Driving home from work last night I didn't feel well. 30 minutes after I got home I was laying down. I stopped throwing up sometime before midnight, and I'm doing much better now. I guess I can't complain too much if I'm only sick for one day.

On the bright side, I didn't go to work, so I have time to do things I haven't done in ages, like post on 64Digits. I have little news.

I love my new job for the most part. I work at a local computer repair shop; exactly what I wanted to do. The boss/owner is a nice guy, and everyone is pretty close-knit. The only thing I dislike is selling Clear internet.

The technology behind Clear (WiMAX) is awesome, and I was delighted to discover that Boise would be one of the first ten cities anywhere to have it. The problem is that the company is having severe growing pains. The old version of the company, Clearwire had a customer base using some proprietary radio tech from Motorola that maxed out at about 1.5Mbps. The new WiMAX can go as fast as 10-11Mbps, although that's only if you are sitting under a tower.

Clear sent all its old customers new WiMAX modems free and recalled the old ones, which was nice of them. They took all their old towers and added a WiMAX "stack" to them, so you now have two networks running side-by-side. As the customer base suddenly switched to the brand-new (and much weaker) network, two things happened. Since the new higher-bandwidth WiMAX doesn't reach as far as the old tech, many customers on the fringes lost service. Second, we got an AT&T/iPhone scenario of a network constantly running at full capacity.

Customers love the higher speeds, but they don't like the extreme fluctuations at various times of day. They also don't like the handful of major outages we've had, or the firmware update that forces them offline while their modem merrily blinks away for an hour or so (I think the update servers caught fire).

Another annoyance is our reseller backend. Clear corporate has naturally spent far more time developing the customer's web pages than ours, and ours is ridiculously clunky.

However, I really enjoy the IT part of my job. It's also a nice to have 15Mbps internet and excellent business phone service. Until you use a copper-based PSTN phone system with the massive wired desk terminals, you won't realize how horrible cell, VOIP and cordless phones sound.

On another note, I've been having fun purchasing various odds and ends from DealExtreme. My most recent purchase is a self-winding mechanical watch. Here are some photos. The flash reveals just how much dirt it has accumulated in one week.

It's way too large and heavy, but the build quality is actually quite good - steel and heavy glass.

The half-circle weight on the back of it swings around as my arms move and winds the watch. So far it's been working. The smaller gold-colored wheel in the back is some kind of pendulum that rotates back and forth rapidly. I do not know why the bearing is pink.