Category Archives: General

Geek Stuff, General

HWAS Data

If you want to know what the weather is like at our house, try this link: HWAS20Data, even though they are a few miles south of us. The Airfield is 12 km SE; the stadium is about 7 km SE. I don’t know where the rest of them are. I suspect that most are on the south end of the Academy; North Ridge and Lewis Palmer might be on the North side. I wonder if Aardvark is Jack’s Valley. If it is, that’s only a quarter mile away.

The academy has a lot of gliders, parachutists and small planes in the air all over the base, so they need weather info from a number of sources, especially since the mountains will twist the air at one end of the academy and the other end will never notice. (Watch out for wind sheers!)

General

Still waving

I was at the Post Office the other morning and noticed that the flag was at half-staff and I was wondering about that as I continued on to work since I hadn’t heard of anyone dying recently. Or, at least not a death that would cause the flag to be at half-staff (grunts in Iraq don’t count). When I got to work I noticed our flag was at-full staff and I checked with the security guy when I went in but he hadn’t heard anything. We both thought it was probably Pearl Harbor Day. He said he would check it out. I looked into it a bit later and found that yes, indeed, there are four times a year when the flag is flown at half-staff, as a matter of course. Peace Officer’s Day, Korean Armistice Day, Patriot Day and Pearl Harbor Day. ( When and How to Display Our Flag)

I checked later in the day and they hadn’t bothered to lower the flag. I guess they had better things to do.

And just to note, a Mast is on a ship, a Staff is on land.

General, Politics, Reviews

Long May It Wave

I thought “West Wing” opened with a nice bit by Penn and Teller last night. As part of a magic trick they were performing at the White House, they folded up an American Flag (correctly), wrapped it up in the Bill of Rights, went ‘poof’- ‘flash’, and the flag disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving the Bill of Rights unscorched. And one of the on-going sub-plots for the rest of the show was getting the “White House” to condemn the ‘burning of the Flag’ in the White House, at a private birthday party.

It might have been more political to have had them fold up the Bill of Rights into the Flag, and then, ‘poof’-‘flash’, the Bill of Rights disappears, and the flag is left unsullied. But that might be getting too obscure and would have ruined the following sub-plot. Hard to imagine the press corps getting worked up about the alleged destruction of the Bill of Rights in the White House.

I thought the writers missed a good, cheap shot when the Josh Lyman character is trying to jump on Penn (he’s a pretty big dude) to announce that they did not burn the flag and to explain how the trick was done and Penn denies him with a stirring speech on just what the Bill of Rights is all about. Josh then asks if Penn went to law school and Penn replies, “No, clown school.” And, what Josh didn’t say was, “Pretty much the same thing” or something like that. A missed opportunity.

General

Colorado Springs, Colorado

This is where I live, and have lived for the past 12 years. Colorado Springs, Colorado – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Wikipedia is a nice little reference source. I never knew that Leeann Tweeden used to work at the Hooters here. (That would be the one down at the Citadel.) Of course, I have no idea who Leeann Tweeden is, but Wiki provides a link to follow.

And here is the Wiki link to the state of Colorado. Amazing what you can learn about a place you’ve lived in for years.

General, Reviews

GreenCine – Online DVD Rental, For People Who Like To Watch

GreenCine | main member – Online DVD Rental, For People Who Like To Watch I use the Greencine DVD rental service and I enjoy it quite a bit. They have a wide and eclectic selection of DVDs and for some reason I am focusing on anime and Asian fight movies.

They have a nice queueing setup to keep series in order so you don’t see the final episode before the previous episodes. Also, they don’t seem to have a limit on the number of titles you can have in the queue, so, everytime I see something by a director or actor I can say add all and they will put all the titles in the queue.

I have calculated that my queue is now 7 1/2 years long , and that’s after pruning it back a couple of years.

To many videos, not enough time.

Geek Stuff, General, Politics

Telecoms Winning the WiFi War (washingtonpost.com)

Telecoms Winning the WiFi War (washingtonpost.com) This article in the WP discusses how the Pennsylvania legislature is passing a bill that will prevent local municipalities from setting up Wi-fi networks and providing free or low-cost internet access to its citizens, in competition with the local Telco. If the muni wants to do this it needs to talk to the LEC (usually Verizon in PA). If the LEC can’t commit to delivering a local Wi-fi network in 14 months then the muni can deploy their own. Philadelphia has already got permission from Verizon to go ahead with its Wi-fi network that has been i the plannig stages for awhile. (evidently this is what sparked the legislation in the first place. )

So why wouldn’t every muni in PA immediately go to the LEC and make the request RIGHT NOW? Verizon hasn’t bothered to widely deploy broadband services for several years. Why should they start now. And then, in 14 months, the Muni’s that don’t have a Wi-fi network can build their own if they have the interest then, or the money. Just because they start the clock ticking now doesn’t mean they have to build anything in 14 months, but at least they have the option.

