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Today, after a mere two delays, I finally got to do the interview for this company.  If nothing else I was very impressed with the building I was in. It was all super-secure complete with some kind of iris-scanning dealie for the more secure areas.

The interview started out kind of strange. The guy (it was just one, for once) asked me a question then some how got side-tracked on describing a portion of the facility before I was able to answer. I don’t think I ever did answer that particular question.

He asked about some of my experience and about my Linux usage level. I tried to be positive about my knowledge while still establishing I could learn whatever required. I still have no idea how I did. If it anything killed it it was probably that Linux knowledge. I guess I’ll have to wait and find out if I got it or not.

I have started to re-think my whole project with FreeNAS. After all that time spent thinking about it and learning and whatever. Because as I think I decided several years ago when I first set up the WHS box WHS has one and possibly ONLY one advantage over FreeNAS: being able to add and remove drives from the storage pool extremely easily. And it doesn’t freak out if one drive isn’t detected by the system on the bootup. The of the stuff is still accessible. On FreeNAS I don’t think that’s true. And maybe it wouldn’t be for an iSCSI anyway, I don’t know. I mean obviously if I have this thing set to auto-connect at Windows start to the ISCSI target but one of the drives wasn’t detected by the BIOS for some reason probably the entire iSCSI will be gone. Maybe it would come back up when I got the computer finding the drive again, I don’t know.

Besides the whole what-if-drive-not-detected concerns there’s the other concern: once a software RAID or JBOD or whatever is created there’s no adding additional drives. Well that’s pretty much what I already said. But what this means is I can’t gradually migrate my terabytes of data over to this new setup… in other words remove a drive my current WHS storage pool thus emptying it of data and add it to the FreeNAS pool and copy some data over then remove the next drive from WHS and add it to the FreeNAS pool and so on until I have all the drives and all my data transferred. I have to actually have all the disks I want to use in one place at once. And they all have to formatted before I can use them. So migrating said data is to one degree or another impossible. At least that I can see. Even if I utilize a whole bunch of spare SATA/PATA drives and do a real cleansing of unneeded data I still don’t think I could really, truly make the transition.

So now I’m stuck where I started. So either I’ll try FreeNAS anyway or just re-install WHS.

The last thing I’ll talk about this time around is my Android phone: a friend pointed me to this particular thread on the XDA forums about a leaked Android 2.2 Froyo release image and I couldn’t resist going through with it. So this friend of mine walked me through installing all the necessary components on my phone and getting the image installed. It took us probably around 90 minutes from beginning to end. Definitely not for the “faint of heart” or techno noobs of any degree at all. I was distracted by the above linked thread: every time I got through reading a page another one or two pages was added to the thread. I mean I would finish reading page 19, push next and the last page would be like 70. So I’d finish page 20 push next and the last page would be page 72 or 75. I mean literally 1 or 2 minutes there was another few pages added to this thread. I think this might be a big deal.  As I write this the last page is 86. And it does seem to have finally slowed down.

Of course the real update will be coming some time in August and all this will be pointless anyway. There were just a few things about 2.1 that are fixed in 2.2 that I really wanted. Like the stupid navigator voice shutting the hell up when I get a call for instance. I mean what the hell? A speech synthesize talking over a caller? This is supposed to be a phone, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you know phone calls get the priority? Just sayin.

Haven’t used it enough yet to really comment fully but so far it does seem snappier. There are some additional bundled things that won’t remove for some reason. I didn’t even like the original 2.1 shit but now they’re adding more. Oye.

Well I was expecting to do the belated interview today but I got another call stating it was in fact postponed once more until later this week. I guess I will be called back eventually with a day and time. I stayed home today anyway rather than going to the volunteer thing. I am actually worried about my source of income come five or six weeks from now even if my outward appearance would hardly suggest as much. I’m just not sure I can really afford to go down to the city every day like I’ve been doing. It’s like the thing that would help me get a job, possibly the only thing, is also hurting me in a way. I’m sure there’s a word for that but I’m not thinking well right now.

I did go for another walk today. A little less than five miles if the FitBit is any indicator (it’s a device that literally indicates distance walked). I can only assume/hope I sleep really well tonight.

