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Bell finally showed up at 3pm and wired up my second pair in about 30 minutes. Boy, did the tech really not want to talk to me at all. Thanks Bell, for wasting an entire day of my time. I figured I wouldn’t have to be around, and the tech only knocked on the door to give me the “workorder completed” paperwork.

An hour or two later (I was making dinner at the same time), I wired up the new pair into the basement, installed a jack on it, and had my TekSavvy 3Mb DSL service up and running. Sweeeet. 3Mb service seems pretty darn stable already. I faxed in my cancellation to TFNet today. They gave me solid years of service though, I’ve got no complaints about them.

Then it was time to activate my Vonage retail kit, which I picked up at Best Buy. This is that little PAP2 phone adapter thing. Well… I had an issue. The signup website told me that my device was not configured for Canadian service, and to call Vonage to get it fixed. Great. So I called, and spoke to many people in India for a while. At first, I couldn’t find anyone who would believe me: they took me for some kind of ‘merican idiot I guess and made me check and re-check the device address I was typing in, etc. I almost went nuts from it. Also twice they transfered me to a Vonage USA representative even though everytime I started with “Hi, I’m calling from Canada…”

My fourth time trying to get some help, I got it right off the bat. Turns out someone screwed up at some warehouse somewhere, and put a bunch of phone adapters that were programmed for the US into Canadian-marked boxes. So they took my details and a few hours later called back to say I could activate it in Canada now. Great. So now it’s active! But I have to wait 15 days for Vonage to transfer my number from Bell to my VoIP. But that’s fine, it will give me a chance to finish the rest of this project, which is:

• finish phone wiring so that security system is routed through VoIP, with proper line interruption, and then test it out
• configure my Linux server back into a router, and my wireless router into a “dumb” bridge
• setup QoS on the Linux box using WonderShaper, to make sure that VoIP traffic gets priority over other stuff.

Now that I no longer fear the big, bad world of security systems, I opened up the box in my basement with the security system’s guts. And looky looky, what did I find but the ADT default programming sheet the installer left, all nicely folded up (click for larger, readable version):

While it doesn’t tell me my installer code (which they didn’t leave as the default, but isn’t my phone number either… grrrr), it does tell me that they are supposed to setup the system to use the SIA format – one that should work with Vonage.

I’m still waiting for Bell to arrive and wire up a demarc box and jack for my new dry DSL. 🙁

We’ve been slowly catching up on some outstanding movie watching.

• Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – A pretty funny, quite quirky Hollywood murder-mystery. Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer take turns trying to steal the show from each other. They’re both quite excellent in this flick, which kept me laughing throughout.
• Everything is Illuminated – 10 out of 10. This was a frickin’ awesome film, a seriously good story that only comes around once in a while. I especially enjoyed the ‘premium’ Ukranian-English translations, and the very nice Eastern European scenery (it was shot on location in the Czech Republic).
• Underworld Evolution – Just as good as the first one, if you enjoyed it. It picks up immediately after the first film and gives you more of the same, and a little more. Plus, come on, who doesn’t want to see Kate Beckinsdale in skin-tight leather all the time?

How – I say – How did I ever live without How’d They Vote? These awesome, amazing, wonderful people keep track of how MPs vote and what they say in the house! It’s as if CPAC had a searchable index. How else would I know that my current MP spoke and voted against the same-sex marriage act, and seems to be a shill lately for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation?

So I ended up on the pre-release list for the Pepper 2.1 software. The new apps and features are there, and the pad is a whole lot more responsive in general.

But what I was really looking for were pre-build development libraries and include files, and I sure did get them. I compiled FCE Ultra, one of the premiere NES emulators, and also managed to build the Allegro library and then the FakeNES emulator without too much extra effort. They both run but a lot of frames are dropped. But still, I’m one step closer to my goal of using the Pepper as an awesome portable game system for emulation.

Click any of these thumbnails to see my screenshots of FakeNES running on Pepper: