Okay, so I wake up, watch Atlantis (always awesome) and then I get to reading my piled up news! I always find interesting stuff to tag as favorites, and a few things to share on that public page I get, and today? I found something to blog about...

CBS News ran out of articles yesterday, I guess, and make a write up on... You can't even begin to guess! They wrote an article on... The Tooth Fairy. Or, to be more specific, the parents who give money to their children for baby teeth. And if that wasn't bad enough? They're taking some random poll by Securian Dental, which is, I guess, a dental health insurance company and... Well, just hear what they start off with:

Even the tooth fairy feels inflation's bite. The price per baby tooth is 22% steeper today than it was a year ago.

That's according to a new tooth fairy poll from Securian Dental, which runs dental plans.

The poll, which included 647 parents, shows that the tooth fairy pays $2.09 per baby tooth, on average, up from $1.71 last year.

Oh, you better believe it. They're trying to say that inflation is infecting what parents pay for their son's tooth! Wow... Just wow. I can't even begin to laugh, because it's so sad, so I'll just leave it at that.

As some of you may know, I'm obsessed with Okami... I mean, in case you didn't notice.

As such, I regularly visit deviantArt looking for that kinda stuff! My Favourites are absolutely packed full of the best Okami art on the site. I probably went through their entire collection twice, to start, and I very nearly daily browse the latest submissions. Yep. Obsessed. But one of the more awesome artists I've come to find and start watching is Lyanti, quite possibly the coolest wolf artist I've seen in a looong time. Needless to say, I found her by searching for Okami stuff, and I found this particular piece: Amaterasu - Happiness, which is now... Up for sale. The original whatever... Uhm. Canvas? It's not a digital piece, it's a traditional paper drawing. AND SHE'S SELLING IT. Aaah! I'm very, very torn... On the one hand, I'm scrapped for money, but on the other? It's freakin' Okami, and one of the coolest drawings I've seen. I mean, even normally, I probably wouldn't consider this, but she's a Christian, too, so I know I wouldn't be paying some weirdo I don't know, heh. (I'd... Just be paying someone I don't know, as opposed to a weirdo.)

But, maaaan... I would so totally buy it. I even messaged her, asking how large it was, and if anyone else has put their sights on it... I would totally frame it and hang it on my wall, too, even. Well, not exactly frame... My friend Iaian had some neat way to kinda-sorta frame something between two pieces of glass and it wouldn't exactly irreversibly pin the thing inside a frame for eternity.

So, great... I'll be up all night waiting to see if it's really free to buy or not.

Before I forget again...

I've noticed that over the past several months, my dreams have become increasingly... bizarre. I mean, dreams are usually pretty other-worldly, but these are becoming memorably weird and outright creepy (when it comes to nightmares). Most of them are plain awesome, don't get me wrong... But WEIRD. And some are even story-caliber, which I don't be sharing publicly, because... Well, they're story ideas now!

Have you ever had a dream where you're home, but everything's WAY out of proportion? Like, our property has buildings all clustered together in a space of about, oh... 2 acres? The road runs north and south. Directly to the east of the road is our house. Butted up against the house, more or less, to the northeast, is a big barn/warehouse/shop where Dad works. Directly to the southwest of the shop is a nice sized pole-barn. Directly to the north of the pole-barn is an old shack where the previous owners made apple cider (we live on an old orchard farm). Directly to the south of the pole-barn is a little blue shed where migrant workers lived. Directly to the west of the little shed is a little red shed that also housed some migrant workers (and now house chickens). Just to give you an idea. Oh, and on the southeast corner of the house, directly connected to it, is a garage that really isn't a garage, but stores lots of junk. All of this isn't very large... I should take a picture sometime and show you, but then people would STALK ME and that's bad. Anyway!

