On The Midway

Took a brief tour of the Midway while I was in San Diego. In addition to some nice sunburns, I got a good impression of how big (and how small) an aircraft carrier is. For such a large vessel it's quite cramped inside:


There was a wide variety of aircraft parked on the flight deck. I was quite surprised at how small the Huey was; I always got the impression that it was a much bigger aircraft.



I took this photo of one of the nuclear carriers moored at San Diego (I think it's the Ronald Reagan), framed by the flight deck of the Midway:

CoinStar Sucks

I had used the CoinStar counting machine once before, to count up my pennies when I had a bunch of them accumulated. They charge 8% of your change value for the convenience of counting it, which I considered a little steep, so I had the rest of my change counted somewhere they don't charge you anything (South Lake Tahoe).

However, I'd seen ads about using the machines to convert change into gift cards (with no fee). And I figure I hit Starbucks often enough to justify getting a card. So I went in today with my accumulated change, dumped it in (about $65 worth), and picked "Give me a new Starbucks card".

The machine took about a minute or two grinding away thinking about it, apparently couldn't contact the mothership, pope, Grand Poo Bah or whatever controlling entity it uses, and said "Nope. Can't do it. I'm giving you cash instead."

And they charged me the 8% fee. No choices, no options, no "choose another gift card", no "give me my change back".

Needless to say, CoinStar is now on my black list.

Still Warm

It's 2:30 in the morning and it's still 84 degrees inside my house. I've had the fan running since 6pm and it barely made a dent. I like warm weather as much as the next guy, but this is just silly.

Bad Day

My plan for today was to get a haircut and have new tires put on my car for the track day on monday. Unfortunately it seems like I got a bit too much sun in San Diego, and came down with a bit of sun/dehydration sickness.

And, let me tell you, today was a lousy day to be sick.

My house has no air conditioning. Most days that isn't a problem; Mark put in sufficient insulation to keep the temperature down to a reasonable level for most of the year. Excepting those few days where it gets really hot.

For those of you that haven't guessed by now, today was one of those days when it got really hot. And instead of doing what I normally do on those days, which is either going in to work or finding some excuse to hang out in the mall, I was either on my couch or in my bed trying to sleep.

I have a fan set up that's pulling some air through the house, giving me a little bit of a breeze. It seems like it's pretty ineffective -- the thermostat inside the house says it's 92 degrees -- until you go outside the house, and realize that, yes, it's effective. Because outside it's a balmy one-oh-three.

Fortunately I'm feeling a bit better now (I'm complaining, which is a sign of good health), so it may be time for a quick jaunt to, well, anywhere that has AC.

Sunny San Diego

I'm in San Diego for a conference, which has more or les swound down, so I got a little bit of time today to play tourist. I went and toured the Midway, which has been turned into a museum. For such a large vessel, it's amazingly cramped. Apparently by the end of its service it was carrying almost a thousand more crew than it was designed for.

I took a bunch of photos, but I'm waiting until I'm back home (tomorrow) to dump them on to my computer.

I'm now linked

Sachin just shot me an invite to LinkedIn, a business-oriented social networking site. Of course, I probably don't need to tell you that, because apparently I'm the last one in the world to create an account there...

I've spent a couple hours that I could have spent productively checking my email or reading news online (well, I suppose I could have worked, but that just doesn't sound nearly as appealing) sorting through my contact list and seeing who had an account there. The answer: pretty much everyone.

The answer? Pretty much everyone. The only ones I found who didn't have an account were Jeff and Adam. Even Grace had an account.

I'm so behind.

What I Want for Christmas

I need one of these. Seriously.

MS Selling Spyware?

A recent class-action suit filed in Washington and California is suing Microsoft for violating the spyware laws of those states. This article in the Register about the "Windows Genuine Advantage" (a.k.a. "cripple your computer if you're using a non-verified copy of Windows") program talks about what MS says WGA does, and what it actually does (a lot more).

