VH1-Classic was on the TV as background noise while P and I played in the livingroom. We’d just flown back from the US, and our body clocks were still trying to come to grips with what was being asked of them.
On came Van Halen and their 80s video for their hit “Jump”. On went Eddie & Dave leaping around. Patrick, about four years old, looked up at the screen. “Look at the girl man!”
What’s to stop someone from creating a watch that beams a 3-foot radius looking for RFID goodies to tuck away for later?
From CNET’s news.com:
Passports to get RFID chip implants
October 25, 2005, 12:12 PM PDT
All U.S. passports will be implanted with remotely-readable computer chips starting in October 2006, the Bush administration has announced.
Sweeping new State Department regulations issued Tuesday say that passports issued after that time will have tiny radio frequency ID (RFID) chips that can transmit personal information including the name, nationality, sex, date of birth, place of birth and digitized photograph of the passport holder. Eventually, the government contemplates adding additional digitized data such as “fingerprints or iris scans.”
Over the last year, opposition to the idea of implanting RFID chips in passports has grown amidst worries that identity thieves could snatch personal information out of the air simply by aiming a high-powered antenna at a person or a vehicle carrying a passport. Out of the 2,335 comments on the plan that were received by the State Department this year, 98.5 percent were negative. The objections mostly focused on security and privacy concerns.
… snipped …
On Tuesday morning I was playing tennis. I ran across the court to try to make a return on a pretty fast ball. ZAP, I felt something snap or twist in my lower back that hurt like mad. I tried to force myself to play through it, but the pain kept slowly increasing. By that evening I found it hard to fall asleep because no position seemed comfortable.
This continued for the next few days, leaving me stuck in bed or on the couch unable to get around much. I had to walk carefully because at nearly any random moment, I might get hit by this piercing pain. On Thursday night I took some more medicine to help ease the swelling and let me fall to sleep.
This morning, it was feeling a bit better. Elana noticed that the lower-left of my back was swollen much larger than the right. We made an appointment and went to the local G.P.
After a few tests and examinations, he said it was most likely to be a pulled muscle in my back; not a slipped disc, as I’d started to fear. Two different places on the Net described slipped disc problems, and a lot of the symptoms seemed pretty similar.
We’re going to try to stick with a regular pattern on the meds, and keep me walking around more than I’ve done since it started. Some light stretches should also contribute.
We fly from the states back to Ireland next week. I’m reaaaaaaaaaally hoping this goes away enough for the flight to be livable. 🙂
According to a newspaper out of Atlanta, a [cracker] broke into a computer database at the University of Georgia. They were able to get access to “the Social Security numbers of employees in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and people who are paid from that department. More than 2,400 numbers, belonging to roughly 1,600 people, may have been exposed, UGA spokesman Tom Jackson said Wednesday.”
Umm … does that mean up to 800 of those people had at least two social security numbers?
I’m spending the night at the Logan Airport Hilton in Boston before flying to California tomorrow. Elana and Patrick are already out there and awaiting my arrival; E’s going to be picking me up.
Staying here is a much better idea than the original plan: up at 6am, leaving for Boston by 8, getting there about four hours later, and then sitting on a plane for nearly seven hours. It occurred to me thisk morning, but I didn’t actually do it until I mentioned it to E on the phone and she agreed it’d be much better to sleep well and not exhaust myself on the drive right before flying.
Instead, I’m able to relax and sleep in, with no pressure: just get my ass over to the checkin desk in time. I still miss E & P and can’t WAIT to get to see them tomorrow when I land.
However, getting to watch an important Red Sox game in a bar in Boston was a great distraction. The bartender had to share his opinions with nearly everyone working there—the guys keeping the tables clear, and the women doing a great job waiting on the tables. Coupled with a sly grin, he’d announce to them that the Yankees “really should’ve just stayed at home.” It was sometimes only a few minutes between each time he’d share this with someone new.
Sitting next to me at the bar were two couples, each clearly Bostonians somewhere in their 50s. The Red Sox hit a ball, they led the cheer. A ball hit by the Yankees is caught, they led the cheer. (The bar had at least fifty people in it, about half of them eating food and all of them drinking some form of alcohol from what I saw.)