On the FreeNAS front I did a bit more experimenting with software raids today as well as actually trying it on a real life PC versus a virtual one. In fact I dug out an old micro-SD card and USB adapter for said SD card and tried to install FreeNAS on that. I booted the CD and tried to install it to the card but it kept throwing an error. So I did a raw-write to the card with the IMG version of FreeNAS and tried to boot it but this too ended in failure. Finally, I booted the CD and tried installing to the recently raw-written micro-SD card and wouldn’t you know it the SD card actually booted. And that computer is obviously way more silent this way

Then I took the same card to a completely different PC and booted it on that. Apparently (as I suspected) FreeNAS detects hardware fresh with each boot-up. Like a live CD sort of thing. I don’t know if that’s the way normal FreeBSD works but it’s certainly the way FreeNAS does, which is good for me.

Speaking of which I would like to complain about the usability of this “appliance”. Namely I was experimenting with software RAIDs and couldn’t figure it out. I had added all the disks and then went to the software RAID section to add the RAID but kept getting an error that I had to add disks first which only linked back to the add disks screen. But the disks were already there added, there weren’t any more disks. So I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. It was driving me crazy.

Finally after randomly clicking on things and add/removing things I eventually realized…well now I don’t remember. I think it was under format, one of the options in the list is software RAID. Or perhaps it was when I first add the disk I was supposed to specify software RAID. Probably the first one, on the format menu. Anyway the page was completely unhelpful and wouldn’t provide even the slightest clue as to what the hell I was doing wrong. It was really frustrating. And linking back to the “add a disk” page just made it worse instead of helping.

In better news I did actually get iSCSI to work albeit via VM as opposed to “for real”. After working at it for so long I was happy I finally managed to get it working. Of course it’s not exactly permanent if it’s a VM but at least I have some idea how to set up iSCSI now.

Speaking of which I was reading the FreeNAS forums and there was a thread in there under extensions/plug-ins/whatever that mentioned running VirtualBox. So ya, I could actually run a Windows VM on my FreeNAS box. That just seems funny to me on some level. I guess I would install it and get it set up on my main machine and then it was ready (and remote desktop was enabled) I would copy the VM and virtual hard drive over to the FreeNAS and start it up. Then I could run my Windows Server or whatever on my FreeNAS box. What would take up less memory: a FreeNAS VM on a Windows server box or a Windows server VM on a FreeNAS box?  I don’t really know, although I’d like to believe some how FreeBSD was some how better at memory management thus leaving more memory and resources available for the VM. But really I’m just wishing it so.

Today as usual I waited to long into the morning for any real meaningful walk. But then I decided I really should walk anyway as I obviously need a lot of exercise. So even though it was in the mid-80s temperature-wise I went for the walk.

Some how I made it all the way through. According to the fit bit it was five miles round trip almost exactly.  And by the time I got back it was even hotter and I was really hot by then. But at least I’m pretty sure I’m going to sleep well.

Since then I read some of the first Wheel of Time book and had some lunch. I’m only just now starting to get back into working on the FreeNAS virtual box setup. Actually I also did some further “sprinriting” on some other drives. That took up some time but is hardly worth mentioning.

I did find this very informative albeit muted video that pretty much walks through it from install in a VM all the way up to accessing the drive in Windows. I’m going to try those steps next.

I did form an idea on my walk about my network setup: I could actually use the USB Ethernet card to connect to the rest of the network and the Internet and the motherboard NIC to connect peer-to-peer with the future NAS (er SAN, er iSCSI, er whatever) box. In fact I just tried and did a speed test with a 2 gig file: instead 6% utilization as reported yesterday it was sixty percent utilization. So what is that? 600 Megabits per second (60% of 1000)?  I then did a similar test with both machines on the 100Mbps switch just for reference and it was 99% of 100Mbps. So yes, it was in fact be faster than if it was just on the switch. Now I kind of wish I had a gigabit switch, for all the good it would do all the other devices besides the two with gigabit Ethernet patch cables. Oh ya, I would have to buy a second gigabit Ethernet cable.

So the one downside to the whole thing is that to stream media I would need BOTH PCs on. Just to watch a movie. Instead of one box just sitting there happily hosting media files for the rest of the network it would be require the Windows 7 box to also be on to do the actual hosting. Because the iSCSI/Win 7 PC have this peer-to-peer gigabit dealie going. As I finally realized last night that doesn’t really work. So either I would have to use iSCSI over a shared 100Mpbs LAN or buy the cheapest gigabit switch I could find to daisy chain/seperate the iSCSI from the the rest of the LAN (although I don’t know if that’s really necessary) or just scrap my current 100Mpbs switch and replace it with a gigabit switch. Or just manually switch out the Ethernet cables if I really want to watch something other the Win 7 box has been powered down. Some how that doesn’t seem quite as “elegant” or whatever.

