Ramblings of a Wayward Code Slave

I just read a post on Slashdot about the communications problems we're experiencing down here in Louisiana and along the Mississippi coast. While everyone is lamenting the lack of communication into and out of the coastal areas hit by Katrina, remember that the mandate of Amateur Radio covers precisely these kinds of disasters. When the FCC established amateur radio and started licensing ham operators it was with this in mind. I'm an amateur radio operator and have enjoyed the hobby immensely and wish I could help out now, but my transceiver is in another part of the state at the moment.

The post I mentioned is copied below and is a great indicator of what ham operators can do. It seems that most people think of us as "10-4 good buddy" folks who profane the airwaves. Nothing could be further from the truth -- ham operators need to pass highly technical FCC licensing exams and adhere to a very stringent code of conduct on the air. If you'd like to check out amateur radio, look at the ARRL website and also the FCC website on the amateur radio service.


Re:Ham Radio (Score:5, Interesting)
by YrWrstNtmr (564987) on Tuesday August 30, @06:02PM (#13439824)

I just heard a short piece on NPR about this:

An 85 yr old woman was trapped on a rooftop. She somehow managed to get a cellphone call out to someone in Tulsa, OK. From there, the Red Cross took it, and asked for HAM assistance. From there, the message was relayed by ham ops to Idaho, then to Utah, then to [somewhere else], then down to the Coast Guard in Mobile, AL.

She was rescued.

Well, Nintendo has patented insanity. No joke. That itself is insane. I think I'll patent the Porky Pig "That's all, folks!" line and the Bugs Bunny "What's up, doc?" line and then charge royalty fees whenever a station plays a WB cartoon.

Pretty soon everything will be patented and you'll have to pay someone to break wind in the bathroom. Where oh where are you, patent reform?

The news is full of images of the damage and destruction in New Orleans and along the Mississippi gulf coast. Here in Lafayette we're getting what I think is good coverage from WAFB-TV 9 out of Baton Rouge. The Weather Channel, while being on the ground with a lot of information before and during the storm, has finally played the drama card and is now going for the heartache angle. I can only watch people with missing spouses, relatives, and/or homes twitch on camera for so long before I feel dirty and need a shower. If you want local news, try NOLA.com for it.

In the meantime, I've received a few images I'll share here. The first is a Red Cross truck in water so fast and deep that it has whitecaps. The second is what Venice, Louisiana, looks like post-Katrina. For those who don't know, Venice is the most southeast point in the state reachable by car and is also the closest anyone can get to the mouth of the Mississippi River without a boat. I've been to Venice. There are a lot of narrow streets snaking around the place and the water comes up to the road -- no shoulder, just water.

Well, I guess that Katrina didn't like being likened to a one-hit wonder from the '80s in my last entry. Deciding to become a three-hit wonder, it made landfall in Louisiana just east of Grand Isle and then made landfall again in Mississippi right around where Waveland and Gulfport are located.

Here in Lafayette I was safe -- we were on the western side of the storm and only got a bit of rain and 20-25 mph winds with 30 mph gusts. New Orleans isn't as lucky. WAFB in Baton Rouge is reporting that there is tremendous flooding, broken levees, wholesale looting, and bodies floating in the flood waters. It might be over a month before power is restored everywhere in the GNO area. My heart goes out to everyone in southeast Louisiana, south Mississippi, and Mobile.

My parents live in Laurel, Mississippi, and the eye passed right over the town. I haven't heard from them since 9 P.M. Sunday night, but they had 100 mph winds and Laurel is full of trees and telephone poles -- a bad combination. Back in 1979 we weathered 80 mph winds from Frederick and, while power was out for 4 days, the house had no damage. I'm hoping that it's a similar situation now. Their land line doesn't connect, which I had expected, but the cellphone isn't operational, either. It turns out that, for most carriers, their switching hubs are in New Orleans and have gone down due to flooding and/or power loss. So I'm worried, but hopeful.

As a final note, upon returning to Lafayette on Sunday I took some photos of the sunset in town. The cloud bands from Katrina made an impressive and beautiful sight in the evening sun. It's ironic that the most devastating creations of nature can create such a sight. You can click on the images for their larger versions, approximately 640 x 480.

Back in the mid-'80s there was a band called Katrina and the Waves who were one-hit wonders with the song "Walking on Sunshine." I just thought this morning that Katrina, waves, and walking on sunshine is ironic. I know, it's a sickness. It's even worse when you realize that I've been waiting 20 years to point this out. The older I get the more I feel like George Costanza.

We were recently treated to yet another brilliant comment by a TV evangelist, this time Pat Robertson. Proving yet again -- in the same vein as Oral Roberts and Jim Baker -- that piety and hypocrisy are oft-times bedfellows, dear Mr. Robertson suggested on Monday that the United States assassinate Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. He backpedaled on Wednesday, indicating that kidnapping was perfectly acceptable to him. My, what a humanitarian. Yo Pat, that funny feeling in the pit of your stomach is your foot. You shoved it in your mouth and just kept going all the way down to the kneecap. Since I think it has no chance of being extricated anytime soon, you'd better learn to hop on and off the 700 Club stage. Maybe you can start a "Free My Foot" donation campaign.

