Finally, after four years, I’m at the half-way mark for my college degree. I go half-time so it’s taking me twice as long as a traditional student. I also need to get some work experience in my new field and so far, I haven’t had much luck with that. Although I bring something most college students don’t have, 20 years of business experience, my resume screams “salesman!” so no one in a hiring position for any IT job will even look at me. On the advice of a school career counselor, I changed it from a chronological to a functional resume, highlighting my IT skills and knowledge and downplaying my work experience. I’m also starting to apply for internship-type jobs (I have bills to pay so I can’t work for free) and I’m looking into meeting people at computer user groups so that I can network. We’ll see how all that works out.

In the mean time, I’ve decided it might help my resume if I did some volunteer work on open source projects. I don’t have much time to devote to coding (my passion) but I have found a way to squeeze in some QA testing work. Every morning, I download the daily build for the next Xubuntu Linux release. I install it on my laptop and test the hell out of it. I have figured out a way to do this using USB thumb drives by actually installing the OS onto one thumb drive from an ISO image on another thumb drive. This keeps me from touching the actual hard drive in the laptop so it stays unadulterated. I got tired of monkeying with daily changes to Grub as this laptop has a regular, full-time installation of Xubuntu Linux (development release) and Windows 7.

Throughout the day, I put the OS through several tests as requested by the developers. I communicate with some of them through IRC chat in case I have questions. Once the tests are complete, I mark the image as either passed or failed. If I fail it, I either submit a bug report on Launchpad or confirm an already existing report made by another tester.

QA testing is easy, fun, gives me a way to contribute to the open-source community, and an opportunity to learn more about this great operating system. It helps the developers and users of Xubuntu and in it gives me real-world IT experience I can put on a resume. It’s kind of like giving myself a job; I don’t get paid for it, but I do benefit from it. As I learn more about software development in school, I hope to put what I’ve learned about Java into practice where I can actually contribute to the code base of open-source projects. Eventually, I might even get someone to pay me for it in the form of an actual job. That is the goal and some how, some day, I will reach it.

I recently moved into a home with some relatives, lots of relatives. Including 3 small children, there are 10 of us. Before I moved in, there were 5 laptop computers and twice as many hand-held devices including Android phones, iPhones, iPods, 2 X-Boxes, and a Playstation, all fighting for their piece of 2.4 GHz goodness. They’ve always had trouble getting reliable wireless internet access to work. Suddenlink, the local cable company, sent out a tech who installed a wireless router and coverage was lousy, leaving people unable to connect. The tech couldn’t figure it out so they gave up and switched to Clear. Unfortunately, Clear was unreliable and slow. Besides, they had around 15 devices trying to share one 4G connection. What can you expect?

The first thing I did when I moved in (besides adding 4 more computers and my Android phone to the mix) was to install my own routers. I had Suddenlink come back out and install a regular cable modem in the home office from which I work my day job, Monday through Friday. The installer was a little surprised that I didn’t want a wireless modem. The office is in the corner of the house and I shun any wireless router with internal antennas. Instead, I connected the regular cable modem to a wired router and then ran 50 feet of Cat 6 to the kitchen where I installed an access point. Let the games begin.

The wired router was a D-Link DI-604 and the AP was an Asus RT-N12 (version 1). I was already running Tomato (Teddy Bear) firmware on the Asus from my previous apartment and never had a problem. I ran it with external high-gain antennas, centrally located in the kitchen on top of some cupboards. Everything worked fine until I started tweaking things.

I had read about a Tomato mod called Toastman, which would allow me to more closely monitor per-IP traffic. I figured that if someone was hogging bandwidth, I could immediately tell which machine was at fault. I installed it on the AP. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I came to discover that the IP monitoring will only work from the wired router (the one handing out the IP addresses). So I went out and got a new Asus RT-N12 (now version 2) and flashed Toastman onto it. I turned off the radio and have it working as a wired router in the office. I assigned static IPs to all devices and all was bliss, except for the fact that the AP kept locking up about twice a day. Connection speeds were slow for some devices, fast for others. Add in about 15 other wireless LANs that are visible from the house and we had real trouble.

I struggled for about 2 weeks getting it to work. Amazingly, I discovered that the stock antennas on the new RT-N12 (about 5″ long) worked BETTER than the aftermarket antennas I had been using. I chalk this up to either an impedance mismatch or lossy cabling (probably the latter). On a hunch, I flashed the AP back to the original Teddy Bear firmware it was using before.

FINALLY, everything worked as it should. I kept Toastman running on the wired router as it has experienced no problems. A day passed, no lockups. 2 days passed and it’s still holding up. It has now been a week and I’m proud to report that we haven’t had to reboot the AP once. Everything connects at high speed and there have been no problems. I think everyone else is happy with it too, now that they’re not getting disconnected on a daily basis.