Well despite my eager ideas yesterday about VMs and using Server 2008 I’ve now about gone back to the drawing board and built back up again.

I install VPC 2007 only to find out it supports a mere 3…yes, three, hard drives. Riiiiiight. Three. Also the size limit is 160 gigs. Really? Are you serious?

By contrast VirtualBox has a drive limit size of two TERABYTES and get this: four IDE drives, EIGHT SATA drives and SCSI…I don’t even know how many SCSI drives you can add. Looked like A LOT.

Also with the latest version of VirtualBox getting the VM it’s own unique IP and that be pinged and remoted into real easy is officially incredibly easy. So there’s really not that much reason to stay with VPC.

Except, of course, for it’s connections to that XP compatibility layer that is available and the theoretical ties to that of Hyper-V. Although actually VirtualBox can mount the VPC format of virtual hard drive. But not create them for scratch. I don’t know why, MS says it’s an “open format” so I would have assumed it was okay.

Also I found out I had never downloaded the “iSCSI target software” from MSDN when I had the chance so I won’t be using Server 2k8 as my iSCSI source like I had planned. I searched and searched and came up empty. Maybe in December/January or whenever I can get that sweet $200 TechNet subscription and come back to it.

So since discovering I can’t make that happen like I wanted I searched for some free iSCSI target software. I found some grossly out dated links to supposedly free solutions that turned out to all be “free trials”. Come on people it’s just me and my humble non-commercial home here. How much are you really going to lose?

So okay I screwed with a Linux iSCSI solution called OpenFiler for a while but couldn’t really get it to work and the web interface was rather hard to use and frankly not worth the time…and had a “known bug” that caused it to stop working as an iSCSI solution when it was rebooted. That didn’t make it sound so appealing if you know what I mean.

So then I looked at something I was contemplating years ago when I first built the WHS box: FreeNAS. As it turns out they’ve added a few features in the mean time like a UPnP server, iSCSI target, experimental ZFS and what I think is a pretty slick web interface. I have it set up in a VirtualBox VM right now so I could practice before screwing up a real hard drive/PC. It actually took me a while to figure out how to get the SMB share accessible and I still have yet to get iSCSI to work but half of that is getting Windows to point it as well. Strangely enough getting the UPnP service up and going seemed remarkably easy (check the “enabled” box).

Keep in mind as you read the above I haven’t actually put a lot of effort into anything crazy like reading the manual. Couldn’t do that!

Oh and since I don’t remember and don’t feel like looking I will mention I did in fact go and buy a “CAT 6″ Ethernet cable and attach it from my new USB Gigabit Ethernet card directly to what is still currently my WHS box (Caprica). I did a test to see how fast it would go, and task manager on both PCs showed the connection speed at 1 Gbps, and it only reach a “6% network utilization”. I’m not sure what the deal is with that but I didn’t actually convert this cable to that of a cross-over cable so maybe that has something to do with it. That’s one search I haven’t yet managed to make.

And as I was saying in yesterday’s entry: my original needs for this spare box that can do all that extra stuff on the side has kind of evaporated: my main PC runs VMs several times faster, it has 8 gigs of memory, it has eight cores so it can encode video and whatever else I need it to do while I play a game or whatever…the only real reason left to run WHS instead of FreeNAS having a PC that can be on 24/7 downloading things like podcasts or other things that can download slowly over several days. But since I’m not leaving my WHS server on 24/7 any more anyway (and even if I did want to utilize torrents like I was two years ago FreeNAS actually has a bit torrent service) my last reason for it has officially disappeared. Come to think of it I could probably set up FreeNAS to download my podcasts for me. If it isn’t built-in there’s probably an extension or some kind of how-to on how to do it. Hmmmm.

So anyway WHS is a wonderful product I only utilized a fraction of but it is no longer necessary and suddenly iSCSI seems incredibly appealing.

Okay so here’s my situation. I have two PCs currently: my main desktop that is a Core i7 with 8 gigs of memory (ya ya, whatever) and an apparently aging computer I use as a server. Currently the server, which I call Caprica, is running WHS but is having some issues. Namely it’s only by apparent luck that the PC actually detects all the drives: it has an old IDE for the OS and four SATAs for the data storage.