General, Reviews

The Avengers

Over several years I have been collecting the DVD set of the original 1960’s Avengers. I have been looking at some of the last Patrick Macnee/Linda Thorson episodes this weekend. And then realized that I am missing one last set of DVDs, the one with the final episode. Arrrggghhh! I was hoping I wouldn’t have to go out this weekend.

The Avengers is one of my favorite TV shows of all time, especially the Diana Rigg episodes. Didn’t really care for Tara King as a sidekick for Steed. She was too young for the part. But, it was the writing, more than anything, that left me with such fond memories of the original airings and made me glad to find the DVDs. The stories were often over the top and silly, but they were so well done, the silliness was part of the flavor.

On a message board over at IMDB Someone asked a question about who would be good actors to play Peel and Steed in a new series. I don’t think we can bring back Peel and Steed. They were defined 40 years ago by the original actors and that’s done. The best you can do today is develop a new show with the same quality writing and let a new generation of actors define a new set of characters.

I don’t have enough familiarity with the modern crop of British actors to suggest a “Steed” character. I wonder how the guy who played Hamish has matured? I can’t see someone like a Hugh Grant carrying it off. It’s got to be someone who acts in their thirties and has the “gravitas” to carry off the physical activities. Maybe one of the MI 5 actors?

The “Peel” character is the tricky one. I think Thorson’s main problem, aside from her age, is that she didn’t have the same physicality that Diana Rigg did. And it seems to be harder to find actresses with a physical presence today, many seem to want to waste away into good-looking wraiths. Jessica Alba, Geena Davis, Uma Thurman, Brigid Fonda; all have done good action roles. I liked Halle Berry as Jinx but I don’t know if she has that right degree of “physicality” I am looking for. Again, I think the actress as to be acting as a thirty-something; the character has to have some life experience under her belt before tackling Intercrime, or the Cybernauts, or the Hellfire Club…

An interesting project, to be sure. I thought the Avengers Movie, from several years ago, was rather poorly done, mainly in the writing. As I remember it, Fiennes as Steed and Thurman as Peel did well fitting into the characters as defined. And letting Connery ham it up as the villain was in character for the series. It was certainly silly enough. The Writing, and Directing, just sucked.

General

White Hats

I think I have heard of this being done on a small scale, but why doesn’t the good hacker community, the ‘white hat hackers’, write anti spam-bots that will go out and clean up all the hi-jacked systems that are sending out spam because some little virus told them too. Distribute the good viruses the same way bad ones are done and you should reach most of the infected boxes in a hurry. And the good bots could close all the trap doors and do stuff to prevent a PC from being re-infected, inoculate them.

And just to make sure the user knows, after all the clean-up is done, a little message pops up to tell the prat what was done to help them out.

I’ll bet the white hats could stay ahead of the black hats, easily. Wish I was a hacker…

General, Politics

Government Priorities

I believe that one of the government’s greatest responsibilities is to protect its citizens, the People that the Government is for, from the inhuman entities that rule most of society’s financial life. I speak, of course, of corporations.

On the whole, I support the principle of corporations. A corporation provides a means for a group of people to create and develop goods and services that can’t be done by individuals, even individuals trying to work together as a group. But they need to be watched closely, monitored and reined in at all times. Unfortunately, it appears that the group mentality needed to make a corp work overrides a lot of the individual cares and concerns that the government should be concerned with. There is plenty of historical precedent with the manufacturing industries, the rail industries, the mining industries, the shipping industries, the banking industries the insurance industries, the petroleum industries, the agriculture industries, the textile industries… Are there any industries that haven’t abused the group power of corporation?

At the simplest level, I think it starts when the person who hires an individual isn’t the one who pays the individual. The hirer is an agent for someone else and may have the power to hire/fire/promote/ individuals, even say how much they will be paid, but the wages come from somewhere else. This is the beginning of a corporation. At this point the worker starts to lose the ability to negotiate face to face with the persons ultimately in charge since the they are distant or a distributed group.

At this point, the government should be providing some oversight, ensuring basic employee rights and minimum wages.

Once a corporation is selling stock for public ownership the government should be monitoring these public companies to make sure they are not lying to the public and that they are following generally accepted accounting principles. As someone who worked for WorldCom, I really, really would have liked to see a little more oversight of public companies.

There are plenty of historical incidents that demonstrate that corporations do not act in the best long-term, or short-term, interests of the citizenry. And that Corporations will use their money to buy social and political influence to weaken whatever monitoring is in place.

Once the People have been badly burned and have put strait-jackets on corporations to prevent them from repeating the sins of the past, everyone starts to game the system and tries to come up with a strait-jacket work-around. What’s even more mind boggling is that these are individual citizens that are working to screw the rest of the country. Part of the game is to avoid taking responsibility for the negative impacts that the gaming will produce.

to be continued