dotPlan.org

I’ve had this conversation before.

One side effect of being born into a culture that boasts a continuous history dating back almost three thousand years before the birth of this guy that got nailed to a cross is having to deal with traditions and procedures that evolve over 4702 years. For example, your home has to comply with the rules and regulations of feng shui. This is something that most people, Chinese or not, know about to some degree. At least some rules of feng shui make sense, the following ones do not.

When I called my parents after our closing yesterday, I found out there’s more. There is also the seasonal cycles of good and bad luck. Luckily we happened to choose a good day for signing contracts so our closing date was unintentionally ideal. Leave it to the culture that invented beaurocracy to have a day chosen that’s ideal for contracts. It turns out our move-in day is also unintentionally ideal for moving into homes. So far so good.

My dad called me this morning with more instructions. To help ward of evil spirits, I have to go buy a few bottles of beer after work and sprinkle it around the house. I also have to find the center of the house and place there something of high value and importance. Ellen also informed me that according to her mom, we have to take a broom and sweep all four corners of the front door to sweep away any lingering presence of the previous owner.

To Save Toby

Watch this Dutch kid go.

For those interested, here is our floorplan.

Xin Nian Kuai Le! Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Happy year 4702!

In brainstorming for things that need to be done in the new house, I’ve run into a problem I currently don’t have enough time to fully research. Hopefully someone that reads this will have a solution.

We’re planning on putting the office in the upstairs loft. That would most likely be where the router and most of the cabling will be. That’s simple, no big deal.

The problem comes downstairs in the family room. I have a hacked series 1 Tivo. There’s a network cable that pokes out of a hole in the bottom of the Tivo. It needs network access. Since the house is 2-stories, it isn’t easy to run cable from the office to the family room without either a lot of work or ugly cables hanging all over the house. What I want to do is have a wireless bridge from the loft to the family room.

Here’s the problem. I want to have all wireless access to the network and my internet go through VPN. So, my ideal router would allow wired connections to work normally but wireless connections only through VPN. I also want to have the bridge in the family room to automatically authenticate with the VPN and tunnel/bridge the Tivo and any other devices in the family room through the VPN to the network in the Loft. Most importantly, I want to do this cheap.

Any Suggestions?

If talking on a cell phone makes me drive like an old person, then I promise I’ll always talk on a cell phone so I can get the same low rate they get.