UngsungBlog: A (Fantasy) Sports Blog

Quick-hitters:

- Is it just me, or are those Mac v PC commercials getting exponentially stupider?

Actually, I’m almost certain it’s not just me.

(You can tack on that stupid Mentos commercial, where the guy chews a piece of Mentos gum, and a girl comes up to him and drinks out of his mouth, as if he were a water dispenser. Yeah, because THAT makes me want to buy Mentos gum.

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,244! And half of that is currently unfiled rebates!

Time to go on a shopping spree

- Quick NBA playoff thoughts:

1) David West is completely unguardable. The Spurs might win Game Six, but I don’t see any way the Spurs are going to beat the Hornets in Game Seven.

(Well, I can see one way: if Chandler and West aren’t 100% for the next two games, the Spurs have a shot.)

2) Orlando had two shots to win a game against the Chauncey Billups-less Pistons, and they couldn’t win one (and one was at home, no less!). Maybe Pat Riley will take over the Magic midway through next season.

Detroit’s gonna get a ton of rest, but I think that the Cavs-Celtics winner will be the Eastern Conference representative in the NBA Finals.

- Time for part 2 of my covert ops mission.

So after a bit of begging on the Slickdeals forum, I got an invite to purchase a Fonera from fon.com. I used this guide to assist me in hacking the Fonera.

(Tangent: Dammit! I didn’t realize that all the steps were compiled on to one web page! I had to print out four different web pages! Bah!)

As soon as I got the Fonera, I found that it came DOA! Argh. I contacted Fon CS, and they quickly sent me out another Fonera, which came in working condition. I decided to wait until the next time I was going to visit my parents to hack the Fonera. A week or so later (whenever I actually got around to visiting the parents again :P), I began preparation for the installation. I made sure to bring home the LF-B10, the Fonera, a spare router, and all cables that I needed.

Sure enough, I managed to forget a couple things! I decided to go ahead and hack the Fonera anyway, just to make sure that the Fonera would work as a wireless bridge. Unfortunately for me, I made the stupid decision of trying this at midnight.

(You see, the router and DSL modem are in my sister’s room, and she’s asleep early, meaning I would have to be hacking the Fonera pretty much in the dark. Browse through the fonera hacking guide, and you could see how I could easily make a mistake.)

I started out by plugging in my spare router, and connecting my laptop and Fonera to it via Ethernet cables. I got to step 4 of the first part of the tutorial, but could not get the Fonera firmware to downgrade to 0.7.1 r1. For the life of me, I could not figure out what the hell went wrong.

(If you haven’t figured it out by now, apparently I missed a key part of the tutorial: the hack requires the router to actually be connected to the internet! Fifty bazillion stupid points for that one.)

I grabbed my laptop, the Fonera, and the Ethernet cables, and hooked them all up to my main router, and began the process again. When I got back to step 4, I held down the reset button on the Fonera, and logged in to it (http://192.168.1.1), and was dismayed to see the wrong firmware version (0.7.0 r2, I believe)!

I looked over the guide, re-checked everything, and after two or three additional tries, I finally got the correct firmware version! W00t! I went ahead with the next step, hit submit, and was indeed redirected back to the Fonera.

I got to step 7, enabled SSH permanently, and began the process to enable Redboot (part 2). I got to step 10, and attempted to reconnect to the Fonera via SSH. That’s when I got a “Network refused” error. Grrrrrr. Immediately I thought that step 7 didn’t take, so I attempted to re-open SSH permanently again, starting from step 5. I ran the script again, and it appeared that the Fonera threw up all over itself. I got a ton of “invalid blah blah blah” errors, and I started pulling out my hair.

Unsure of what happened, I decided to start all over from the beginning. When I got to step 5 again, the Fonera threw up all over itself once again. Worse, I noticed that the firmware on the Fonera was 0.7.0 r2 again!

On a whim, I attempted to SSH into the Fonera again, and it worked! I entered the command to open SSH permanently again, and then I proceeded with step 10. I was hesitant to do this, though, as I couldn’t get the Fonera to downgrade to the “correct” firmware (0.7.1 r1, as directed in the guide).

Step 10 went to completion, and I attempted to access Redboot. For some reason, it was not working, and I immediately thought I bricked the Fonera. That’s when I read the instructions carefully, especially the blurb before step 11:

Make sure the Fonera is powered off. You also need to make sure you have a wired connection to the Fonera and an IP address in the 192.168.1.x range.

