This is the midnight radio one
As music in the moonlit starry night
beneath this purple haze our common dark
The heavens obscure, starlight travels into infinity
Yet we only see it when the night is black.
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Forty-eight hours before our trip begins. Wooo!
—
Originally by Ike Reilly
Covered by Cracker

Well there are some lines that can’t be crossed
And sometimes those lines get lost

Do you need anything from Duty Free?
I’ve got to get out of the wet UK

Jackson Haring and I were at London Arms
College drunks kicking pigeons in the asses
Yeah feathers flying, and bobbies whining
Like little drunken schoolboys we only thought we were kicking rats

Will you need anything from Duty Free?
I got to get out of the wet UK
Do you need anything from Duty Free?
I’ve got to get back to the USA
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Something this morning led me to try to find the old beachhouse my aunt and uncle owned in Garden City, SC. A minute or two of poking around map sites led me to this picture of it.

This imagery was taken pre-1989, as the Kingfisher Inn is still there. As a kid, that Kingfisher Pier was like the end of civilization. I spent a lot of summer days making that walk.

Hurricane Hugo swept the Kingfisher into the sea in 1989. The Pier at Garden City replaced it soon afterward. It was a sunny morning on April 17, 1998 that I proposed to Kelly next to that new pier.

The beachhouse itself was sold a few years back, my uncle and aunt have moved away, and another hurricane may once again lay claim to that pier. In spite of all that, the memories will always be there.

I spent the weekend setting up my diabolical scheme to set up a network for my neighborhood. The HomePlug tests worked fine, as I reported earlier, though it didn’t reach the corner of the neighborhood I needed initially.

That left 802.11g to cover the gaps. I had a new, in-the-box Linksys WRT54G which I bought for the purpose of hacking. It was perched on the top bookshelf near a window on the front of our house. I installed a separate network card in my firewall and assigned a fresh DHCP range to any hosts appearing on that network. To keep the spammers out, I blocked outgoing port 25.

I didn’t get any hits on the access point all weekend, so I spent some time last night gleefully voiding the warranty on the Linksys. That’s right: months after Shane gave his talk on putting Linux on the Linksys, I finally got around to doing it, loading it up OpenWRT. To my surprise, the process was dirt-simple. OpenWRT’s default configuration provides you with a simple NAT firewall and dns redirection, so you can flash it and immediately resume using your access point as an access point. Even without the built-in access point hardware, running Linux on the box is useful in itself. It’s fast and very expandable. I can think of many cool things to do with it.

I hope to add a capture page when people first log into the access point, but for now its up and running. The first step to world domination!

I like the National Weather Service‘s PDA-enabled forecast pages so much that I recently wrote an email to the webmaster. I told her how impressed I am that the NWS uses such cutting-edge technologies like RSS feeds, DVB broadcasts, and PDA-sized pages to get the forecast into the hands of the public. The webmaster wrote back, thanking me for noticing and basically saying I made her day.

As much as I love to take digs at the government, there are some things it does outstandingly well. One of these things is our public weather forecasting. I belive the United States has one of the finest meterological services on the planet. Hurricanes and other disasters which might otherwise claim thousands of lives are easily avoided through the professionalism, technology, and diligence of the National Weather Service (and its network of weather spotters).

So I was quite perplexed to understand how Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) could sponsor a bill which would prohibit the weather service from issuing public forecast data. Of course, a little more digging reveals that Pennsylvania is home to AccuWeather, which hopes to make you pay for the same data your taxes have already bought through the NWS.

“It is not an easy prospect for a business to attract advertisers, subscribers or investors when the government is providing similar products and services for free,” Santorum said.

The National Weather Service predates AccuWeather by about, oh, a hundred years. If AccuWeather can’t compete, it should have picked another business.

Can you believe any of this? Santorum is a loser. If the people of Pennsylvania have any shame, they’ll send him packing next year.

There’s a reason the sidewalk is littered with dead worms: the dry ground is like concrete! I went out to water some dry patches of my lawn last night and literally needed a hammer to put the sprinkler in the ground.

I like having a warm spring like the next guy, but so much heat and so little rain has put a hurting on my lawn. Time to break out more sprinklers before its too late.

I got a chance to try out my HomePlug networking around the neighborhood. The next-door neighbor’s house picked up the signal just fine. No such luck few doors down at the house of my fellow computer geek, however. We’ll have to network the old-fashioned way with WiFi.

I haven’t tried any other homes, though, so there’s still lots of potential. There are twelve or thirteen (!) identified access points within a stone’s throw of my home, which makes it ripe for a community network. It should be a fun little project.

Yesterday, my pair of HomePlug powerline Ethernet bridges arrived. I have to say they work as advertised. I can plug a bridge into any electrical outlet in my house and instantly have a 14Mbs Ethernet connection there. It’s really pretty slick. You can even remotely manage other bridge endpoints in-band (changing their password, for instance).

The only drawback for me is that a Windows software utility is needed to set any encryption or do any management to the bridge. Maybe WINE can alleviate that problem. I haven’t had time to try it.

Another thing I haven’t had time to try is seeing how many other homes near us can receive the signal. My ultimate goal is to create a neighborhood network. Maybe I can catch up with my neighbors before this weekend and try pushing some bits.

I don’t normally get affected by springtime allergens, but the past few days have been pretty brutal for my head. I’ve been waking up with sinus headaches, which I never have. Fortunately, they’re pretty mild and don’t last long.

I’ll be glad when all this pollen gets washed away and my head returns to normal.

Interestingly, in spite of my allergen woes, my sense of smell has been greatly accentuated. Go figure.