Personal update

For the past week+ one of the heaters in the basement has been on every few minutes and making lots more noise, vibrating my bedroom. Sleep has been poor. I spent a night in the Motel 6, which wasn't as bad as reviews suggested, though I didn't sleep well there either... The landlord's guy did something yesterday, which initially helped a lot; I slept for the first time in days without aids like earplugs and my fan on max. But by 5am the vibration was back; later investigation suggests the pipe insulation added is now loose. Of course, didn't hurt that yesterday was nice and warm.

Still, even with the 5am interruption (on a rare 10:30pm bedtime), I felt much better this morning than I have in a while, feeling as if I'd caught up a bit. Hope the guy gets back out today for further work.

I have newly keen interest in soundproofing and sleep aids. I got Bose QuickComfort 2 noise-cancelling headphones, but I'm not sure yet how much they do; seem poor against my fan. And I got them cheap, at $140 off some Amazon seller. $15 Peltor earmuffs seem to do a much better job of making sound go away. I've also got a variety of earplugs; the top two recommendations online seem to be Hearos Ulimate Softness, though the Hearos Xtreme Protection from Kroger seem to block better (but irritate my ears more) and the Howard Leight MAX (or Max Lite, or Laser Lite, for smaller ear canals.) Soundproofing for renters sites exist, but I don't know how much help they are; thick (acoustic?) drapes and curtains and carpet might help, and there are tips on protecting yourself from ceiling noise, though that's not my problem. There's a Sleep-Eze noise-isolating earbuds with built-in white noise generator out there, though I didn't buy a pair.

The whole psychology of sound and sleep, plus hearing, is interesting, though I wish it was less personal. I say "what?" a fair bit in conversation, suggesting I have either hearing or voice processing problems, but I also seem more sensitive to faint sounds than others, e.g. noticing when Josh knocked to visit the rabbit last week, and other faint alerts. And I'm unfortunately sensitive to lots of sounds while trying to sleep, including faint bass or voices in general. Cars don't bug me much. Sounds I control seem to generally be more okay, e.g. a fan much louder than the outside noise it's masking. (OTOH, secondary vibrations in the fan are annoying, and may merit replacement. And my own fridge is aggravating.) And then there's the fact that I can't imagine falling asleep during garbage truck noise, yet it's never woken me up, and I know from insomniac early mornings just how loud it is.

Unix white noise tips: cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp
Or this shell script. Also http://simplynoise.com

Avatar, economy, Bhutan, Bag End, Ayers

* I don't know any of these actors for live action Avatar, but they do seem a tad like Sci-Fi Channel Earthsea.
* Paul Krugman on the applicability of the New Deal, and the false lessons right-wingers proclaim. Depression economics, lame-duck economy, why didn't we see this coming ("who's we?") All links archived at http://pkarchive.org/
* Detroit bailout pic, though comments suggest other considerations (suppliers; conversely, whether we could just buy GM.) (But then we'd have to pay for running it, and its pension obligations.)
* Bhutan's refugees.
* (From Ai) model of Bag End
* Bill Ayers responds to his name being invoked in the election.
* Shamans in Taiwan.
* "Judgementalism doesn't see race, colour, or creed". Heh.
* ETA: Joseph Stiglitz on the economic crisis. Summary:
1. Pres. Reagan replaced pro-regulation fed chairman Paul Volcker with anti-regulation Alan Greenspan
2. The Glass-Steagall act was repealed, eliminating banking safeguards (letting commercial and investment banks re-combine); SEC increased the allowable debt-to-capital ratio of investment banks, from 12:1 to 30:1
3. Tax cuts (especially on capital gains, vs. labor) and low interest rates masked all the warning signs and gave perverse incentives to borrow and gamble.
4. The rating agencies gave good grades to companies in deep trouble (and were paid to do so); stock options reward distorting financial information.
5. The administration's "cash for trash" bailout plan was a disaster
Also, "Defaults on C.R.A. [Community Reinvestment Act, bugaboo of the poor-haters] lending were actually much lower than on other lending."

The truth is most of the individual mistakes boil down to just one: a belief that markets are self-adjusting and that the role of government should be minimal. Looking back at that belief during hearings this fall on Capitol Hill, Alan Greenspan said out loud, “I have found a flaw.” Congressman Henry Waxman pushed him, responding, “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right; it was not working.” “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan said.

activating AT&T DSL with Ubuntu Linux

This one's mostly for the search engines.

My Insight/Comcast cablemodem has not been all that reliable, with various random outages and promises to send a technician a week later (though to be fair, the outages mysterious stop, also at the source, despite what the tech support said on the phone.) I got fed up and ordered ATT DSL... a month ago, and finally got around to activating it. This is a bit non-trivial, especially with Linux instead of Windows or a Mac; phone tech support said they wouldn't support it. And I don't even have their software to run under Wine, probably because I already had a modem and said so, and they never sent me a kit.

Inputs: one Ubuntu laptops, one 2Wire modem+wireless route from AT&T 1.5 years ago.
Preliminary Procedure:
1. Plug in modem. Observe flashing red "DSL" light.
2. Call tech support. Spend 40 minutes, much of it on hold in stages. Eventually get a diagnosis that my line had problems, with someone sent out the next day; also get an IP address for the modem.
3. Have technician come fix the line; modem is now green. Technician gives further instructions, not being fazed by Linux.

Actual procedure:
Using Firefox, go to https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net
Try getting past the initial registration page; fail, because the Next button doesn't work. Per Internet rumor, download Konqueror and try again.

1. Using Konqueror, go to https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net
2. Try registering with e-mail address printed on my bill; give up, and go with option 2, using the High Speed Internet (HSI) number on my bill (I don't have phone with AT&T.)
3. Go through fairly intuitive pages.
4. Worry as, once I seem to be almost done, the next button stops working.
5. Optimistically, go to 192.168.1.254 (note: different IP than my cablemodem uses.) Futz around the menus, in particular setting the AT&T/Yahoo username and password I'd created on the SBC page. Also the wireless name and mode and password. In the process use the System Key in brackets on a label on the modem. This may have been complicated by my modem having been used before.
6. Profit! Both my computers are on the net.

I don't know if that was perfectly helpful, but it should at least confirm it's possible, with one example of website and IP address. Oh, and this is in Indiana.