Again, it was late and dark. Never again will I hack anything late at night, I told myself. You will see later on, though, that I did not adhere to this

At first, I could not get into Redboot. It took me fifteen minutes to realize where I screwed up this time: step 12 says to ” Open putty and enter in “192.168.1.254″ for the IP address and “9000″ as the port number.” It says nothing about changing the connection type to Telnet (as the image states)!

I finally managed to get into Redboot, and prepared for the flashing process. I will neither confirm nor deny that I said a non-denominational prayer or ten at this point.

Each step, from 15-18, took me a while, because I was carefully typing in each character, triple-checking to make sure that I didn’t make a typo. It was eventually brought to my attention (from another guide I was reading) that I could paste commands into PuTTy simply by right-clicking! Bah!

According to the tutorial, step 19 was supposed to take about 10-20 minutes. I got really worried when that step only took about six minutes; I was almost certain that something went wrong at this point. Step 21 also took only a few minutes, and the final step only took a few moments. When step 22 finished, I could not bear to look at my screen as I rebooted the Fonera.

Once the reboot completed, I peered over at my screen, and was dismayed to not see the “dd-wrt” network available. I cilcked “refresh network list,” scrolled down the list S L O W L Y, and almost paraded around the room when the dd-wrt network finally appeared!

Much thanks to Krunk for assisting me throughout the hacking process, as well as setting up the hacked Fonera as a client bridge.

Part 3, including more hacking, to come another time!

Tags: david west, fonera, lf-b10, linksys, locationfree, mac commercial, mentos, nba playoffs, sony, spurs, wrt54gs by Peter
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This blog was supposed to be posted last night, but in typical UngsungBlog fashion, I misremembered :P.

(Because of that, I went ahead and added a few thoughts, if that’s OK with my loyal readers.)

Quick-hitters:

- So I got my Columbia sunglasses yesterday from Campmor.com, and after trying them on for a bit, I really like them. I haven’t tried them out in sunlight yet, to see if I could tell the difference between polarized and non-polarized lenses, but I’m most likely going to keep them. They feel a heck of a lot more comfortable than my Oakleys, even though the wire frames bend at a pretty severe angle, no thanks to my big head.

- Boy was it HOT the last two days! Real-Feel temps in the low-100s on Sunday in MPK, followed by a much more bearable mid-90s here in the Valley on Monday. I think I drank about ten gallons of iced tea these last few days alone.

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1900, and that includes the $250 in checks I received since my last update.

- Armed with a $25 Amazon.com GC (courtesy of my Amazon.com VISA), and a half-off coupon on select chocolate snacks (CHAWCLAT), I decided to purchase some snacks.

I think I went a bit overboard with what I bought:

• 8 8oz. tubs of Good Sense Dark Chocolate Pretzels
• 12 8.5oz. bags of Harmony Foods Yogurt Raisins
• 24 3.5oz. bags of Harmony Foods Yogurt Pretzels

I just hope the heat doesn’t ruin my snacks.

Total cost, after the GC: < $10. Now let’s hope I have the willpower to not polish off the entire order in a few days :P.

- After watching the conclusion of the Nuggets-Lakers series last night, one thing was evident to me:  if the two teams played ten times, the Lakers would win nine, and Denver would win the 10th on a couple of bad calls, lucky bounces, and Laker rim-outs.  Anyone watching the game could have sensed that Kobe was going to explode in that fourth quarter, so I wasn’t surprised when he did.  Look at the sequence that ESPN’s John Hollinger so eloquently described:

Not that he can’t do it — the final six minutes Monday were a tour de force at both ends. In that time he scored 14 points, blocked a shot, stole a pass and drew two offensive fouls.

He made a 3-pointer and a driving layup basket to break open a tie game, then hit a jumper over Kenyon Martin when the Nuggets briefly took a one-point lead. He turned his attention to defense and drew the fifth and sixth fouls on Martin by charging out hard and drawing illegal screens, knocking his primary defender out of the game.

Back on offense, he drew the fifth and sixth fouls on his next defender, Carmelo Anthony, by attacking off the dribble to draw blocking fouls — removing the Nuggets’ best scoring threat. His runner in the lane with 40.7 seconds left sucked the air out of Denver’s final charge, and his physical D on J.R. Smith and subsequent steal with 18.2 seconds left sealed it. And just for good measure, he rejected Linas Kleiza’s 3-point attempt at the buzzer.