And to think that this guy ran for President a number of years back...

I don't have much of a love for lawyers, bankers, and advertisers. Lawyers are opportunistic barracudas, bankers are lawyers with better hours, and advertisers are pushy little twits who live to put Preparation H and Tampax commercials on TV at dinnertime. However, while lawyers and bankers can do more damage to an individual, advertisers are more intrusive and annoy on a much more consistent basis.

Being the drug pushers of the commercial world, it's the job of advertisers to think of new and inventive ways to plaster whatever they're hawking in your line of sight. Now, as if billboards weren't big enough already, there are Bluetooth-enabled billboards that search for Bluetooth devices in a 100m radius and beam ads to the devices. The idea is to send ads to cellphones whose owners are able to see the billboard. Oh jolly, just what I wanted. It's been my lifelong desire to shoot past a billboard of Billy Joe's Chevy-GMC-Nissan and have my phone pick up a coupon for free mud flaps.

According to the advertisers, you have to approve the ad before it will download. Oh, that's great. So am I eventually going to drive down the Houston freeway and, before I'm done, have 73 download requests? It's better than 73 ads, I guess. The advertisers also say that no viruses can be transmitted, but there's been JPEG hacks and other file format hacks that can crash devices. Additionally, advertisers are adopting the spammers' favorite tactic -- the opt-out. While you can't opt out of getting these download requests on your phone, advertisers indicate that you set Bluetooth on your phone so that it's not discoverable to other devices.

If you ask me, Bluetooth is the virus. I don't want a phone with Bluetooth and, in fact, I got rid of my old cellphone that had it. It was a security risk, it drained the battery fast, and I never really needed it unless I wanted to use the cordless headset. Now I have a corded headset, no Bluetooth, and the battery last three times as long before a recharge is needed. No thank you, advertisers of the world, the space on my cellphone is not for rent. Go blow it out your billboard.

Not being specific about where or over what, I received a fair amount of praise recently from several people for doing something right. While my normally bruised and battered ego basked in the glow from these nice words -- as well as my chest puffing out and my head swelling ever so slightly -- I was somewhat taken aback by the fact that I did something that was neither extraordinary nor particularly wonderful. I just did something the right way, that's all.

As a teacher at heart and a former teacher by profession, I'm somewhat depressed by the idea that doing something right, or doing it the right way, garners such attention. I'm forced to ponder the question of why. Why is it that the unacceptable has become the acceptable, the barely passable and uninspired has become the norm, and the ordinary has become the magnificent? When I was in school teachers routinely demanded a level of effort and mastery that today would be considered outstanding. Have standards lowered while none of us were looking? Or is it that we saw and just didn't care? Is this an extension of political correctness, where nobody does a bad job but are simply "overly-challenged outside of their sphere of talent?" I don't know when people stopped having high standards, but it scares me.

As a teacher I always demanded a lot of my students, as most of them will probably tell you. A certain fraction of them probably remember me with less than fond reminiscence, but they learned the material they needed even if they didn't understand why at the time or enjoy the process. My job wasn't to get them to like me or to get them to enjoy the material -- it was simply to teach them the course material that the faculty decided they needed to know, in keeping with ABET accreditation guidelines. I certainly hoped that they would like me and/or that they would enjoy the material -- and I tried to make it interesting, where possible -- but these were merely hopes and not expectations.

I don't know when and I don't why everything changed. I suspect that it's due to a lack of parental caring and supervision that has led to a lowering of expectations in the classroom which has manifested itself in society as a subsequent lowering of expectations there as well. I suppose I could jump up on a soapbox and start lecturing on parental supervision and education, but I'm still lamenting the sorry state of things too much to give it an effort. Are you disappointed? Are your expectations of me higher than that? Lord knows I hope so.

The Road Warrior, Part IV: A Piece of the Rock

This past Saturday, my wife and I decided to make a pilgrimage to Little Rock, Arkansas, about three hours north of where we live in Ruston. Located at the junction of I-30, I-40, US 165, and US 167, Little Rock is almost exactly in the center of the state and is about equidistant from Tulsa and Memphis. From Ruston it's a breeze to get there since US 167 goes right to it, but the trip is 90% two-lane roads and there's precious little to see until you get there. Drivers from Oklahoma would get a better view as they would pass through the Ozarks on the way there.

Little Rock is an attractive city. Located in what I would call the foothills of the Ozark and Ouachita Mtn. ranges, it's primarily a valley with the occasional hill sprouting up in the midst of things, much like a teenager's complexion ... except good. Their downtown area by the Arkansas River is both vibrant and stylish, catering to the yuppie crowd with specialty stores, art galleries, and upscale eateries, none of which we had the money to go visit; nevertheless, they were nice to see even from the truck.

