http://www.peta.org/Sea_Kittens/index.asp
http://www.fishinghurts.com/
I couldn’t even make this stuff up, Peta seems to be committed to making themselves progressively more ridiculous to get people to pay attention to them.
And, am I the only one who thinks that “Sea Kitten” actually sounds more appetizing than “fish”? “I’ll have the sea kitten sticks, please”. That has a nice ring to it 
After spending over a year with a nice HDTV, and no DVD player, just a VCR, I finally bought a DVD player for it. I was going to wait until I get paid, but I’ve run out of VHS movies that I haven’t seen a million times, and I watch a lot of movies while I’m working (there’s a severe lack of not-suck TV shows during the day). Plus, Wal-Mart unexpectedly had the exact model I saw at Crutchfield for $25 less 
I had forgotten just how sexy movies look on this TV, damn.
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On a side note, 85%-cocoa dark chocolate bars aren’t nearly as tasty as I thought they’d be (I love 60%-cocoa dark chocolate). It kinda tastes like solidified black coffee, and really hard. Why do foods describing themselves as being “for true aficionados” taste gross?
After making my last post about the issues I’m having with getting my laptop shipped, I decided to do some research on both Dell Precision models I’m considering (the m6400 that I initially ordered, and the m6300). Found some very interesting things out about both:
1. The m6400 is much newer than I thought, they just started shipping it in the US two weeks ago. Which explains the high lead time on building them; people who ordered them in August are just now receiving them, and people who ordered them yesterday were given shipping quotes in December.
2. The few people who have received the m6400, and who’ve posted about it, mention that the keyboard design is really flimsy. This is a problem in cheap backlit keyboards (I’ve owned several for my desktop computer), but I didn’t expect it to be an issue with a Dell laptop that’s being presented as a super-high-end flagship model.
3. The m6300, on the other hand, is a tried-and-true model that’s well-refined (despite looking much like its flimsy PoS cousin, the Inspiron), and receives constant high marks for build quality. I couldn’t find a single mention of “screen flop”, a problem on large Inspiron models (which share many casing similarities with the m6300). And, the keyboard on the 6300 receives many positive marks, with many reviewers calling it “second only to Lenovo”.
So, given this information (that I should have researched before jumping into a major investment like this), I think I will cancel my original order and get the Precision m6300. The 6400 is really nice, and I would like to have one, but given my timetable and usage habits, the m6300 looks like a better choice.
Thanks for all the feedback on my last post, I appreciate it.
Last week, I ordered a new laptop so I could work away from home, a Dell Precision m6400. It kicks tail, and it’s utterly gorgeous. Plus, it has a backlit keyboard, something I’ve been desperately wanting for years, to the point that I seriously explored the option of swapping the one in my current laptop with the keyboard from an Apple.
However, there’s a problem with this; the screen bezel is backordered until November 17th, which means that the earliest I’ll get my laptop is November 20th. That happens to be the day I arrive in Chicago for MFF, meaning I won’t have it at all for the trip. This is a problem because, if I get a big project at work or something (I won’t know stuff like that until, like, that week), I’ll need to be able to work remotely, and I can’t do it with my current laptop. Plus, my original travel plans extended the trip a bit. And, it interferes with my ability to travel before the con.
After talking to a bunch of supervisors, my only options are to wait, or cancel. If I wait, I get the laptop I truly want, but I won’t have it when I need it. If I cancel, the only other option that would get here in time is the Precision 6300, which is an older model, and can’t be built up to the same specs as the one I ordered (still a decent system, though). It also lacks the backlit keyboard, something that’s a huge disappointment, and borderline-dealbreaker.
Any advice?
EDIT: After some research, I’ve made the decision to cancel my initial order and go with the m6300. I’ve made a new post about this here.
A Rockingham County judge has ruled that that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s local field manager cannot vote in the presidential election.
Circuit Judge James Lane ruled Tuesday that Camron Gorguinpour failed to meet Virginia’s October 6 deadline for getting his voter-registration form into the county registrar. Gorguinpour claimed the delay was a result from malfeasance on the part of the Harrisonburg registrar’s office.
Lane says the case was simply human error, but couldn’t determine whether Gorguinpour or the registrar was at fault.
Gorguinpour declined to say whether he plans to appeal the decision.
Story: Obama Field Manager Can’t Vote
I have nothing to say about this, really, except that I find it somewhat amusing. Sucks, too.
Despite my efforts to the contrary, I had a really crappy day today.