One of the interesting parts of this was the relevant portion of the Washington state anti-spyware law that's being used:

(1) Induce an owner or operator to install a computer software component onto the computer by intentionally misrepresenting the extent to which installing the software is necessary for security or privacy reasons or in order to open, view, or play a particular type of content; and

(2) Deceptively cause the execution on the computer of a computer software component with the intent of causing the owner or operator to use the component in a manner that violates any other provision of this section.

I'm sure they'll manage to weasel their way out of the "intentionally" part through a finely-developed case of corporate amnesia ("We did what? I'm sorry, we deleted all records of everything we did more than 30 days ago. I forget. Next question?"), but perhaps a little bit of public shame would clairify things.

Pointing Out the Obvious

Microsoft and Cisco are backing a patent challege based on the "obviousness" clause of patent law, which states that an invention must be non-obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. It's been appealed to the Supreme Court, in the hopes that the court will put some teeth into the "obviousness" clause and stem the tide of 1-Click patents.

Murder Mystery

I just finished reading "The Black Dahlia" by James Ellroy, an author who was recommended to me. The book is set in post-WWII Los Angeles, and depicts a gritty, hardnosed police department with some shady mob connections, that isn't afraid to bend the rules every now and then to get a conviction.

The book is an engaging read, especially since you never actually meet the title character. Her life is revealed through interviews with her friends, associates, and ultimately with her murderer. There are no innocents in Ellroy's story -- all the characters have significant lapses in moral character, and even if the guilty are punished in the end, justice is not necessarily served.

This is the first book in a four-book series set in the same period (the most famous being "L.A. Confidential"), so I'll probably plow through the other three fairly soon.

Julia's Bike

Adam and I went dirt bike riding for the first time in about a month and a half. Had a good day (i.e. no one got hurt), then when we got back and put the bikes in the garage, we realized that Julia's bike (which has been living in my garage for the last few months) hadn't been started in a while, and she probably wouldn't be able to ride until she recovered.

Poor bike.

So we pulled the bike out and started it up. It was unhappy from sitting and had to crank for a while, but eventually it fired up. And then we figured we'd ride it around a little bit to warm it up. It's not a street bike, though, so where to do this?

We clearly needed to ride it around the back yard.



Hey, I wonder if you can do wheelies on this thing? Let's find out...



Why, I do belive you can.

Rest assured, Julia, your bike is in good hands.

Ethanol Wars

A CNN article with a new take on Ethanol -- according to the article, the adoption of ethanol is a foregone conclusion, and the only debate is over what it will be made from. The most straightforward answer -- sugar -- is apparently complicated by subsidies and the corn lobby, which make it too expensive to import sugar (it competes with high fructose corn syrup. If you wonder why every soft drink and candy bar contains it, that's why).

But corn is not efficient to use as a fuel. It's a high-maintenence crop -- you burn around a gallon of ethanol to create a gallon of corn ethanol to the pump.

So companies are looking into other ways to produce ethanol. Importing refined sugar ethanol from Brazil is one possibility, but might run afoul of the corn lobby, again. The big-bet alternative seems to be making ethanol from the non-edible portions of plants (or non-edible plants). This is where the President's oddball comment about "switchgrass" in his state-of-the-union address comes from.

Also interesting is that the increased ethanol content in new gasoline has apparently doubled the price of fuel-grade ethanol.

Broken Skate

I managed to break my hockey skate at a game the other night. In my first shift, unfortunately, which pretty much canned the rest of the night for skating. I did a pretty good job of it, too:
You can see the whole frame has separated from the bottom of the boot. You can't really see it here, but all the rivets that hold the frame on have rusted completely through, and snapped. Also, there's a little crack in the frame around the third rivet.

I think I got my money's worth out of this pair.

"Interest Tapering Off"

According to a recent article I read, interest in embedded Linux is "tapering off". Which just goes to show that sometimes it doesn't matter so much how many design wins you have, as who those wins are.

Witness this article which said that:

Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, NEC, Samsung, Panasonic and Motorola are joining forces to work on an open source operating system for mobile phones based on Linux.

To me, this says two things: first, that the handset manufacturers see that the money is in services and applications, and not as much in the handset or its operating system. Second, that they have no interest in paying per-set royalties so that all phones run on WinCE.

