SmashTech

According to this Reuters article , CompUSA will be closing 126 stores over the next 2-3 months.

If you visit the Store Locations page on CompUSA’s website, you can find out if the store in your area will be closing or not.  If your city is no longer listed, then your CompUSA will be closing.

The Grand Rapids location will be one of the stores that will be closed.  Lansing will have Michigan’s only CompUSA after this is all finished.

If you have a UTstarcom PPC-6700 phone, Engadget has a good walkthrough for configuring it to act as a modem for your laptop via USB or Bluetooth.  While the instructions provided are for Verizon service, they worked just fine on my Alltel phone.

You will need the drivers from your phone’s CD to get this work.  If you lost the CD, Google for Harrier USB software (or you can get it from here , but you’ll have to register).  The Harrier software can act as a dialer for most CDMA devices.

You can use the 8 Pool extension list (*0008) as an easy way to do debugging and stopgap routing on NBX systems.  The 8 Pool is accessed by prefixing outgoing numbers with 8 instead of 9, and you can manage it from Dial Plan > Extension Lists in the NetSet.

If you are having call audio issues with a particular digital line span, you can remove that span from a regular line extension list, and then add it to your 8 Pool.  This will prevent the span from being used for outgoing calls, unless they are prefixed with an 8.  You can then modify any settings related to that board or span, and it will not affect any other calls on the system, and allow you to make test calls on only that circuit.  Note that this will not prevent incoming calls from avoiding that circuit (you will need remove those extensions from your incoming pretranslator list first).

If you have multiple phone providers, and for whatever reason, you need to route a certain number over a certain provider, you can add only a few channels from that provider to *0008, and then update Table 2 in the dialplan to route that number to the 8 Pool only.  In this case, even dialing a 9 to get an outside line would still route over the 8 pool:

TableEntry Create 1 1 5551212 7 7 Local 0 1
DestinationRoute Create 1 Alt Provider for 5551212
DestinationRouteEntry Create 1 1 *0008

From Navy Times/AP -

“A retired member of the U.S. military aged about 70 put suspect Warner Segura in a headlock and broke his clavicle after the 20-year-old and two other men armed with a knife and gun held up their tour bus, said Luis Hernandez, the police chief of Limon”

The other 2 attackers fled after the rest of the tour bus gathered around and started advancing.  The only injury was an anxiety attack by one of the tourists.  No charges will be filed and the cruise continued normally.

From CSO Online -

The in-flight entertainment system Hugh Thompson was using on a recent flight allowed him to play Tetris to pass the time.  One of the features of this Tetris clone was a setting to allow you to see up to the next 4 pieces that would fall.

“To give myself the biggest advantage in the game, I pressed the + control as many times as it would allow and got to the maximum value of 4. I then put on my “bad guy” hat on and asked: How *else* can I change the value in this field? Near my armrest was a small phone console; you know, the one where you can make very important calls for a mere $22 per minute. I noticed that the phone had a numeric keypad and that it also controlled this television monitor embedded in the seat in front of me.”

The full story is an interesting bit on what happens when you don’t properly limit the max value of a field, and that field is only cast as a 1-byte integer.  Fortunately, crashing the entertainment system doesn’t bring down avionics as well.

From BBC News -

“The impact of heavy use and high temperatures on hard disk drive failure may be overstated, says a report by three Google engineers.  The report examined 100,000 commercial hard drives, ranging from 80GB to 400GB in capacity, used at Google since 2001.”

Google has found that, in their sample data, drives failed more frequently at lower temperatures, than drives at higher ones, unless the drive was older (3 years or more in this case).  It also found that drives which are used frequently are less prone to failure, compared with drives which see intermittent activity, even if the drives are the same age.

You can also read the original report from Google. 

From CBS4 Miami -

“An elderly woman who had been living without power in her home due to hurricane damage was finally seeing the light Friday night, when power to her home was restored. What makes her story amazing is that the hurricane which put her in the dark was Andrew, almost 15 years ago, and she’s been living without power to her house since August 24, 1992.”

‘Norena’, as she goes by in the article, was without power after Andrew hit.  Her contractor didn’t finish the electrical wiring to code because the insurance money ran out.  Instead of asking for help from FEMA (back when it worked), the Red Cross, or even her neighbors, she decided to live for 15 years without electricity in her home.

The only electrically powered items in her house were a refridgerator and some lamps, powered via extension cord, but the article doesn’t say where.   If I was her neighbor, I might start asking when she was planning on getting the power back after the first month or so of her mooching.