This post might be rather meaningless to some. But for those of you who have first generation Macbook Pros, you may be interested at some point in upgrading to Wireless-N support. If you weren’t aware, we got gipped.

Well, our Macbook Pros came equipped with slower, hotter Intel Core Duos. The next round came with Core2 Duos and with a version of the Apple Extreme card that could be later upgraded to 802.11n. Yep! Ours were a limited bunch. I think they maybe shipped our models for around 6 months or so before making the big changes. Not that I’m really anal enough to track it down.

But I’m a techy kinda guy. I make my living learning newer ways to move much, much data in a short period of time. So for me, Wireless-N is a big deal. Not sure what it means? Let me explain.

802.11 is standard covering Wireless ethernet, or at least some of it. For the most part, this is what we are really talking about when we speak of Wi-fi. And as a standard, there are derivatives or changes that occur. These could be to target security or performance, etc. In this particular case, I’m interested in speed.

802.11b was my first real interaction with this. I can remember getting an Apple Airport back in the late 1990’s when they first came out. Back then, Apple had the lowest cost access point by far. Many of the other brands cost more than $1000. My Airport was less than $200. And I used some pretty inexpensive Orinoco PC cards in my laptops. Little did I know that those Orinocos were also inside the Airport. But that really doesn’t matter. It was cheap and relatively fast back then at 11Mbits/sec.

A couple years later some faster solutions began popping up. They required some new equipment to take advantage of speed. The problem was that it wasn’t very backward compatible with the 802.11b stuff. This 802.11a spec really seemed to suck. I’m glad I didn’t invest into it. Right on top of its release was the release of 802.11g. Now this stuff was also 54Mbit/sec like the 802.11a stuff. But it was also backward compatible with everything else. Nice, huh? I like it when folks are kind enough not to obsolete my purchases.

But now we’re in the age of 802.11n. And the newest Macs are equipped with it. You just have to buy the software enabler from Apple for $1.99. And for those of you with older Macbook Pros (btw, mine isn’t even a year old yet), this enabler won’t work for you. It’ll tell you that you don’t have compatible hardware. So, what would you do?

Well, if you first thought was to go buy a new Airport Extreme card from Apple, good luck! At least I haven’t found them on their website yet. Nope. Just the older 54Mbit stuff. I want the fast stuff— the > 200Mbit/sec stuff. Anyway, I looked all over the place for anyone advertising drivers for Mac OS X. There are a number of cards available from Linksys, Netgear, Buffalo, and a couple others. Sure, I wasn’t too crazy about having some thingy hanging out of my laptop, but I counted the costs. But it didn’t matter. I could find anyone in open source boasting about getting such a card to work. This was quite disappointing.

Eventually, I did find a solution. It came via QuickerTek. They offered an upgrade to the Airport Extreme shipped in the Macbook Pro. And this upgrade wouldn’t protrude from my laptop. But the solution does come at a price. Besides the need for a router upgrade, you’ll need to fork out another $149 for this upgrade. Honestly, I think there are more expensive upgrades one can make. This still seamed worthwhile.

Now, if this is something you’d like to do, you will need to pay a little attention. In your upgrade kit, you’ll receive some decent instructions for taking off the keyboard. I’m pretty convinced you’ll need to remove every single screw. No joke on that one. Despite all the screws, this isn’t a big deal. And everything fits together pretty easily. But once you get the hardware swapped out, you’ll need to revisit that Software Enabler from Apple, the one that didn’t work at first. You’ll want to download and open up the .dmg package to reveal Airport Extreme 802.11n Enabler.pkg. Copy this .pkg file to your desktop, by dragging it from the disk image. The reason for this is that you’ll need to make a change to one of the files and then run the installer. If you keep this package inside the disk image, it’ll remain read-only.