My dreams that take place at home are... bigger. All the buildings are absolutely enormous, like huge sprawling warehouses. Even the house is some huge, squat, single story building. And its always run down. Windows are missing, doors broken, maybe a room is open to the elements. Even last night, the shop was large enough to house an alien wreck that a group of us were sent to investigate (I guess). I remember precariously walking on narrow platforms spanning bottomless pits, and that other people had managed to fall in. And then? We all gather around the Puddle-Jumper (so I guess we're from Atlantis) that was parked in the garden (which is west of the little red shack and south of the attached garage) but it was only me and one other person who managed to get back, because there were zombies milling around. Yep! Zombies. Not entirely spooky to me, but it was freaky in the sense that there were a colossal amount of them. If you didn't move, they couldn't see you, but there were so many moving around on their own that they would get close enough to see you anyway, if you didn't move... Which... Let them see you. So there was a lovely bout of brain-eating by the zombies, and the massacring of the oncoming with my trusty P90 and... That's all that I remember. All this taking place at my house.

I've also had a parcel of Doctor Who dreams... The most vivid one I can recall right now was that I had the key to the TARDIS, and I was in the kitchen, and it started glowing! For some reason, I knew exactly where it was, and there was an intense sense of urgency... As far as I can remember, there wasn't actually anything I saw that made me want to run, but it had that nightmarish feeling where you just had to GET OUT. So I run to the basement and there's the TARDIS, all dim and fading, trying to appear, but it wouldn't, and there I was panicking for absolutely no reason, because I couldn't get the door unlocked. I'll tell you sometime about my old house... That was a childhood experience. I'm almost thinking it was haunted or something, because that house seriously creeped me out at all ages until we moved sometime in the late 1990s. Never been afraid of a house since! But basements are always creepy in my dreams because of it, and this was no exception. One of those... Your salvation is there before your eyes, but you can't get to it, and you know you need to defend yourself somehow, but you're too ghastly afraid to turn around and see what's coming up behind you? Really weird...

Then there's that one dream where I was the only "good guy" in the area of my house... The sky was creepy red and everything was desolate and run down and my house was taken over by a group of... People. Not sure. It wasn't really important. This, too, was a nightmare, because they had released some sort of monster to hunt me. It was really big, and really strong, and really FAST, and I had to hide in the shop, which, of course, was completely run down. I remember running into one of the back rooms and locking all the doors as best I could, and hiding under a small broken window while it kept running around the outside of the building and trying to break down the doors and jump through the holes in the walls. I was hiding under the window because even if it managed to look through, it couldn't be able to see me... Because I knew once it actually saw me, it would easily be strong enough to smash through the wall and devour me or whatever it was supposed to do.

But then there's always the perfectly harmless dreams, but still very, very odd. Like... I was the President of the United States? Yep. Just elected, and I my inauguration was scheduled for that afternoon and everyone was gathering and everyone was waiting for me to give a huge speech, but... Suddenly, I realized that I didn't have a speech, because my writers had managed to forget. As I realized my predicament, I knew I had to come up with something on the fly, so I asked the only person in the area who would know what to say in this situation! That's right... Bill Clinton. I asked freakin' Bill Clinton what he said during his inauguration, because I had absolutely no idea, and I needed something fast. Wow.

Interestingly enough, as much as I obsess about wolves and stuff, I very rarely have dreams about them... Okami or Wolf's Rain or just anything wolf-related. Not so much. I've noticed, though, that the majority of the weird dreams I remember are directly related to either Stargate Atlantis or Doctor Who. I'm either running around with a P90 on an alien world or on a space station, or I'm running around on an alien world with The Doctor... Even last night, after the zombie-Atlantis dream, I had one where we traveled to some really messed up world, and people saw us arrive, and they all tried to commandeer the TARDIS so they could escape the disaster, but that's all I remember.

Well! There you go... I was bored and not at all tired, so I thought I'd brain dump a few of my non-important dreams so I could remember them and/or share them. Might as well make a new category for them, too, because I'd like to start remembering them. I think it'd be awesome to have a trove of dream stories all stored up that I could reference later, once I become that famous professional novel writer that sells out all his books! (Oooor not.)

I'm writing to you from a fresh network, currently being controlled by new Ubuntu Server 7.10 router that I have decided to call Amaterasu. So far, the computer names on the network are the family system: Dirktooth (it's a name on the side of the case, and I liked it!), my desktop/file server: Aurora (named after an Ancient spacecraft they found in Stargate Atlantis), my laptop: Teyla (a character from Stargate Atlantis, duh), and now my router: Amaterasu (may I please direct you to the pretty wolf adorning the top of my blog). Then there's my Xbox 360, that I can't name, so it's affectionately referred to as "Xbox 360."

