The News:
This is October! Guavaween looms on the horizon, and although I've missed the past two, there are indications that I may be attending this one. Sadly I also missed the Diwali celebrations on this past weekend. The S2000 has been in the shop 4 weeks as of today and should be out any day between today and Friday (for the curious, it is getting a new 5/6 synchro sleeve in the manual transmission, as well as new convertible top latches and a driver's side window regulator, at a cost roughly on par with a new central air conditioning system, ug). The EFX 544 arrived last Tuesday. I've faithfully done 30 minutes of EFX, plus a few sets of almost-free-weights on Beel's Soloflex up in the loft, every single morning, as the physical-fitness routine ramps up and begins to yield small results. Consumer debt has been reduced to levels not seen since mid-2005 before my dental adventures began (speaking of which, I'm already more than halfway through orthodontic treatment). Dancin days aren't exactly here again, but we're close enough to hear the music, thanks to the toughest year I can recall. I harp on it a lot, but only because it is so true: This year tested everything I am, and I learned so much from it that I know things are going to be just fine from now on.
The Gadget:
I didn't want to write yet another self-congratulatory entry without something redeeming, so here it is: I paid a Craigslister $50 for an unlocked (originally from Broadvoice) UTStarcom F1000 Wi-Fi VOIP telephone. It it an amazing little device. It is the size of an average cell phone, and works flawlessly for making and receiving VOIP calls (me, I have an Asterisk machine in Virginia Equinix, that is provisioned via IAX2 from terravon.com, giving me a toll-free direct-dial number as well as 1.6 cents per minute to the US48, with per-second billing accuracy. What this all means is that it's dirt cheap and $20 will last you a couple months, even if you're relatively popular). Its OS is built on VxWorks, it has an HTTP administration interface, and you can telnet into it (although the much-publicized defaults from a few firmware revs ago, do not work).
Also a hint to people wishing to hack the F1000: It has an ARM processor, and the .bin.z firmware updates can be uncompressed with the standard zlib inflate() call, google for zpipe.c if you're too lazy to write an inflate() program yourself. The resulting file has all sorts of interesting things in it.
Oh yes, there will be more news soon.
-Chris