Our first stop upon getting to Little Rock was this cool-looking glass building set apart from the downtown area but right on the river just next to this old but cool bridge. Upon closer inspection, we found that it was the William Jefferson Clinton Memorial Library. Ole' Willy must have greased quite a few palms to get this baby built. I wonder if the Monica Lewinsky Hall of Shame is in there? If it is, it's probably bare except for a humidor and a dry cleaning ticket. Incidentally, the fountains outside are very stylish and, even though you can't see it in the picture very well, churn up some Whitewater. I couldn't resist...

There's an article in Bruce Schneier's current Crypto-Gram on Secure Flight, the government's new flight screening software. The proposal for the CAPPS-II system was killed by Congress in 2003 for being so horribly invasive to individual privacy, so Secure Flight was designed as the leaner and less invasive phoenix rising from its ashes. Apparently, however, the old bird lives on because Secure Flight is currently designed to use commercial data about passengers that Congress killed in CAPPS-II, i.e., the Transportation Security Administration is trying to do an end-around and turn Secure Flight into CAPPS-II. The main problem here is that the TSA violates federal law -- the Privacy Act. This was reported by the GAO but was worded so that it seems that the TSA might just get a small slap on the wrist and the whole deal therby is glossed over. Read the article for more information.

It was just back in May that I was complaining about how Louisiana is so poorly depicted in films -- how we either get the Bourbon Street crime dramas or the backwoods horror movies. Well, Hollywood did it to us again. This time the culprit is The Skeleton Key, a horror flick that, based upon the reviews, is a cliche of a cliche. We're supposed to believe that there's this murderous grandma down in Terrebonne Parish who practices folk magic and makes John Hurt's life miserable. Thanks guys, that's just what Louisiana needs: a born-on-the-bayou witch to go along with our cannibals, decapitation-loving rednecks, and voodoo priestesses. The only stereotype you Hollywood types haven't stretched to the breaking point yet is that of the corrupt Louisiana politician. How about do a House of Wax remake but with Edwin Edwards and set it on Bourbon Street? Oh I'm sure you'll love that...

Pick on another state for a change. Ohio, maybe. Cleveland ("The Mistake on the Lake") should be used to the bad press by now. Or how about something sinister in New Hampshire? Something evil lurking under the water of the Great Salt Lake in Utah? Demonic possession in Wyoming? Cannibalism in West Virginia? We've got 50 states and a number of possessions, so move the film freakshows out of Louisiana and out of the South for a while, okay?

Imagine my ire and consternation at being assaulted with more Michael Jackson news in the daily regurgitation of "what's fit to print." According to an article in the L.A. Times, two people who sat on the Jackson criminal jury now think that he's guilty and are accusing the other jurors of railroading them into "not guilty" votes. I think this is deserving of a few comments...

1. Being a juror means that you have to dig deep and have the courage of your convictions, even if those convictions mean that you stand alone against popular opinion.
2. Giving in to pressure from others not only invalidates the legal process but also is an injustice to society.
3. The time to speak up is not when you've announced that a book is in the works and that you're shopping for a publisher.

If these two thought that Jackson was indeed a child molester, they should have stayed the course even if that meant a hung jury resulted. At least with a hung jury the prosecution can have a retrial if they deem it's merited. Now, a retrial is all but impossible thanks to double jeopardy, a 5th Amendment right.

Both ex-jurors claim that their statements aren't based on their worship of the almighty dollar, but it seems quite coincidental that they both are shopping for book deals and they were also the only voices of dissention. Now that this has come to light, I think we can add plenty more voices of dissention, including mine, but directed at them. It's always so nice to see people going to the great media pawn shop and cashing in on a story. And with free advertising, to boot. Smooth move, you two ... smooth move. And thanks for doing nothing until it's too late. Jackasses.

The Road Warrior, Part III: Yahoo in Yazoo

My birthday was about a week ago and my wife gave me a new digital camera, the Sony Cybershot DSC-T7. People have given it mixed reviews, but I personally love it. At any rate, ever since I moved to Lafayette to work during the week my wife Julie and I make a road trip on Saturdays. This past Saturday was the first pictorial chronicling of said trips.

It all started out with me asking Julie where she wanted to go. "Yazoo City" was the reply. I asked "Why there?" She replied, "Have you ever been there?" "No," I said. The destination was thusly finalized.

We made it to Yazoo City in a bit over two hours. For those who don't know, you can take I-20 to Vicksburg, Mississippi, and then take US 61 north a few miles until you get to State Hwy 3. Yazoo City is about 35-40 miles up MS 3. You can certainly get to it from other directions (US 49, for instance), but since we were coming from north Louisiana this is the way we went.

Upon first arriving in Yazoo City, we were treated with a spectacular view of their sewage treatment facility and some Section 8 housing. I neglected to take pictures of these for some odd reason. We then landed on Broadway St. which introduced us to the seedy underbelly of town before revealing a more palatable area.