drunk.com

Another busy few days and here I am settling down with a new tipple. I have before me a glass filled with a combination of Bundaberg rum, Bundaberg ginger beer, and crushed ice. I’ve read such a combination is a variation on something called Dark & Stormy, and it’s not half bad. I’m missing the lime, but I can’t really be asked at this late hour.

Lots of trivial stuff happening, so for lack of anything more topical I’ll just kick off. First off, I’m living in a rented house, and while it’s over the top in terms of no expense spared, it’s also a bit unwieldy and not completely squared away. My current piece of work is in getting a happy home network. Fascinating stuff, I know, but hey, you’re the one reading.

For a start, I had a second phone line installed. The first one is used by the cable box, the alarm system, and for the emergency phone in the lift, so it was agreed when I signed the rental agreement that I’d get a line for my own use, meaning ADSL, which is fair enough. Unfortunately, when it was installed the local telco guy couldn’t figure out the setup and ended up replacing the existing line with the new one. So two lines made it into the house, but everything was wired to one of them and the other wasn’t used at all.

This wasn’t initially a big deal, but immediately the alarm system started to complain, and when it complained it would dump the ADSL connection. This typically happened an hour into any particular session online, but as I’m not home all that much, it wasn’t absolutely killing me. Still, annoying. Fortunately that’s sorted as of this past week.

So now I have the basics, in terms of a connection that doesn’t just die randomly, and I’m trying to get the place covered in terms of wireless. I started with a Belkin modem and an Airport Extreme box to provide wireless for the place, but alas it’s only effective on a single floor. Running between the the ground and first floor is a terrazzo floor, which I’m guessing blocks pretty much everything except depleted uranium rounds.

So back to this house. Someone put some time and/or money into the entertainment system. There are three big plasma TVs and a little flat screen TV in the kitchen. There’s some central Bose audio system that includes speakers in various zones. Frankly, I don’t make especially good use of it, so in some ways it’s really just here mocking me as I listen to radio over the Internet.

But I digress. On thing I noticed early on is that in some of the rooms there is a cluster of outlets which includes a pair of co-axial cables and two RJ-45 jacks. I finally decided to investigate them tonight and it turns out in the hi-fi cabinet there are a bunch of Cat-5 cables. Three are bundled together with room names written on them, so I figured Bob’s my uncle. I hooked up a small router in the hi-fi cabinet and of the three only one actually seems to go to a jack in another room. That may actually be enough to get coverage with a second wi-fi box, but I am really curious what’s happening with the wiring in this place. Once I have something that works, I’ll worry about figuring out what else needs to be sorted.

At this point I’ve really written about nothing, and I’m tempted to leave it at that, but now after a few drinks it’s time to rant about people who want to buy this domain. Broadly speaking, they fall into three categories: people who want to put it to a good use, people who are drunk and think it would be cool to own the domain, and people who want to make money by selling it onward.

I have little time for those who would put it to good use. I know lives are ruined everyday by alcohol abuse, but frankly it’s not got a lot to do with me, and I’d rather have this domain sit idle than see it used for something wholesome.

Then there are drunk people who want to own the domain. To be honest I haven’t seen so much action from them now that I’m writing. Instead they submit comments which I read and eventually delete. I’m generally sympathetic in that as someone who enjoys getting drunk and owning the domain name, I understand the attraction.

Then there are the people who are in the business. Some are pretty reasonable - they start out asking if it’s for sale and offering cash. I tell them it’s not for sale and that’s that. Totally professional and they move on to something else. But then there are people who won’t take no for an answer. I had one of them this past week.

So he started with the usual “Would you please consider selling me the name?” I sent him “we are not interested in selling the domain” and directed him to the page detailing my disinterest in selling. He had a whole story about how he liked to drink, how he’d never let the domain fall into the hands of people like Mothers Against Drunk Driving and how he ended up getting caught driving drunk. After telling him no, he wanted to know if I had any other domains for sale, and when I told him that if I wanted to sell anything I would advertise it instead of waiting for the first offer from a vulture. He did end up making an offer higher than any prior offers, but frankly he lost me when he started his email with “Hi friend” which I find amazingly offputting for some reason. And hey, if something isn’t for sale, it’s not for sale. Eventually I lost patience with his annoyance and just told him to go away.

So it’s really time to sleep and I’ve been writing many words about nothing at all. In terms of music, the only drunken insight I have at the moment is that Snow Patrol’s Set The Fire To The Third Bar is not Damien Rice’s Rootless Tree. For some reason, which was almost certainly a fair amount to drink, I thought they were in fact a single song. I like them both, for nearly the same reason, but they’re not the same. I have the same problem with The Killers and Razorlight, in that I heard their first CDs during the same summer, and their follow-up releases came out at just about the same time as well. Again, I like them both, I have all of their respective CDs, but I can’t tell them apart to save my life.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 10:09 am and is filed under beer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.