The file you’ll want to make changes to is within the Contents folder. You won’t see that unless you do a right-click on the package file. But don’t double click on it. That will launch the installer. Instead, right-clicking will reveal the menu option “Show Package Contents”. Inside the Contents folder, you’ll see a file called Distribution.dist. You’ll need to open this file using your Text editor. Once you’ve done that, look for the following line:

(property == “MacBookPro2,2″) ||

You’ll want to change this to read the following:

(property == “MacBookPro1,1″) ||

This will cause the installer to recognize your version of Macbook Pro as a valid upgrade model. Save the file with your changes and then go back to the top level .pkg file. Double click it and start the upgrade process. You’ll have to reboot for your changes to take effect, but that should be expected.

And that’s pretty much it. Hope it works well for you.

I’ve debated posting anything on this. I’ve tied to keep my personal life to myself, but my grandfather died this weekend and my mind is sort of all over the place.

I was just out in CA the other weekend for business and for some personal stuff. The Saturday before this past one, I took my sister and Brendan out to pay a visit to my grandfather. We hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. It’s never a very good excuse to be busy— too busy to see him or other loved ones. But that was the frequent line. It was hard to justify the 3+ hour drive out to his house.

Anyway, I was glad we made the trip. We had no idea it would be the last time we’d see him alive. He was actually looking like he was doing well. After all, he was 91.

Growing up, I didn’t really spend much time with my grandparents. There had always been a bit of a rif between my grandparents and my parents. This was largely due to disapproval over my mother for racial and, I’m sure, other reasons. The end result was that my sister and I grew spending very little time with my extended family. And trying to make up for such lost time as an adult isn’t very easy.

While I have been able, and fortunate, to be able to restore and build my relationship with my dad, I wasn’t so luck with the rest of my family. I think the relationship with my sister is the only other exception, and that’s a very recent thing.

So much has been coursing through my mind in the last few days. It’s tough living with regrets and I’ve found doing so to be of little value. Instead, it’s far better to simply learn from our decisions, both good and bad.

Anyway, I’ll be traveling back to CA, near the end of the week to attend the funeral services. I’m debating on whether or not to bring Brendan with me. He’s only 7 and such a service could be a bit much for him. But then again, I recall all of the services I missed out on, for similar thinking. And frankly, it may simply seem to be a boring church service to him. He had only seen his great grandfather a couple of times in his life. But, this will be another opportunity for him to see his other family. I wouldn’t want him to be deprived of the opportunity. But who knows? This could be another bad decision. …still weighing things.

Around a month ago I wrote a post about the problems I was having with my Wildblue service. Whenever I would try to pull up certain frequently accessed sites, I would get a wild error message in my browser indicating that the connection had to be reset while loading the page. Sometimes I would get as far as getting a little bit of text. But most of the time I wouldn’t be able to see the site at all. The problem had gone on for quite some time and I had filed numerous complaints.

Anyway, I’m ready to provide an update. I filed my last complaint on Feb 4th. And I received this email response from them on Feb 6th:

Thank you for contacting WildBlue Communications. One of our Agents will respond to your message, if applicable, as soon as possible. If you have a specific question, you may find your answer by visiting our web site’s Question & Answers section by clicking on the following link: http://www.wildblue.com/aboutWildblue/qaa.jsp— WildBlue Support

Well, that was pretty much it until Feb 19th. That was the next message basically saying they’ve checked things out and couldn’t find anything wrong on their end. Truth be told, the problem wasn’t completely gone, but was getting better. A couple of sites I couldn’t read in over a month were now readable again. But I wouldn’t attribute this to their overwhelmingly great customer service. Chalk it up, instead, to accident.

So, things are great again. Huh? Not so much. A new problem has occurred in place of this one. Lately, I’ve been experiencing outages. In fact, I had two of them yesterday. It’s a lot of fun calling up to see what’s going on. In all cases they have no idea when service will be restored. Great!

Needless to say, I’ve found a remedy. I’ve now signed up to have a T1 installed here. That should provide me guaranteed 1.5Mb/sec uploads and downloads. It’s expensive, though, at $599 per month. Other areas are able to get such service for as low as $350 per month. But living in the mountains has its advantages and disadvantages. I worked things out, though, and it looks like I can pretty much wrap up a bunch of other services I’m paying for into this one and actually save some money each month over my current expenses. More importantly, I need this for my business so that my engineering group can access my servers and collaborate on software development. I wish I could have done it for cheaper however. At least this is an option for me. And for Wildblue… see ya!