Interesting to see that Nokia, which is also interested in Linux for mobiles, isn't on the list...

New Blog

I've created a 12 Shots Blog for discussion/announcements, since it seems like we're on track for that...

Disingenuous

The ACLU has brought a lawsuit against the U.S. government over its warrantless wiretapping program. The government has sought to have the case dismissed on the rather disingenuous grounds that the plaintiffs aren't sure they're directly affected by the program.

Coppolino said that the plaintiffs' beliefs that they are among the likely targets are insufficient to establish that they have been directly affected by the program.

"You don't get standing by saying the president has a program, and I'm concerned it might cover me," he told the judge.

Of course they aren't sure. You won't say who's targetted and who isn't. By that logic, conveniently, no one has grounds to challenge the program because no one can be sure they're on the list.

Creative lawyering is bad enough when it's being used to, oh, say, get O.J. off the hook for killing Nicole. But it's really disturbing when it's used by the government to pass of its activities as legal.

E85 Hits the West Coast

A gas station in San Diego has started selling a wide variety of fuels, including E85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) and BioDiesel. Once you get over the heart-stopping price of high-grade gas ($3.73, read it and weep), a couple interesting things come out of the sign: bio-diesel is only $.10 a gallon more expensive than dino diesel, and E85 is a whopping $.74/gallon cheaper than high-grade gasoline (a fair comparision, since E85 is about 100-105 octane).

Of course, at present, the only cars that can use E85 are cars that come dual-fuel from the factory, or pre-'74 cars that have been modified to run on ethanol. But it's a start.

Banlieu 13

Saw "District B13" tonight, which is a French maritial arts/action film. Adam and I laughed at the plot synopsis, since it's basically a re-done "Escape from New York". But it was a well done film, and enjoyable as such -- lots of long-running chase scenes, mostly on foot. Parts were very similar to this Russian Climbing video. If reading subtitles doesn't bother you (and it's an action film, so you can probably figure out what's going on anyways), then I'd recommend it.

The backstory of the movie is that a neighborhood is so full of undesirables and criminals that it gets walled off from the rest of the country, and services within the wall are gradually cut off. Then the government "loses" a low-yield neutron bomb and sends in a super-duper SWAT guy along with a local Robin Hood-type character to get it back.

Proof that you can still make a good film without spending $100M or blowing up everything in sight. Come to think of it, nothing blows up in the entire movie...

12 Shots Rides Again

Had lunch with Jon and Ethan (and Ethan's minion) today, and around stuffing our faces with burritos, Jon raised the prospect of ressurecting 12 Shots as a charity event. His reasoning was that the original charter of 12 Shots as a big house party had run out of steam as the organizers got older (and got married, chimes in Guy), and that we needed a different motivation to bring people together. A charity event, where people give $10 or so at the door, and the proceeds go to someone relatively noncontroversial, seems like a good thing to organize around.

Personally, I think people could be talked out of $20 for a charity event. Since 12 Shots XII finished up with roughtly 800 people, and we didn't really have any desire to throw an event that size, I don't have any problem upping the donation amount a wee bit. Besides, you feel better if you can say you rounded up $4000 for charity...

Also, after some reflection, I realized that getting drunk for charity has a long and honorable tradition. It's just that people usually dress better when they're doing so.

Spectrum Plot

Ran across an article for the GnuRadio project, an open-source software radio implementation. One of the most interesting things was seeing a spectrum plot of the radio frequencies between 0 and ~450kHz, and which ones are used and unused.

The theory of a software radio is you could put a single, fairly simple chunk of hardware on your computer, and at that point it could transmit and receive pretty much anything -- walkie-talkies, AM/FM radio, GPS, HDTV, you name it.

All of a sudden a few geeks have scared the crap out of the FCC and MPAA. The FCC because, well, airspace is their turf, and the MPAA because they see control of transmission mediums as a way to prevent "piracy".

Anyways, the spectrum plot is interesting because, among other things, it shows how little of the existing broadcast spectrum is being used in everyday life. Software-defined radios are already here in a number of commercial products -- we'll see if open-source SDR results in cool new tech or nasty new leglislation. Or both.