Okay side note although WHS has been on there for years now and it is getting slower and slower and obviously needs a re-install that would not help the BIOS in detecting all the drives. I get that, it’s okay. After having that issue with the drives not being detected consistently I went into the BIOS and reset to “optimized defaults” then changed a few things like disabling any floppy drive and setting the optical drive as the first boot device and it has detected the drives consistently since then. Flashing a new version of the BIOS may actually also help resolve the drive detection issues.

Now where was I? Right. At one point I wanted to put server 2008 R2 on the server and and just use WHS via a VM, possibly Hyper-V since I need practice with that anyway. So I installed R2 on an old IDE drive (I seem to have a pile of them) and started to play with it but it seemed too slow. And apparently Hyper-V requires the VM CPU extension which mine does not have. So installed virtual PC and installed XP into that. Well that worked okay and I could remote desktop into the VM which was a fun novelty for a while since I had never done that but it didn’t really help. And it was painfully obvious the server didn’t have enough memory to run both R2 and a VM like that.

So finally, here’s my new idea: put some form of R2 on this server box (I had an MSDN subscription, this is all legit FYI) that converts this server box into basically a [network-able] hard drive storage box that just houses all the drives and enable it as a SAN/iSCSI. Then connect the box to my main Core i7 over a gigabit network connection (gigabit cross-over, I assume those exist). Then I would be running WHS or whatever via a VM (virtual PC is this case) which be running super-fast thanks to the fancy VM stuff I would have running.

What I am aiming at here with the SAN/iSCSI is for my core i7 (galactica) to see the server’s storage as if it were a local drive. Then point the VirtualPC at that storage, thus all my WHS storage data is still on the other PC but in the form of VirtualPC hard drive files.

I have set up an iSCSI thing like this before but I would want to do is leave the four SATA drives as separate drives and make four different virtual drives, one per drive.

So once I had this VirtualPC WHS set up I would fire up the VM and once it had booted I would use that VM’s IP to point my various UPnP media stuff at that, using it as I already was using it.

So why VirtualPC instead of VirtualBox? Well maybe some guru knows how to use VirtualBox with a separate IP instead of in “NAT” mode, but I do not. I need a real live pingable, remote desktop-able IP that I can use.  And I don’t really feel like spending the time to figure out how to do that with VirtualBox. So I’m using VirtualPC.

I have actually used VirtualBox extensively. Even now so far as I know Windows installs several times faster with VirtualBox than with VirtualPC. But that doesn’t really solve my concerns.

Also the reason I am doing it this way is because what happens if I need to re-install Windows on my Core i7? Or I get a new PC (which won’t be for years of course)? Well all I need is the WHS VM and a way to point it at my iSCSI PC and I’m back up and running. That’s the theory anyway.

One solution I have already made some progress on: the Core i7 machine (galactica) would need two network cards, one for the network/Internet and one to connect to this newly dubbed iSCSI box. So I bought a USB gigabit Ethernet adapter. So assuming all is good I need to get that gigabit cross-over cable.

I do actually have that N+ book that shows me how to make a cross-over cable. So I could probably just buy a gigabit cable, CAT 6 or whatever, snip off the ends, do some re-wiring and crimp it back together. It would certainly motivate me to set that whole thing up, wouldn’t it?

Downsides? Well I have a lot of data and just the one place to store it. So transitioning from data on real disks to the same data on virtual disks might be a bit tricky. I guess I would disconnect all the SATA drives and install the storage server/iSCSI solution OS on the spare IDE drive.  Then on galactica install WHS into Virtual PC and start setting up virtual drives. Then, connect a drive with no data on it into the iSCSI caprica box and start setting that up so galactica sees it and everything. Put the virtual drive on this newly found iSCSI drive on galactica and start copying data to the virtual drive inside the WHS VM.

Okay I don’t even know if that made any sense what-so-ever.  Basically I am going to copy the data off of the four drives one at a time to the new drives in the VM until all the data is moved over. The VM is of course WHS and so far as it will know it is just create a storage pool as usual, combining a bunch of drives into one big pool/series of network storage shares.

I do have one unanswered question: how many virtual drives can you actually create with VirtualPC? I have no idea. It has to be at least four. I am hoping for more than four but I know it has to be at least four.

Speaking of unanswered questions how if at all easy is it to even set up a SAN/iSCSI box like this anyway…?

Wow this turned into a much longer post than I planned. I should probably publish it before I manage to lose it.

Several hours later….

