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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Today’s blog topic will cover one REALLY long topic, so expect it to be split up into at least two parts.

Blog-related quick-hitters:

- As a fan of The Office, I am appalled at myself for the fact that I have yet to watch last Thursday’s episode!

I am ashamed of myself, and I don’t even have a good reason for not watching it yet! Well, unless you consider Spurs-Hornets, Korean BBQ, Olive Garden, Mother’s Day Weekend, etc., to be “good” reasons.

(Office fans may start booing me.)

- For a similar reason, I did not watch Game 3 of Lakers-Jazz. I was 99% sure that the Lakers were going to lose that game, not that that is a good reason to skip it, right?

(Laker fans may start booing me.)

Non-blog-related quick-hitters:

- File this under the fall-out-of-your-chair-laughing department:

So my sister (the one that doesn’t have karmic powers) visited us on Friday, and after settling in, she asked if she could grab some MP3s off my computer and upload them onto her iPod. I said sure, and went to go look for the USB cable.

After a few minutes, I couldn’t find it, but my sister spotted the wall charger…except that it didn’t register with her that she was using the wall charger. This conversation (slightly exaggerated) followed:

Me: You know you’re plugging your iPod into the wall charger, right?

Her: (blankly) OK. Is that not going to work?

Me: Not unless the data can transfer from the computer’s power supply, through the surge protector, and through the charger!

Eventually, she blamed lack of sleep and hyperglycemia—she bought an iced coffee from McDonald’s that was supposed to be sugar free vanilla, but was not—for the mistake. Uh-huh.

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1,350. I better start spending some money; I gotta do my part to stimulate the economy!

(Tangent: I won’t be getting a stimulus check until mid-June! Booooooooooo.)

Current toothpaste-o-meter: a whole hell of a lot. Same with deodorant. I’m going to start selling this stuff to my neighbors real soon.

I better move on before I get too inundated with material. On with the topic at hand!

- A few months back, Staples had a great deal on the Sony LocationFree Base Station LF-B10 (think “SlingBox Lite”). I bought one as soon as it was for sale, thinking that I was going to hook up the device to my own cable box and use it whenever I was out of town.

It took me a day or so to realize how dumb of an idea this was. The only times I’m out of town are when I go to Monterey Park, or the much less frequent trips up to Sacto. If I’m in Monterey Park, there are three TVs to choose from that all have cable boxes. If I’m in Sacto, I’ll need a high speed connection to use the LF-B10 anyway.

I then decided that I would hook up the LF-B10 to my sister’s cable box. That’s when I discovered that the LF-B10 had an Ethernet port, making use of the device pretty complicated; I’d have to run about 50′ of Ethernet cable from my home router to the LF-B10. Compounding the problem was the fact that her TV is used frequently.

(Background: The LF-B10 works by connecting directly to your cable box via a composite cable. From a remote computer, you can log in to the LF-B10 and view the device’s live video stream, and you can even change the channel on the cable box using the included IR adapter that affixes to the front of the cable box. Of course, if somebody should change the channel on the cable box while you’re accessing it remotely, you’re stuck watching what they switch to, unless you cruelly change the channel back :P).

So I determined that installing the LF-B10 on my sister’s cable box was a terrible idea, due to all the “traffic.” That’s when I decided to hook it up to my mom’s cable box, which is HARDLY used.

(She has a $1,000—at the time of purchase—Samsung LCD HDTV that she hardly uses, either, in the sense that 99% of her TV-watching is of SD broadcasts or DVDs. Sad, huh?)

Unfortunately, it would have taken a lot of Ethernet cabling to hook up the LF-B10 to the home router. That’s when I got the great idea to purchase an Ethernet to wireless adapter. The idea was quickly sunk, though, until I heard of the Fonera.

Now, I knew that DD-WRT capable routers could be used as wireless bridges (Ethernet to wireless adapters), but I wasn’t going to fork up ~ $50 for a Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL just for this ability. $15 and a bit (or so I thought) of elbow grease for the same functionality? Why not?

If only it were that simple…

(Part 2 to come later!)

Tags: ddwrt, fonera, fontenna, la fon, lf-b10, linksys, putty, redboot, sony locationfree, ssh, tftp, The Office, vxworks killer, wrt54gs by Peter
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Quick-hitters:

- Cavs v. Celtics thoughts: I missed the game completely (more on that later), but I was astonished to find that “King” James only went 2-for-18. As soon as I heard that, I assumed that he had to have been fouled several times w/o getting calls.

Apparently that was not the case. “King” James will have to wait another game to earn his moniker.

- I picked myself up a Linksys WRT54GS from Staples for ~ $5 after some FAR items and a $20/100 coupon. Now I gotta decide whether or not I want to hack and flash it with some third party firmware, or just use the stock firmware.

One key deciding point: this router is for use at my parents’ place, not here. I’ll probably just leave it as-is :P.

- Current rebate-o-meter: $1450. I got a ton of rebates in the past week or so—about $300 worth of Symantec Rebate debit cards alone!

I know have over $400 in unspent Amazon.com gift certificates.

(Every time I receive a Symantec Rebate debit card, I immediately convert it to an Amazon.com GC, which I add to my Amazon.com buyer account.)

- Sprint’s customer service is awesome. Don’t believe me? Read on!

Back in January, I extended my contract in exchange for a 10% discount on service. The Sprint rep I spoke to told me that I would see the 10% discount on my account effective within the next two statements.

In April, the 10% still didn’t show up, so I called Sprint, and the rep I spoke to assured me that the 10% would show up on the next statement.

