good thing, unless you run multiple websites using WordPress.

If you’re in that boat, upgrading all of your WordPress sites might be a pain in the butt, but it’s extremely important to do so.

The main reason for these “dot releases” (ie; 2.5.1) are security fixes. Which means that when someone finds a way to “hack” your WordPress installation, the new release fixes that.

What’s that mean? Well, if you’re running a version that’s old, there’s probably a group of people out there that’ve found a security hole in it.   They can gain access to your account, and cause all sorts of problems for you.

For example, if you’re running WordPress 2.3.2, there’s a very simple “hack” that anyone with the power of Google can do, that can give them complete access to your Admin panel.   And well, you know what they do from there, including deleting everything on your blog, that you’ve ever done.

So, be sure to stay up to date. Always update plugins, always update core code. Always.

Got back about 6 days ago from my trip to India. I’m home for a bit, then heading off to Phoenix for a few days, for work, again.

India was pretty cool, I have to say.   I got to see lots of really old sites, and took nearly 900 photos during the 10 days I was there. (http://christineandmike.net/trip-to-india-for-work/ if you want to take a gander. I can’t be bothered to re-upload all 400 megs here, too)

Things have settled down nicely at work, thankfully. Our giant merger is almost over, which means less panicking, and less craziness, which I think everyone needs.   It’s great, though, to see how brilliant some of the people you work with are, in times of crisis.

That’s all, for now. I’ve got nothing interesting to say.

I’m in India, for work. A long long way from home.

Just thought that was interesting, so I’m posting about it. I’ll post some photos from our offices here when I get back. Should be fun.