Things started out just peachy; I saw how pretty the sky was, and I was up earlier than usual, so I decided to go off-roading and take autumn pictures of the forest. I’ve been itching to do that for a few weeks now, and I recently got a polarizing filter for my camera that I wanted to play with. I borrowed mom’s Blazer (my Rover is out of commission, currently), grabbed my gear, and headed for the mountains, taking lots of pictures.
Now, my mom’s Blazer isn’t as capable off-road as my Rover, but it does pretty well for a vehicle that was largely purchased by soccer moms. However, the trail I chose (selected for the greatest number of beautiful photo-ops) was rougher than I remembered, and it was a nerve-wracking experience to go down it without pulverizing the truck’s suspension. I thought I was ok at one point, but I encountered a rock that I just couldn’t get over. So, I had to go back down the trail, which involved driving over obstacles on a steep slope in reverse for over a mile before I could find an area wide enough to turn around in (these are mountain trails, where the road is narrow, and bordered by a cliff on one side, a sheer slope on the other). By the time I got back to the smoother area of the trail, I was a ball of nerves.
About that time, I realized that all the pictures I’d taken would probably be useless. See, my camera, despite being expensive and high-end, has ridiculous sensor noise. In order to take anything close to SLR-quality photos, I have to keep the ISO set to the lowest possible setting, 80. Above that (even 100), the pictures are unusable for anything bigger than 1024×768 images on my website. Now, this normally isn’t a problem, except that the Obama rally was last night, and I photographed it. An ISO of 80 is pretty darn difficult to work with in anything other than bright daylight or still-life, so I set it to 200, the maximum possible setting that doesn’t make the pictures look like they came from a 1st-gen camera-phone (400 looks grainier than Polaroid film, and 800 looks like analog TV with bad reception). Since those pictures weren’t great anyway, and they were just going on my website, it wasn’t a problem there, but I forgot to change it back to 80 when I started this journey. So, the first 150 pictures I took were probably going to be crap. It’s ok, though, the sun was still out, and I had to go back the way I came, so I’d just take a new set.
Then, the low fuel light came on. Great. I’m on a road that’s not even on the map, 20+ miles from the nearest gas station (almost 30 to the nearest station that takes credit cards, and I had no cash), and I now have to drive for 10 miles in first gear with the idiot-light on. I got out of there as fast as I could, and I just barely made it to the credit-card-accepting gas station. But, between the unexpectedly small gas tank, and the heavy clouds that rolled in on the way down the mountain, I only got a few retakes, and they weren’t very good.
I thought about going back up, there’s another spot I could go to that doesn’t require 4WD. But, at that point, I was down to my last hour of daylight, and with the events of the day, I just wanted to go home. It was freezing cold anyway, which made it hard to be out of the car for very long, and that kinda kills the point of going out there in the first place. I go to the mountains to commune with nature, to be alone in the forest, just me and the trees for miles in every direction. When I have to bundle up to keep from freezing, and/or get in the car every 5-10 minutes, it’s just not the same experience.
So, I came home, and checked a forum I admin, to find a bunch of members whining over a policy decision I made this morning. Normally not a big deal, but I really wasn’t in the mood to deal with that bullshit, so I took care of it much more aggressively than I normally would. It feels good to do that every once in awhile, as much as I hate to admit it.
Then, I checked my email, to find that my laptop can’t be shipped any sooner than November 19th because the display bezel is backordered. I spent $4500 on a laptop, and they can’t ship it for a month because of the $20 piece of aluminum. That pissed me right the fuck off, so I tried to call the helpful lady I talked to before, figured I’d see if the extension she gave me works. It went to her voicemail. It seems that the hours in her email signature are the hours for the call center, not the hours she’s actually there. I tried to transfer to a manager, no luck; their system is broken, and the extension that the voice prompts claim will send me to a supervisor is a circular redirect. So, I called again, and jumped into the queue this time. I spoke to someone who seemed fairly helpful at first, until she found out that I already had a case ID in the system. Because of that, the only person I could speak to was my agent, or her supervisor, neither of whom were available. I responded via email, hoping that it would be received by someone.
And, on top of all this, I’m way behind on hours at work because I’ve spent too much time finishing up leftover work from when I was unemployed for so long. And because I utterly fail at time management, but I’m getting better at that. I’ve just been trying to do too much.
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Pictures from the Obama rally, New York, and today’s adventure (what few usable ones there are) will be coming soon. For now, I just needed to vent, because this day fucking sucked.