I have just had some more thoughts on this whole thing.  Namely do I actually need to use a WHS VM for this whole thing? Really? I mean with the Windows 7 libraries and WMP hosting the UPnP services anyway why not just set up the iSCSI box, link it as I was going to do so that storage shows as local storage on my Windows 7 machine and let Windows 7 do the streaming? I mean as long as my supposed solution requires both my PCs to be on just to watching a stupid movie anyway why complicate it with the VM? Why not just use Windows 7 to organize and host all the media content?

Okay so way back when I first set up this spare box as a server one of my main reasons for doing so was so I could do things like encode video and store files separately thus freeing my main computer up for the stuff I really want to do like playing games or whatever else would bog down the computer and prevent me from doing things like playing games or running other VMs or whatever. I don’t think that need is really still there. I mean it is nice to have the two separated out. To have one relatively low-power PC that can run relatively quietly in the background to stream media and provide a storage location as needed. And it’s still there consistently no matter what happens to my primary PC. If I put everything dependent on my primary than if something happens to it I’m pretty much starting over I think.

Today I found out two things: the physical address of where my job interview will be and that the job interview is apparently postponed until Monday. Well that’s okay really because I needed my close dry cleaned anyway. Which I dropped off last night anyway and told the guy I needed before Friday on account of the interview. So good that I’ll have that early then. Right?

I also wanted to mention I have just started to learn about the password keeping utility called Last Pass. I’m still learning it right now, but so far I am enjoying it a lot. Eventually I’ll actually start using the actual password generator feature and use really special passwords for all my stuff.

Okay I should go now so to bed I shall go.

Well it seems like a secret art form to me. Maybe because I’m just now discovering it. What am I talking about?

Being a dick.

Yes, knowing what will get you where you want to go at the appropriate time is possibly a big secret to success. I was just thinking about this the last couple of weeks for some reason. Knowing when only being a dick will accomplish your goal and when being nice will work is apparently one of the most difficult things to master.

For example my manager at the volunteer place had to call someone, either the supplier of some medical shipment or the package carrier I’m not sure which, and be a dick about his dissatisfaction. It seems the carrier left packages at the wrong address, about a half block from the desired location, and my manager was going to make this right come hell or high water.

As in transfer me to someone who make this happen, a real live person, RIGHT NOW.

Keeping in mind this was 4pm on a Friday. By most other standards an impossible task to get a package delivery truck to come back, pick up some already delivered packages and drive them half a block down for a different building.

The manager accomplished this goal though. He did it. The package delivery truck did in fact come back, put all the boxes back into the truck, take them down to the other building and bring them all inside. He did this by knowing the only way to accomplish this goal was to be a hard ass about it.

In some cases being nice and courteous is the right course of action.

Of course some people are stuck passive/don’t fight back mode and are NEVER a dick. For instance a former room mate of mine once gave a friend-of-a-friend-of-friend his contact information. Six or whatever months later that guy calls my room mate and tries to sell him on some MLM scam or whatever it was. That would have been the PERFECT time to be “be a dick” and tell that guy to shove it. But he didn’t.

My current co-worker at the volunteer gig on the other hand seems to be stuck in difficult mode. No matter which outside entity he’s talking to he’s talking to them in probably the wrong sort of tone. And he never seems to want to escalate when the call isn’t going well either but that’s probably not related.

The point is some people are stuck in nice/agreeable/passive mode, some are stuck in difficult or for lack of a better term “be-a-dick” mode, but the truly successful people have mastered both ends and know exactly when to be which to accomplish what they are trying to get done.

Well I’ve recognized this so maybe that’s the first step to going int hat direction. Or perhaps that is an art I will never quite master. Admitting the problem is the first step, right?

The weekend was really uneventful and that is what I was expecting. I did manage to accomplish a couple of things I had been meaning to do for a while anyway. Renewing the domain/hosting plan for another domain name of mine, for instance. It was the day before it expired actually. Really waited for the last moment on that one. I was thinking about moving this blog over to that site at some point. Or moving this blog to the free WP service. I don’t care which. It just doesn’t seem worth it some how to keep the expense of this domain/hosting, even if it does come out to $5 or so a month, when I don’t really go beyond the real basics of it.

But where was I? Right, the weekend. Uneventful save for accomplishing one or two things I should have done a while ago. I also bought yet another case for my new Android phone. So that’s like three cases I already bought for it. I had it since the 9th or so and I’ve owned how many cases? I did return the rather worthless one back to wal-mart. So I’m glad I did that both because I didn’t need it and because I didn’t put it off until I forgot about it or whatever like I sometimes do.