The lady next to me, one of the wives, kept shouting, “Go Mike! Yeah Mike!” Her voice was just barely audible over the sound of her hands crashing together in boisterous applause. I didn’t need to use Google to guess the pitcher’s name.
Reuters confirmed what I heard on the radio driving into Boston about security at the game: “The Boston Globe reported that 876 officers and commanders would patrol Boston’s Fenway Park at each of the three games for the American League East title, which would guarantee the winner a spot in the playoffs.”
As I made my way onto Route 1 towards Logan, the radio commentators (all on AM stations, none of which came in well—what’s the “official” Boston Red Sox AM station to use??) criticized the umpire behind home plate. This was later echoed by one of the husbands standing at the bar: the ump seemed to wait a long time to actually signal whether or not it was a strike. On the radio, they theorized the player at bat heard the call before the ump finally decided to signal the official opinion to everyone else.
The lady next to me concurred on my conspiracy theory: much like George Bush in the debates, the ump probably had an earpiece making him wait to find out what his call was supposed to be.
Despite any of that, I learned that American Baseball is perfectly matched with a well-poured pint of Guinness. 🙂
One sleep ’til I see my darlings…
USA Today:
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) – The Danish Air Force said Thursday it paid about $5,000 in compensation to a part-time Santa Claus whose reindeer died of heart failure when two fighter jets roared over his farm.
For $10 I can get a self-contained package of VAX/VMS flashbacks.
According to the Energy Fiend: Death by Caffeine system,
185.25 cups of Starbucks Grande Caffe Latte + Me = Death
I’m helping with a project that needs three 100-foot lengths of CAT5 ethernet cable. And quickly. Fine, says I, this will be easy. I go online to TigerDirect.com, order them, and can’t get it to change the shipping from UPS Ground, but since it’s Friday hopefully it’ll make it in time. Well, up comes the order confirmation page showing me my order number and thanking me—and letting me know most orders will take 5-7 days because of a renovation or move or something at their warehouse.
Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!! There’s no way in hell it’ll make it. Why didn’t they warn me?
I call them on the phone (screw email), but the guy said it’s not yet in his system; it could be 30 minutes to 2 hours before it shows up. Maybe try calling in the morning. Fine. I go to Cables-To-Go, spend about 3x as much for the same cables, but get it to promise UPS 2-day shipping. I reach the final page, but it doesn’t say if it’ll be shipping soon. Uh oh. I call them: their offices are closed and won’t open again until Monday morning. Jesus. So my shipment probably won’t happen til Monday, meaning it might show up on Wednesday.
Saturday morning, I call Tiger Direct back to cancel the order. The order’s been COMPLETED AND SHIPPED. What??? It was going to take between 5 and 7 days, I thought. So I’ve got two orders of 300′ of cable coming, with TigerDirect coming at least a day or two after Cables-To-Go. The guy on the phone from TigerDirect, Roberto, says my only real option is to refuse delivery when it shows up.
Ok. Monday, I try calling Cables-To-Go to see if I can cancel *THEIR* order. No answer, the phone just rings. Crazy busy day so I don’t keep trying.
Today, Tuesday, I get an email from Cables-To-Go confirming my order shipped today. TODAY? It was supposed to go out Monday cuz I ordered it on Friday. Well, the email says it shipped only 5 minutes ago so maybe it’s actually sitting in their shipping department and I can call and cancel the damn thing. I call Cables-To-Go, the guys says it’s too late, it actually did leave, so sorry.
Oh wait—they’re doing manual entry of all shipments because of a problem, and it did in fact ship on Monday. The email I got was incorrect. So it (the $200 shipment) should arrive on Wednesday. This is getting nuts. Well, we’ve got two orders en route now, in theory arriving within a day of each other. Whatever. We’ll have them reject the $200 order (C-T-G) and wait a day to accept the $70 order (TigerDirect).
Just to double-check that TigerDirect will really arrive when I expect it to, I check their site: a UPS tracking number. Ok, over to UPS.