There’s an Obama rally in Harrisonburg tomorrow! I’m totally going, and I’ll try to get some pictures
Manassas, Virginia was the first US city to see a real, non-trial launch of broadband over powerline (BPL) technology. However, BPL has floundered the last few years because of its inherent potential for interference with amateur and emergency radio, its irrelevance in the face of next-generation speeds, and the unavoidable fact that many utilities simply didn’t want to be broadband providers. Manassas was a particular hotbed of interference debate, with enthusiasts complaining the FCC (who for years cheerleaded the technology a little too enthusiastically) didn’t properly test the network and used bogus data to make the case for BPL.
The FCC’s dream technology, embraced in the hopes it would help them obfuscate the fact their policies have created an uncompetitive duopoly, hasn’t been faring well. Last May, a flagship BPL trial in Dallas operated by DirecTV and Current Communications was sold to the local utility. The network DirecTV and Current Communications had hoped would offer BPL service to 2 million residents — is now being used for smart-electrical grid monitoring. After five-plus years of the BPL industry insisting each year would be “the year of BPL,” it looks like 2008 may be known as the year that BPL died. It’s estimated the technology never saw more than roughly 5,000 subscribers, most of them trial participants.
Comtek, the company who originally built the Manassas network, has read the tea leaves and begun focusing on smart electric grid technology like Current Communications. Comtek was somewhat obnoxious when it came to complaints from ham enthusiasts in Manassas, claiming that interference didn’t exist, and that ham groups like the ARRL were engaged in a “campaign to turn back the clock on broadband in the United States.” These days Comtek wants no part in the network it hyped for years, and the city has taken control of the network:
ComTek was supposed to sell the technology — used to provide basic Internet capabilities to residents and businesses — to Smart Grid LLC. However, the deal fell through this year. Instead of axing the program right away, the council decided to keep the service for the roughly 675 customers until April, when it will be on the budget cutting room floor for fiscal 2010.
In other words, another network that was supposed to be a shining example of broadband over powerline’s promise is likely going to be shelved. The city may potentially keep the network operational to monitor the city’s electric grid, but says the technology simply isn’t viable as a major broadband option. That’s something we’ve been saying for going on half a decade, though many didn’t want to hear it.
2008: The Year Broadband Over Powerline Died at DSL Reports - Oct 16, 2008
For those who’ve never heard of this, BPL (short for Broadband over Power Lines) is a technology that, on the surface, is a brilliant idea. The idea is to transmit high-speed data over power lines using radio waves, because the infrastructure is already in place. However, there is a serious flaw in this line of thinking. Typically, high-speed data transmissions are carried over well-shielded coaxial cables (single wire, commonly used in radio antennas), tightly-twisted wire pairs (used in telephone and network cables), or fiber optic cables. All of these wire/cable technologies are specifically designed for two things; keeping the signal inside the wire where it belongs, and keeping outside signals out of the shielding. Power lines, on the other hand, are bare copper, with no shielding outside of buildings, and no twisting to cancel interferance. Plus, many rural power lines are fairly old, with high resistance. In radio terms, this sort of wire works better as an antenna, not a carrier line. So, when trying to transmit radio signals over power lines, more of the signal is transmitted outward more than is carried through to the next node, requiring the signal to be re-generated every few hundred yards, creating massive amounts of interferance.
Since BPL equipment operates in frequency bands already allocated to other users (as with most networking technologies), this creates significant interferance issues, particularly in emergency and amateur radio bands. I’ve been following the news regarding BPL deployment and interferance research for a very long time, actually, it was what brought amateur radio to my attention in the first place, and it was what sparked my interest in the mechanics of radio waves.
So, in short, this is excellent news. BPL has always been a poor delivery method for long-range networking, and I’m quite pleased to see the only real US deployment of it finally failing. Hopefully, we can now focus on rural broadband delivery methods that will actually work, like “white space” wireless technologies.
I don’t normally make posts while I’m travelling, especially when I don’t have my own computer handy, but I had to share this. We saw a play on Broadway tonight, Equus, and to my surprise, Kate Mulgrew was in it, with a pretty big role! That totally made my night, it was so great! She’s one of my all-time favourite actresses, not just because she was my favourite Star Trek captain, but because she’s incredibly talented, and can portray a wide variety of characters well.
Unfortunately, she didn’t come out the front door to sign autographs, but the fact that I had the chance to see her in a live show (something I’ve often dreamed about, but that I never thought I’d do) was definitely on the list of “Greatest Life Experiences”.