I could have gotten a lot more productive but at some point I decided if i was going to waste time on the weekend I could at least do something half fun. So I played a little of a quite old game called Thief. Played that for one or two hours and I was actually having a pretty good time. At least until I had to leave.

Speaking of the new phone, I have been having some serious buyer’s remorse lately about this phone. I mean $80 a month? Really? How about this: let me sign up for a “light user’s” plan for say $10 or $15 a month with a limit of 100 or 200 megs then have a next level up like 1000 megs and then the $30 for “unlimited”. If I go past the 100 or whatever megs then I am notified by text message by the way, you went over so you’ll be charged $20. And the same if I go past that limit: you’ve been auto-upgraded to the $30 unlimited plan. Please consider switching. This way the light users can pay less and there’s no need to worry about people complaining about unwittingly getting $10,000 cell bill in the mail because they didn’t know what “three cents per byte” means. Is there some reason this can’t be implemented? Some real reason this can’t be done?

Okay so I did do some other experiments: here’s what I wanted to happen. Create an calendar appointment or whatever you want to call it with Rainlendar and then have it sync to Google calendar which auto-syncs to my phone. And actually an appointment made at any of those three places results in it auto-synced to the other two. That was the goal. I had all my appointments/events set up perfectly happy with Rainlendar’s “ToDo” feature. Then I found out I can’t sync Google calendars to those events. I mean the screens for a new To Do and a new “Event” are nearly identical. Why I can’t covert between them or sync them anyway I have no idea. So after wasting hours searching for a solution I finally just made a new Rainlander calendar tied to a google calendar and started doing “events” and converting over some of my To Dos.  The main problem I have is that when an Event isn’t an all day thing Rainlendar doesn’t list the actual title of it but merely the time range. It’s kind of annoying since I’d like to know what the event is as opposed to merely the day and time of some mystery event. I did eventually figure out I could adjust how long into the future rainlander display events. It was 6 days by default. 360 days seemed too much. So I’ve now settled on two weeks.  Seems like a good balance some how.

I did hear about a couple of funny videos. Here, I will embed them for your convenience:

First Evo Vs. iPhone

Then iPhone vs. Evo

Yesterday I only worked a half day in the hopes of meeting for a lunch with that ex-boss of mine. But that ended up being canceled so instead I drove up to my sister’s house for a little lunch/dinner thing with her and my dad/grandmother.

So I hung out with them and talked a little but, as seems to be ridiculously common these days they commented how “out of it” I seemed. Apparently per the usual I was rather tired. But I didn’t get nearly as much sleep as I wanted last night. As usual.

Today I went to a certain northern California city, as hinted in the title, and then over to Berkeley. It was a nice albeit uneventful day trip to a nearby area. In fact that was a large part of the reason I went: finally going some place that is more than 50 miles from where I live.  It’s been quite a while since I have really done that I think.

On the way there we actually passed two people who were getting a gas fill up from a AAA truck, on two different freeways. One of them was causing miles and miles of traffic back up. Here’s a hint people: fill your gas tank before you leave. Cars need gas. Ya, apparently that was necessary. Sadly.

I have been enjoying the first book in the Wheel of Time series right now. It seems like it has “borrowed” a lot from the Lord of the Rings books. Or Fellowship more specifically. That’s not a complaint though, I’m still enjoying it quite a bit even though it’s still in “getting started” mode.

Since I can’t keep my eyes open I guess I’ll end this here.

So today was the day I switched to a little [cell] carrier called Pure Talk USA. I am a lot more impressed with their customer support than Simple Mobile but their web site is waaaaaay more confusing. For some reason I brought my old phone with me but forget the SIM card. So about half way through the day when people called my google voice number they’d something like “mail box not set up” followed by a hang up. Apparently this is from google voice still pointing to my old number but the phone still having the deactivated SIM card in it. I know this because I inserted the new SIM into the phone as soon as I got home and had a family member call me and go to voice mail so I knew it was working. And it did. Now whether the same would have happened had I left the phone at home with the battery out I don’t know. Maybe. Also if I had realized that I could have removed my old number from google voice temporarily and I think it would have worked fine.

Today was another largely uneventful day. I did wait probably more than an hour for a PC to free up just so I could install a little mini-scanner (it was about the size of one of those black metal three-hold-punches, you know the one I mean). Anyway all that waiting was rather boring. And I didn’t have my N+ book with me to study even if I wanted. A book I haven’t really opened in quite a while. I’ll finish it eventually though. That’s when even more begins. For the test. Okay I think this entry is over.