1. Why I’m addicted to using Gmail: after all, it’s pretty darn slow most of the times. I’ve been trying like crazy to send messages this morning. And, now they’re hitting me up to upgrade to “pay for” services. Hmm…
2. Krispy Kreme donuts: in general I don’t really like donuts. I used to. But they just make me feel like crap. Now, put a box of Krispy Kreme’s in front of me and the story changes. All of a sudden I can’t live without them. In fact, I can eat a whole box in a single sitting. There’s just something magical about them. It’s as if they absorb calories while you’re eating them so that you feel lighter and lighter. But then an hour after you’re done… Ugh!!!
3. Fedex and poor weather: I can’t understand why Fedex can’t manage to make deliveries on time due to snowy conditions, but UPS can. I suppose the snow likes Brown better
4. VMware and it’s sucky disk performance: been doing a fair amount of work with this lately and I can’t understand why disk performance hovers around < 100MB/s when running Windows as the guest OS. I can get around this using Linux as a guest or by using Xen instead of VMware. And this is on a system where my backend performance is around 700+ MB/s.
5. Why Internet access is such a pain in this day and age: a while back I wrote about changing our internet access to Wildblue. I then wrote about how I could no longer access certain key sites and how I had filed off my 3rd complaint. Well, several weeks went by and they really did nothing to fix the problem, though I can now access one of those sites. Anyway, I’m looking into T1’s now. The cost everywhere else in the world is around $350/mo. But it’s going to cost me around $599/mo here. It’s looking like something I need to do, however. I just can’t depend on the current service any longer.
6. Why Windows and the hardware it runs on can suck so badly: not like this stuff is cheap. But I have had more issues with laptops and PCs going bonkers lately than ever before. Take the same, cheap hardware and put Linux on it and all is well. Buy a Mac and all is well. But go to Windows… Gee, let me upgrade to Vista– Not!
7. How hard drives can continue to get so cheap: it’s simply amazing even to a guy like me who has grown up in the industry.
8. How my dog can put such a huge smile on my face: I’m really not sure how Barkley can do it. He’s such a happy dog, sure. And he’s a loving dog. But it still doesn’t explain it. I just love my dog so much
9. Leg room vs. outer dimensions: The Toyota FJ Cruiser is such a nice looking vehicle on the exterior. But open the doors and the space seems to be missing. Then there’s the Jeep Wrangler 4-door. It looks small on the outside, but has great space on the inside. Hmm… I wish I could mix and match on this one.
10. MP3 downloads: I used to love iTunes till I started to buy music online. Then I found out that the music I purchased wouldn’t work on other MP3 players because the music isn’t MP3. Dang! And then there’s Sony’s Connect. They’ll let me download MP3’s but I have to use their Sonic Stage and IE 6.0 or greater. Too bad I’m on a Mac. Guess I’ll just continue to buy music from Half.com and rip it myself.
11. Why Sony will never learn: any of you remember Beta vs. VHS? Remember how Sony had better technology for video, but kept things proprietary and lost the battle? Well, they did it again with music. I simply love their MD Walkman. I really do think they’re so much better than iPods. The sound totally rocks! But they’ve been awful to record to as they have required Sony/Windows software. Fortunately, I can now copy music directly to my MD Walkman using my Mac. But it’s a bit too late. They’re simply disappearing these days.
12. Blog software: Blogger sucks for so many reasons, but has such a commanding market share over Wordpress. Typepad actually gets away with charging for their stuff. You have to have a M.S.CS to use Drupal. And then there are the rest.
13. Cingular/AT&T: I thought I’d save the best for last. Didn’t Cingular acquire the AT&T wireless stuff a while back? And now it’s back to being AT&T? All I know is I’ve been with Cingular since it was CellularOne. And there were times it really sucked. But a little while after merging with AT&T’s service, it got much, much better. Now, it sucks again! What gives?!?