It’s interesting how much a difference the correct firmware makes. The AP was indeed running the correct Toastman build for it’s model and version number, yet it just couldn’t do the job. The new router (also an Asus RT-N12, but version 2) runs it’s build of Toastman just fine. Note: these are TWO DIFFERENT Toastman builds. The build for the Original RT-N12 is RT-std while the one for RT-N12 v2 is RT-N-std. The RT-std is NOT STABLE while the RT-N-std IS stable. However, the RT-N-std can only be run on the version 2 router, not the version 1 router (the one I’m using as an AP). Therefore, Teddy Bear stays on the AP and Toastman stays on the wired router. And finally, everyone connects, all the time, with no complaints.

I’ve long poo-pooed cloud storage as not being worthy of secure, long-term storage of important files. While my opinion hasn’t changed, I have found a very practical, in fact killer-app use for these various services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft Skydrive, etc.

When my HTC Sensation hit the toilet water a couple of months ago, the insurance company replaced it with an HTC One S. While it’s a superior phone in all other respects, it doesn’t have provisions for a Micro SD card. I spent good money for the 32 GB one I had in the Sensation and was annoyed that I could no longer use it in the phone. The employee at T-Mobile made a good point however, noting that the phone actually works faster without it. But what sealed the deal was the 20 GB of Dropbox space I get free for 2 years (after which time there is small monthly fee). The very reason they offer this at no extra charge is because of the lack of Micro SD. I’ve long had a Dropbox account with 5 GB of storage so this was a nice upgrade.

Dropbox account has served me very well. There have never been any problems and I use it to keep all my documents, pictures, NetBeans projects, and other files in sync across 3 different computers, all dual-booting Windows and Linux as well as my smartphone. It’s absolutely brilliant.

However, I still recognize that it’s only as safe and reliable as the good guys at Dropbox keep it. I make sure to back it up occasionally on a local hard drive just in case.

It recently occurred to me that I have almost a full 150 GB of storage on my web hosting account at 1-and-1 that goes unused. I pay for it so I may as well use it. Been making good use of FTP lately.

I’m also experimenting with Google Drive and Microsoft SkyDrive. They all work very well on PC and Android. The only downside I see so far is they they don’t work on Linux except through web access. This is ironic for Google as they use Linux for most of their servers. For the record, Dropbox makes a Linux version that works very well in Debian and Red-Hat based systems.

The bottom line is that these services are almost identical and they all have free and paid offerings. There are other services too, such as box.com (5GB free). There is Ubuntu One which works on Windows, Android, and, of course, Ubuntu. Sign up with all five and you get a total of 25 GB of free online storage that keeps files and folders in sync across multiple devices. But always remember to make a backup and just to be on the safe side, I wouldn’t store anything such as commercially-made music, videos, or software – legally owned or otherwise – on a remote server.

I went back to school four years ago and it looks like I’ve got about three or four more to go. It’s hard going part-time because it takes forever. I look forward to the day when I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Every day is essentially the same. I work eight hours and I spend about half of the the evening doing homework. The rest of the time is for recreation, whether that be watching TV shows my computer has recorded for me, playing OpenArena, or general monkeying around on the computer. On a rare occasion, I find time to enjoy playing the guitar or talking with someone on amateur radio. Many of these things are often done simultaneously.

I try to set aside time for reading and practicing my Java programming skills. There are more languages I want to learn like C#, HTML/CSS, and PHP. At the rate I’m going, it will be years before I’ve mastered one or two of them. Learning a programming language is difficult. Not because of the subject matter at hand, but because it takes discipline. The kind of discipline I use up doing homework. After two or three hours reading and taking notes, the last thing I want to do is read and take notes. I’ve also been dual-booting with Xubuntu Linux for a little over a year now and I always enjoy learning something new about the OS. There’s so much to learn and so few hours in the day.

Life is about to change in a big way come January. I’ll be around my daughter and her family every day. I very much look forward to it but it will bring its own challenges to my already busy schedule. Just how exactly I’ll divide up my time will be interesting. I’ll be working from home so the fact that I won’t have a commute will certainly help. My day is short enough as it is so I’ll welcome the additional time I get by not having to drive to and from work. If only I could add a few hours to the day.

Patience is a virtue I’ve learned to exercise with others quite well. Being patient with myself is another story. I can’t learn everything all at once nor can I learn it all as fast as I’d like. But I can learn to accept the fact that there are only 24 hours in a day. May God help me to make the most of every one.

Welcome to the ALL NEW scottbomb.com. Pretty boring, huh? While this site has been operational since 1999, it’s currently undergoing some rather fundamental changes. I’m changing the focus of this site from politics to everything high-tech related.

Computers and electronics have been hobbies of mine since I was a boy. I learned to program in BASIC on a Timex-Sinclair 1000 and then a Commodore 64 in the mid-1980s. I was taking apart everything electronic to satisfy my curiosity about how things worked.

As an adult, I have earned an FCC Amateur Radio Operator license (Extra Class, callsign n0xmz. See n0xmz.com). I enrolled in college 4 years ago on a part-time basis, working on a degree in Information Systems at Regis University. I’m pursuing my passion, hoping to eventually make a career change from sales to something computer-related. I mostly enjoy learning to program in Java and C#.

In the coming weeks, this site will take on new features and content. Hopefully, it will become a place people might want to visit once in a while. If not, it will at least give me some practice in honing some new (and some old) skills.