Personally, I thought that one or two of those fouls were ticky-tack at best, but you know what they say about superstars and fouls in the playoffs.

So did the Lakers steamroll Denver, or did Denver roll over?  I’m going to cop out and say it’s a little of both.  The Lakers were just playing way too well to lose the series, but Denver had their chances to win Game 4.  At least they didn’t commit any absurd technical fouls.

(Tangent:  Why is it that when one is confronted with a “Is it A or B [that caused something to happen] question, 99.9% of the time, the person will say it’s a little bit of both?)

A couple other quick playoff thoughts:

1) Is it just me, or is Mavs F Josh Howard playing like he’s high?  I was watching parts of Game 5 of the Mavs-Hornets series, and I saw him miss a few jumpers BADLY.

(Note to any player who is going to come out and admit marijuana use:  you might want to play well in the game(s) following the admission.)

2) I expect the rest of the Western Conference first round to end tonight (NO over DAL, SA over PHX, UTA over HOU), and after tonight, we can officially declare the two big “panic” trades in the West—Shaq to PHX; Kidd to DAL—failures, leading to the firing of both coaches.  I do hear Pat Riley is available, though (more on that later).

(As far as Shaq is concerned, note that his teams have never done well in Year One of his stay at each stop.  I actually expect the Suns to be pretty damn good next year.  Now if they could only avoid SA or LAL next year…)

3) Is Boston doing a little looking ahead to Cleveland, or is Atlanta really that talented?  I’ll say a little of both :P.  But seriously, I thought Boston was going to mow over everyone en route to the NBA Finals.  Now, Doc Rivers might not get his team out of the first round.  Joe Johnson looked like freaking Michael Jordan in the fourth quarter of Game 4; why did Rivers not make a defensive switch?

And finally,

4) Is Washington really trying to prove that they are the dumbest team in the history of the world?  First, DeShawn Stevenson ran his mouth, then Arenas, and now Brendan Haywood???  Apparently, Haywood and the rest of the Wizards are sick and tired of LeBron’s whining:

“Awww,” Haywood said, in a whiny, high-pitched voice to mock James. “They are trying to hurt me.”

“I mean, come on, man, this is the playoffs,” Haywood said following yesterday’s practice. “He wears 23, he wants to be Michael Jordan, I can respect that, he’s a great player. You saw what Mike went through. Mike got fouled way worse than this. No one is trying to hurt him, everybody is trying to play basketball, trying to play tough. Play basketball and leave it alone.”

Look, I understand that playoff intensity translates into harder fouls, but that does not give you the right to hammer LeBron with flagrant-2s!  I’m not saying this as a LeBron fan; personally, I turn off the TV when I see him on SportsCenter (I can’t stand the hype for the guy!), but even LeBron doesn’t deserve to be treated as a punching bag.

By the way, Haywood, why don’t you heed your own advice and play basketball?  Last I checked, you guys are trailing 3-1.

- So Pat Riley doesn’t want to coach anymore?  Larry Brown wants to coach again, and so he took a job with Charlotte?

In other news, water is wet.

Riles, I’m pretty sure ANYONE would be tired of coaching after tanking games to earn extra ping-pong balls enduring a 15-67 season.  Then again, should the NBA freeze some envelopes to give Miami the #2 pick (behind New York’s #1, of course) which they would use to draft Derrick Rose, and then somehow trade for an impact big, who would be surprised to see Riley abruptly end his retirement yet again?

I will neither confirm nor deny that I suggested that the NBA has fixed the lottery in the past.

I wonder if Riles would be willing to move to Phoenix; I hear they may need a coach.  And who wouldn’t want to coach a pair of MVPs and one of the most dominant power forwards in the league?

As for Larry Brown…bored again, eh?  I’m about ready to dub Brown the Paris Hilton of coaches.  Is he just trying to coach every team in the league?  Charlotte?  What is so enticing about Charlotte, other than its proximity to Chapel Hill?

If (when?) the Bobcats stink up the joint next year, how much do you want to bet that Brown will take some “recruiting trips” down to Chapel Hill?

Until next time (later tonight?).

Tags: amazon, campmor, chocolate, coaching, columbia, heat, lakers, larry brown, lenses, nba playoffs, nuggets, oakley, pat riley, polarized, pretzels, raisins, rebates, snacks, sunglasses, sweep, yogurt by Peter
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