With every year’s Tax Return my wife and I kind of go nuts after we pay some bills. This year was absolutly no exception. She ordered a plethora of shoes (she has a really difficult time finding her size here in Japan) and she ordered herself a new 27″ iMac computer.

Myself you ask? Well I went nuts in several smaller ways. I sold my MacBook Pro, used that money for a Nexus One. They will not mail them to Japan, so it is going to my father-in-law’s house in Beaverton where he will resend it to me here in Misawa. I’m anctious to see how well it works with SoftBank vs my current iPhone. Most of the threads I read about it are possative, but there is always that itch in the back of my mind hoping I can hack and overcome. Hopefully sometime early February I’ll know first hand if I tossed my MacBook Pro money into the trash or not.

The first thing I ordered with my tax return money was a Garmin Oregon 550 for Geocaching and hopefully navigation while driving around this place. I read about these devices for a while (since December at least) and this one turned out to be the most promasing for a do it all device. At the very least it will be fun to GeoCache with it.

The majority of the other things I ordered were for fitness or something I’ve needed for a while now. Like a heart rate monitor for my Garmin Forerunner 405 and a foot pod to go along with it for the winter months here (Lots of indoor running and treadmill action).

The last of the little things I’ve ordered is the first print book from J. C. Hutchins called “7th Son: Decent“.  I learned about this book some time ago when I downloaded the free Audiobook here. I’ve also ordered his other book (created with an accomplis) called Personal Effects: Dark Art. I highly suggest you visit this link so you can see how indepth he got with creating this story. You can investigate instencas of the story while reading it via online searching and clues from the story. The book also comes with a pocket filled with “Personal Effects” like the main charectars ID, Credit Card, PassPort etc. Very cool ideas here.

I fully intend on posting more about the hardware I’ve ordered. I’m extreamly excited about the Google Nexus One phone. That thing is currently the apex of what a cell phone can be right now.

I forgot to post about it, but just before we left for vacaion I received and installed my Linksys Switch. This removed a wireless router I was using, pulled all the cat5e into one device and sped my network speeds up internally more than I can explain.

Basically I used to have all the ports on my ADSL router filled up, all the ports on two wireless Linksys routers full and a couple on our Vonage router as well.

Now I’ve got one cat5 running from the bridged ADSL router into the back of the Linksys WRT54GL and one from the WRT54GL to my new Linksys 16 port Switch and all others plugged into that. It helped remendosly to ditch all the routers and replace them with a simple switch.

Tomato Linux is still running the WRT54GL so I feel pretty good about that. So far the wireless router (WRT54GL) has not had a glitch and seems to do very well at handing out IP addresses to the wireless devices and watching the static IP addresses of all the connected devices.

We’ve had some issues with the Linksys Vonage router but trusty MagicJack is in the house so we’ve always got a state side number on the books.

Just a quick note to let anyone connected via the rss feed that OpenLUG.com is BACK! Turns out Verizon does allow home based web sites; you just have to go ask for a “Bridged Router” instead of the locked down version they normally supply.

More to come as I update all the applications on here (WordPress, plugins and of course Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.4 when it comes out).