Snowflakes in Hell

I put a new firewall/wireless router on my home network.   The default Verizon ActionTEC has flaky wireless, so I switched to a Netgear box.  The firewall features on the Netgear box aren’t quite as good, but it’ll do for now.  At some point, I might play with OpenWrt on a Linksys WRT.   Linksys WRTs by default kind of suck, because they like to time out TCP connections while you’re using them, and there’s no way to disable this “feature”, but if I can run a Linux based firewall/wireless router on one, I’d have total control, and it would do anything I wanted it to.

Visitors to the blog might have noticed a slight interruption in service for the ten seconds it took to switch over to the new system.  It’s easy when it’s just a simple home network.

It’s good to see that people in Alexandria can get things done, even when the police take almost 15 minutes to show up:

Hart caught him in a bear hug three blocks away about the time that O’Brien, who had run back to her house for handcuffs and was still barefoot, drove up in Boyd’s truck. They handcuffed Dean just as Alexandria patrol cars pulled up. Dispatchers registered Thorp’s 911 call at 5:22 a.m. Police were on scene at 5:35 a.m., Alexandria police officials said.

Babin’s children slept through the ordeal.

In the ensuing months, Dean has tried to call Babin collect from jail four times. Hart said there is a palpable sense of relief in the neighborhood now that he is no longer hanging around. And O’Brien’s son has a much clearer sense of what she means when she says, “Mommy catches bad guys.”

O’Brien, Hart and Boyd were honored for their actions recently by the Alexandria police. But they played down their roles. O’Brien said she is trained to deal with crime. And helping each other out is simply what neighbors do, they said.

O’Brien is a fed, but it’s a good deal when the neighborhood has a guy in custody before the police even get there.  A good lesson in this is not to leave your cell phone uncharged or out of reach.

Conservative Scalawag links to a guide written for the NYPD on how to spot a concealed pistol.   Take a look.  I have to admit, about keeping the hand close to the shirt, and not swinging the other arm, I do that.  I have to keep the shirt from blowing open.   I do that even when I’m not carrying, just out of habit.  The rest of the things they mention can be solved by using a quality holster.   Studies have shown that bad guys almost universally don’t carry in holsters; just stuffing it in their waistband.   I don’t get this.  Why don’t criminals use a holster?