Category: Random Thoughts

So there is a mom who blogs about her daily experiences and it’s pretty hilarious. Mom’s can feel isolated. Blogs can help. Here is my favorite post (one of her early ones): http://mom2my6pack.blogspot.com/2007/08/adventures-in-grocery-shopping.html

At what dollar amount does money not matter any more? I am convinced that it is around a billion (yes, billion with a “b” — a one with nine zeros after it). This obviously depends on your lifestyle, but a billion bucks would accomodate pretty much anything I can imagine — and I can imagine a lot. (This goes back to my brother Bob’s discussion of the Yahoo/Microsoft buyout debacle).

Yesterday I brought this up with some friends. Marion mentioned that even a million dollars could support someone indefinitely (ignoring inflation). If you stuck it in a CD or some other interest-bearing account that yields 5-6% you could pay yourself $50-60K per year without touching the original million. Where I live, this would be considered a decent middle class income. But when I suggested it to my wife, she just laughed.

So to anyone who has this as their sustainability plan, I dedicate this Bare Naked Ladies song to you.

I have decided to take the router back and use a regular land line for now. I still can’t pinpoint the problem, but I have found that re-flashing the firmware is a temporary fix. For some reason this works, but simply restarting the router doesn’t. So that’s what I have done every other morning for a week: Wake up… no blue light (no phone service)… “upgrade” firmware (for the n-th time)… blue light comes back on (phone works again)… then I just wonder how many calls I missed. This is one of those times when being an early adopter can bite you in the butt. At least I was able to talk T-Mobile into taking it back outside of the 14 day “buyer’s remorse” window. The whole idea that I would have to pay a $200 “early termination fee” is just silly. If a product doesn’t work after a few weeks I should be able to take it back for a refund. Period. 14 days is *barely* enough time to switch your number to T-Mobile and back, so you might want to test out your service with a number you don’t care about first. I know this has worked for others very well, but for some reason the Comcast + T-Mobile combination was a non-starter for me. Anyway, I’ll try VOIP again someday — in a year or so maybe.

If you get cankers easily you should avoid the ingredient sodium laurylin sulphate. This substance is in many mouthwashes and almost every toothpaste (to make it foam). But sodium laurylin sulphate can cause cankers, especially if you are already prone to them. The only toothpaste I have found that doesn’t contain this substance is Rembrandt, but I’m sure there are others.

If you are trying out T-mobile’s HotSpot@Home VOIP home phone service, there is a setting you may need to change. T-mobile is still figuring this out so their technicians will invariably blame it on your ISP to get you to hang up and go away. I usually like T-mobile, but they have had this VOIP service out long enough to have figured out these types of issues. By the way, this article is only useful if they gave you the Linksys WRTU54G-TM router (this is the model they are currently handing out with this service).

I have Comcast as my ISP, and I was having the same problem others were having (no blue light — no phone service). I also got the same error message as others (W006.1 ISP Error. Retry.) I have found that the default firewall settings on the WRTU54G-TM router are too strict. I am not an expert so there may be a less drastic fix, but turning off firewall rules solves the problem. To do this, log in to your router via a computer connected to it (type http://192.168.0.1 in your browser to access it). As has been mentioned before, the default user name and password for the router are both “admin” (without the quotes). You can change this later. Once you have logged in, click on “Security” and then “Firewall.” Change “Enable” to “Disable” and click “Save.” You may need to restart your router (just unplug it, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in). Once it has time to start up the error message should be gone now and the blue light that indicates a phone connection should be back on. (To check, log back into your router and click “Status” –> “Voice” –> “Error List.”) You should be in business!

Here is a link to the Linksys forums where I posted this as well:

http://forums.linksys.com/linksys/board/message?board.id=VoIP_Routers&message.id=2931

If you want to check for firmware updates, here is the place (although currently there is only Version 1).