Fast forward to yesterday, and the 10% was still nowhere to be found. I called Sprint again, and here is our conversation (paraphrased):

Me: My 10% discount still hasn’t shown up on my account!

CS: Ok…well…it’s there, and I can’t do anything about it. It will probably show up next month.

Me: Probably? And what if it doesn’t show up next month?

CS: (laughs) Then you can call back and yell at me.

I love Sprint.

- So I swung by Ross today with my sister to return a shirt I bought over the weekend.

That’s when I found a really nice golf polo (Adidas ClimaCool something or another) for $20, marked down from $70. I couldn’t resist, though I’d say it’s 50-50 that I return the shirt sometime in the next week or so.

Anyway, when I got to the checkout line—single line, but multiple registers—I noticed three people in line, followed by a little gap, followed by a shopping cart full of stuff. I looked at the cart, wondered if it actually belonged to somebody, and before I could make up my mind, the owner of the cart came up to it—she had been looking through a rack of clothes near the line—nudged it forward, and gave me a death stare, as if to say “Yes, this is my cart, and yes, I’m in line, a$$hole.”

So I stood behind the lady’s cart, and she went back to her shopping. The line moved some more, and I just stood behind her cart, like an idiot. A guy was behind me, wondering what the hell the idiot in front of him (me) was doing just standing there, and the gap between the cart and the person in front widened. I seriously contemplated just shoving the cart out of the way, but the woman came back, nudged her cart forward again, and walked off.

I told myself, “If I’m the next person in line, and the woman doesn’t return, I’m cutting in line no matter what.” Unfortunately, the woman came back right when one of the cashiers shouted “next in line!”

One other bit of shopping cart ridiculousness: later, when another cashier called for the next person in line, two older ladies went to the register. One of the cashiers asked the trailing lady, “Were you in line?” The lady responded, “Of course! I was with this woman (pointing to her friend) all the time!”

That’s fine and dandy…HAD THE TWO WOMEN COMBINED THEIR PURCHASES AS A SINGLE TRANSACTION! But nope, the second woman waited for her friend to finish checking out, and then started emptying her cart in front of the register, expecting the cashier to start checking her out! And yes, the cashier reluctantly started scanning the second woman’s stuff.

Oh how I hate stupid people.

- Fifteen dollar ($50 retail) box seats. Chicken nachos, Dodger Dogs, and peanuts. Not-so-obnoxious fans (and if they were obnoxious, it was in a funny way). Blake DeWitt hitting his second career HR in inside-the-park fashion. A couple of B-level celebrity sightings (twice!). What could have ruined tonight’s Mets-Dodgers game?

Answer: the possible existence of an even more powerful, faster-acting Ung-hex!

The Dodgers were up, 5-4, in the bottom of the ninth inning, with two outs: a long fly out to center by Moises Alou, and a hard ground out by Carlos Delgado on a great play by 1B James Loney. The crowd stood up, and my sister and I joined them. That’s when I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, my sister putting her backpack on. I immediately told her, “Take that off!” She didn’t listen.

Single by Angel Pagan.

I told her again to take off the backpack. Instead, she handed me my sweater.

Single by Brian Schneider.

I grabbed her backpack, and slammed it on her empty seat. I tossed my sweater on the seat as well.

Strike three, looking, to Luis Castillo.

As we celebrated, I told my sister, “You lucked out. If I hadn’t removed your backpack, we would have lost!” She denied the existence of her own Ung-hex, but who could deny it after what happened above? Never has my Ung-hex worked THAT quickly, and THAT effectively.

The seats themselves were pretty decent—aisle 44, next to the right field foul pole, and row T, just underneath the overhang of the Loge section—and thank goodness that there were no really obnoxious fans near us. The concession stands were a heck of a lot nicer than in other sections, and there was a much larger variety of restaurants. Also, the bathrooms were really nice! Instead of a trough, there were actually urinals :P. Also, while there were paper towel dispensers, the bathrooms also had Dyson Airblades! Awesome!

The game was excellent, although it was clear that Dodgers’ pitcher Hideki Kuroda was going to have a rough game. Thank goodness for the play of one Blake DeWitt (who?): 3-4, 4 RBI (2-run single with the bases loaded, and what proved to be a game-winning inside-the-park home run that had the home crowd demanding a curtain call with a “We want Blake!” chant.

(Who needs Andy LaRoche? Nomar who? BLAKE DE-WITT! BLAKE DE-WITT!!!)

As for the celebrity sightings, it was nothing much to write home about. Once we found our seats, we immediately got up and visited the concession stands. A few seconds into our walk, and I noticed three men walking the opposite way. I caught a glance of one of them, and thought he looked familiar. My sister immediately chased me down, and exclaimed some gibberish that I don’t quite recall.

(She LOVES the show.)

Turns out that Detective Don Flack (Eddie Cahill) and CSI Danny Messer (Carmine Giovinazzo) were the two celebs she spotted. On the way out of the stadium, we spotted them near the Field level exit (I was 99.999% positive that that was them, and my sister confirmed it, muttering “OMG OMG that’s them!”). I quickly told her that I would walk past them, and then bend over and tie my shoelaces, to give her an opportunity to go bother them.

She chickened out. By the time she gathered herself to do something, they walked away.

(If this is how we act in front of B-level celebs, what would have happened if we saw Gary Sinise?)

Until next time!

Tags: blake dewitt, box seats, carmine giovinazzo, cavs, celtics, checkout, csi new york, customer service, Dodger Stadium, dodgers, eddie cahill, firmware, inside-the-park home run, mets, rebates, ross, shopping cart, sprint, wrt54gs by Peter
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