So, stage one complete, which was simply to get a working router again. So far it seems to be doing well. I'm currently updating the packages that came from the CD image, and it's downloading at a sustained 160KB/s, which is 10KB/s better than the straight up Debian router. What's neat is that Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, DHCP and Samba were all options to install, which was really nice. The Server distribution is a command line interface only, and I'm thinking I want a GUI, so after it's finished updating, I'll be downloading the whopper 500MB package that'll turn the server into the Desktop version, complete with the best UI I've ever seen on a Linux system. Perhaps I can learn how to set up VNC so I can remote access the GUI and do sweet things like, I don't know... Use torrents at speeds far greater than I've ever seen in this house? Yeah. That sounds good, actually.

So! Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday and/or Sunday are Karazhan raiding nights in my World of Warcraft guild. I'd been away to Michigan to visit Iaian, and then crunched college (still am, because I keep putting stuff off because I'm sick of school already) and I wasn't able to get any fun time raiding done. That all changed last night! Signed up for the raid, logged in at 7pm sharp, and we downed the first boss with only 9 of our 10 people. I sensed an awesome run ahead of us! But then... Disaster struck.

My internet connection died... Repeatedly, no matter what I did. My brother and I play WoW at the same time all the time! It's not something we ever think about... We just do it! "Hey, wanna help me with this quest?" "Sure thing! I'll sign on in a second." It just works and we don't think about it not working. But last night, something happened and I don't know what it was.

The symptoms are something I've been having problems with a lot, but not nearly as bad as last night. Basically, the DSL modem stops responding to internal connections, and, as such, I can't tell if it's still getting information from the internet, but it doesn't forward any of that stuff to my router. It would crash, I would reset the modem and re-initiate the router's network cards so it would detect the new IPs faster than just waiting. Log in to WoW, and... BOOM. Rinse and repeat... For nearly half an hour, every time I reset the modem and reconnected to WoW, it would die without exception. I could visit websites just fine before, but as soon as we both logged into WoW, the modem froze up. I restarted my Linux router, I restarted my laptop, I shut down my file server (it runs torrents) just in case some stray connections were bogging it down. Nothing. So I finally decided that it wasn't going to work anyway, so I bypassed the router and plugged the modem directly into Vista and... Perfect quality. I was able to keep a connection going for more than 10 seconds. This has happened before... Some weird hiccup in the ether that would kill the modem and I'd just reset it a few times and it's work just fine. So, hey, I thought that it might work now! So I plug the router back in and we both log on and BOOM. Death... Again. Then I just said, hey... We can't do this. I'm the healer, so I was the lucky guy to keep playing the game with the modem feeding directly into my laptop and I played the night without a single other hitch. Nothing at all. In fact, I started watching other people disconnect randomly and we decided to stop because we couldn't get anything done.

So... What is up?! I was the definition of "angry" last night, and I'm fed up with coaxing my network along like it's about to fall apart at any moment. This all started a long time ago with the AT&T merger... Or, at least, I thought it was. I had also completely reworked my router back then, and upgraded it to a newer version of Debian. I'm now convinced that my router is the problem, but I have no idea how, and it seems to be completely random.

I now interrupt this post to bring you an announcement. As of 1:16pm, right now, my network has once again crashed due to, what I believe to be, excessive connections and/or traffic. I am currently downloading a torrent of the Ubuntu Server 7.10 ISO. It had a consistent speed of 150KB/s for 25% of the download and then the network crashed. (It shockingly managed to recover on its own without my intervention and it downloading again.) What is going on?!

I downloaded LOST last night without a single problem, except it was incredibly slow. My connection has a theoretical limit of 160KB/s and I only really get 150KB/s out of it at any given time, but only if I'm very lucky. As in... My practical limit is 150KB/s, but something keeps it from going anywhere near that high. In my experience this usually occurs during or some time after I download a torrent, or do something that either opens a lot of connections or moves a lot of information. Moving from LAN system to LAN system, behind the modem, is unharmed, so it's not my LAN infrastructure. It's either the modem or the router.

