Geek Rant!

Warning, moderate Nerdery follows! Turn back now or be assimilated.

It's no secret that I'm a pretty big geek to the average person. While true geeks would probably call me a half geek, I prefer to think of myself as a functioning geek. I'm not front row at E3 or C.E.S. or W.W.D.C., but I catch the summary on G4TV, just to feed the need to know when the next add on pack for Doom 3 is coming out, or what must-have iToy Steve Jobs unveils that I simply cannot live without.

Two things at the top of my geek To-Do list have been to:
1) Blanket my house in WiFi
2) Check out a VoIP phone.

I'm glad to say that I've accomplished the two, and I'm sad to say that neither of them have lived up to my expectations. Lets start with the WiFi.

Three Apple Airport Extremes and one Apple Airport Express hooked up to a Linksys BEFSR41 v.3 router with 4 port switch, all acting as one great big web of WiFi, and my connections go down more often than a Windows 95 box. I should be sipping iced coffee in the sun and instead of tucked away in a dark corner, on the laptop, ten feet away from the office where the bloody desktop is. That's the whole point of a laptop. Apple is the grand poobah when it comes to simple, intuitive, and easy to use products. I'm a huge fan of them. Yet how come my old $60 D-Link DI-624 can give my neighbor half my bandwidth, while $700 worth of Steve Job's best can't even get a decent signal on the stereo while we BBQ? My triumphant Geek Moment was *going* to be streaming iTunes via Air Tunes over the WiFi network to the outdoor stereo so my guests could enjoy my wide range of Yanni tracks while I overcooked the steak and undercooked the shrimp.

Instead it came out a garbled mess of dropped connections and scratchy tracks, so we did it the analog way.

Burnt CD's and played them through the CD player.

How 1997.

My second geek moment began about a month ago when I bought a Packet8 DTA-310 VoIP adapter from Fry's after hearing Leo Laporte rave about them on KFI. Now if you've never heard about VoIP, or have, but think it's some sort of banned sex act, here's a quick rundown of what it does.

Basically, it's an adapter you connect to your DSL/Cable/T1 line that allows you to make and receive voice calls over the internet with a standard telephone. What's the catch? Well, you pay a monthly charge. In my case, $20 a month for unlimited calling within the U.S. Still, that's much much much much much much much much much less than my monthly phone bill is, and since I hate the phone companies only slightly less than I hate the Culver City parking cops, any chance to stick it to 'em is a good chance.

Plus, and this is kind of cool, you can hook the adapter up to ANY DSL line in the U.S. [with a router] and it'll be up and running within minutes. If I'm at my Summer Palace in Spokane, and someone calls me on my L.A. number, it'll ring in Spokane. At least, according to their website.

The truth is, the product worked as advertised, and I was more or less, happy with it.

Until I started making a lot of calls.

Then, I noticed a slight hiss in the background. As if at any moment Samara might come on and whisper: "Seven Days" into my ear. A little tweaking on the router, open up the DMZ, and the hiss is gone.

But something else reared its ugly head. An echo. Like I was talking into a hallway where my doppleganger muttered my exact words a half second afterwards. As is often the case with voices I hear, it was inaudible to others. Still, it was bugging me, and making it quite a pain to use the phone. A week after bragging to every man woman and child within three degrees of separation that "I'd gone VoIP", I was suddenly embarrassed to pick up the phone on my new nifty number for fear of driving myself to violence and punting the phone through the office window.

Finally, customer support somehow magically eliminated the gnawingly insane echo, but like all bad things, something else took its place.

A delay.

And not just any delay, but a delay of about a half second to two seconds. I confirmed this by phoning myself and having my girlfriend run around the house going: "Can you hear me now" as loud as possible so I could hear it both in person and over the phone. Unfortunately, taking any sort of conference call while there's such a delay makes the conversation a bit odd. While I was responding as quick as I could to questions and ideas, on the other end I could tell the parties involved thought I was constantly cutting them off. It sounded like one of those old shipboard phones where you end every sentence with "Over" so the man in the middle can properly switch the direction. The natural flow of high speed Hollywood conversation was interrupted by my not-quite-there-yet technological jump, and I ended out just phoning in from the land line I'd hoped to have cancelled.

The final verdict: Not quite there yet. At least, not for me.

Ironically, I worked in a call center doing customer support at one point, and whenever someone insisted that something was broken, even though it clearly was not, and they were simply using it wrong ["that's not a cup holder, it's a CD drive"], we would take their product in for a few days, just to make them feel better, and write: CODE ID-10-T on the ticket.

ID-10-T
ID10T
IDIOT

I think my bad technology karma is cashing itself in all at once.

Next time:
-How to blow up a producers email server with Final Drafts brilliant PDF compression scheme.
-Tips for turning your liquid cooled Pentium 3.2ghz game machine into a $2000 Fish Tank.
-10 best ways NOT to mount your Apple Cinema display.