The shipment is on its way—as of 8:35am Tuesday September 20th. Oh god. That’s today. But the person on the phone Saturday morning said it had shipped! UPS says it wasn’t even SCANNED until 8:36pm Monday night for its origin, and sat there for 12 hours til it actually scanned for departure Tuesday morning. Grr. TigerDirect, shipping today from Illinois, won’t make it til Friday or MONDAY. And it too can’t be cancelled. So now we’re forced to make sure they accept the $200 order tomorrow, and wait until the TigerDirect ($70) order shows up some days later to be rejected.
This was just insane. So much for the notion online shopping is superior to getting off your ass and going to RadioShack—their products might be a tad overpriced sometimes, but at least you can get what you need immediately.
For about three years, we’ve had a constant problem with our phone. Pick it up, make a call via OneSuite, and hang up. Pick up the line again, and OneSuite’s still there. Finally it’s fully hung up, and you take it off the hook, dialing 1-800- but change your mind…hang up. Pick it up, it’s still there waiting for a call. Call voice mail, hang up, but it’s still there when you pick it back up. Gahhhhh. This was incessant.
Meanwhile, we were using a few wireless phones in our house, though we found it would sometimes be making an amazing crackling sound while we’re doing the call. It would be worse if the microwave was going, but under normal circumstances it was fairly frequent. Our friend John, when Elana described the problem to him, pointed out that our wireless phones were operating at the same frequency as our barrage of wireless networking equipment: 2.4GHz. D’oh!
Elana went looking around and discovered a sale on 5.8GHz wireless phones. We’ve gotten a base and a few handsets, replaced everything, and the noise was gone!
But around the same time, we weren’t able to receive calls with any reliability at all. Everyone was telling us calling our number went straight to the voicemail hosted by our phone company. Sometimes we’d hear the phone ring and be excited, thinking it had somehow corrected itself. But no such luck. And still we can’t make it actually hang up properly. I went outside to the box on our house where the phone line comes in from the pole on the street, opened it up, and plugged the phone in there. No problem, worked perfectly. So it’s something inside our house causing all of the headaches.
Today, I decided to attack the problem and try to figure out what was going on. A journey down into the basement where the line is sent from the box outside, then into the garage where the wires split up, and finally to the different phone jacks. Nothing obvious in the wiring.
I cut a phone cable and hooked it up to my little Radio Shack digital multimeter turned on to measure DC voltage. It said it was 48.4 VDC for exactly 23 seconds, then it dropped to 6.44 for not even one second and then up to 9.5 VDC for 30 seconds. Back to 48.4 (phone on-hook), wait 23 seconds, etc etc. When it was holding at 48.4 for a moment I picked up the phone, and the multimeter reported 6.44. Hung up, and it held at 9.5 for about 30 seconds. Then I watched, and it repeated the pattern over and over.
I first thought it was the base for our new wireless phones that caused it, so I unplugged it from the jack in the wall. Voila, the multimeter held at 48.4 VDC for a few minutes. Out of curiosity, I plugged it back in and unplugged the phone line that fed both our Hughes GCEB0 receiver and our TiVo (Series2, running the not-hacked version of their stuff—the hacked version’s disk died, sigh). The problem went away! No more repeated pickups then unsuccessful hangups.
I made the line just plug into the Hughes satellite receiver, not the TiVo, and it kept happening. Plugged in just the TiVo, not the receiver, and it stopped. So the receiver box has some sort of an issue with anything taking the phone off-hook. The moment it’s taken off-hook, the receiver wants to keep it almost off-hook—at this odd 9.5 VDC level—for about 30 seconds. I’ve not yet found anything to explain these three numbers (48.4 on-hook, 6.44 off-hook, and 9.5 right after it’s been put on-hook ).
But that’s okay! Now the phone’s just plugged into the TiVo (more later about why I’m still fighting to make the TiVo go over our net connection instead of it making never-for-free dialup calls), and we’ll wait for the satellite receiver to care that it’s not got a phone line to use. We don’t to Pay-Per-View on it, so hopefully it’ll go for a nice long time before it complains.
Before I finish, I’ve got to point folks at the Phone Man’s Home Phone Wiring Advice Page. It was a great source of information about the various DC voltage levels involved in a phone being on-hook versus off-hook, along with lots of other goodies and great tips. If you’ve got even the slightest urges to take a DIY approach to handling your home phone system, that page will give you everything you need to set up a second line, and a new jack, or even things far more complex.
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