Another thing I noticed... LOST, last night, was downloading at 30KB/s the entire time, spiking to 100KB/s very rarely. TW downloaded it in about 10 minutes, and it took me 2 hours. It shouldn't be taking me that long, even with my slower connection. My limit is 150KB/s, but even with an idle network, I can rarely reach that high. As I mentioned earlier, I'm downloading the Ubuntu Server at sustained 150KB/s... However, instead of XP and uTorrent, I'm using LiveCD Ubuntu 7.08 and the built-in GNOME torrent client. There is something very fishy going on here. This speed increase could be related to something in XP, and it probably is, but I'm not sure, since I used torrents on Vista at my friend's house and it was sustaining well over 100KB/s.

Conclusion? Router functions are broken. Solution? Rebuild it... I really don't want to, and I have a lot of custom compiled applications I play with sometimes, but none of that's important if my router doesn't work properly. But here's what I'm thinking... Install a version of Ubuntu. Desktop or server? I haven't decided, yet. (Give me an opinion, if you know about this and even decided to read this far, because most people don't.) I want a GUI, so even if I install Server, I'll be installing the UBUNTU-DESKTOP package afterwards. Actually, that's probably exactly what I'll do. Then, if I don't need the GUI, I just won't start it, and if it decided to start automatically? So much the better. Then I can use VNC to navigate the UI and SSH to poke around the guts like I do. The fact that Linux torrents run this fast (and always have) tells me that maybe I should be doing my P2P stuff directly from my router. I'll also be looking into dedicated router software for Linux, instead of using some lame IPTables script, which could very well be the source of all my problems, but I think Linux router software takes advantage of IPTables, so it's probably not IPTables itself that's causing the problems.

Anyone have any input or suggestions?

Well, look what I found! A bit of code that lets me list the top 5 (or however many I want) articles I've shared with Google Reader. Now you guys can't help but succumb to your curiosity and look over to the sidebar and see what I've been reading! Hwahaha! And here's the stats from Reader as of right now:

From your 24 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 1,682 items, starred 27 items, shared 7 items, and emailed 0 items.

Yeah, yeah... I don't care if you don't care, but I'm showing off my new toys.

So guess what I did yesterday? I decided I was tired of using Digg and Slashdot as my primary sources for getting news articles, so I decided to make use of Google Reader. I've used it to syndicate Capella's blog, since that's really the only one I read, and I keep forgetting to check it, so I added her RSS feed! I figured that there was more potential to the Reader, so I decided to add all the primary categories from Google News to the Reader! Business, Elections, Entertainment, Health, Sci/Tech, Sports, U.S. and World news now stream to my Reader, and it gives me about 5 articles every 5 minutes... Lots of stuff. I woke up to nearly 200 articles this morning. That was new!

But now, in addition to Cap and Google News, I have an RSS feed of forum posts made by Blizzard employees, so I can keep tabs on the latest Blue News. I've also added Slashdot's Games, Politics, and "Your Rights Online" feeds, as well as Digg's Gaming feed. Plus, I have NewsBusters, Colts.com, IMDB, and Major Nelson's blog. (Major Nelson is the nickname for a guy from the Xbox Development team at Microsoft who has a blog, for all you uninitiated gamers.) I'm planning on adding more Digg categories (Politics, of course), and other feeds as I remember them! Needless to say, MystBlogs is not going to be on the list. I don't need to make a habit of hearing the latest whine-fest in realtime. (Although I have to admit that the whole Slackers war going on at Alahmnat's blog was pretty funny to watch.)

If you're interested, Google Reader also lets me share articles I find interesting, and it formats them onto a personalized web page for me to share with anyone I want to. I haven't really started to use it as much as I want to, but here's the link, if you want to give it a look-see: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/14475660581053705508 As I get my Reader more organized, I plan on using this to share articles, so be sure to check it out. I think a classic case of "stupid criminal" is up there right now. Some guy decided to complain to the police station, and he took a stolen car over there to do it... Needless to say, he got caught and arrested.

But anyway! If you have any feeds you want me to keep tabs on (so I can make fun of it write about it if anything interesting comes up), let me know! I want to see how much I can handle before it gets too hard. Right now, I can browse through 200 articles in about 10 minutes, just scanning the headlines and looking for stuff I might find interesting. You know, like how the MSM is trying to maul another Republican candidate for no reason, or what the latest freebie is on Xbox Live.