January 11, 2008

There were 6 posts published on January 11, 2008 (this is page 1 of 1).

Disconnected, but in a good way

I’m about to cancel the $10 DSL I’ve had after having tested it and deciding we don’t need it anymore. The plan now is to drop Bellsouth service entirely and go to VoIP over our cable service. I’m still mulling that change over, though.

As I perused Bellsouth’s FastaccessDSL page, I note that the FastAccess DSL Direct service – the DSL service without phone service I mentioned earlier – is now listed on the DSL page. Its near the bottom of the page, mind you, but at least it’s there.

And to think you heard it here first on MT.Net!

Disconnected

I tried to make a phone call just now and instead I got a recorded message I’d never heard before:

“We’re sorry, due to telephone facility difficulty your call could not be completed. Would you please try your call again later.”

Hmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with the FBI not paying the bill on my phone’s wiretap?

Female Marine dead, sheriff says

Ed Brown, the Onslow County sheriff investigating the disappearance of missing Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach now says she’s dead and a search is on for her body. Lauterbach was 8 months pregnant and had previously claimed to have been assaulted by a superior officer.

What I don’t understand is how the sheriff could be so sure she’d dead. No one has been able to find her body, nor can police find the guy they suspect of killing her. A lot of what I’ve heard seems to indicate she had planned to go away, so what would make the sheriff say she’s dead?

Converting Raleigh’s streaming media into open formats

The City of Raleigh now makes the meetings of the city council and other boards available as streaming media hosted by the company called Granicus. These streams are helpful for getting citizens (particularly geek citizens locked in a cubicle) a look at government happenings but they are offered in a proprietary Windows Media 9 format and not an open format like Xvid, MPEG4 and the like. Linux media players like Totem and Mplayer can play the existing streams but the streams’ lack of an index makes it impossible to skip through the sessions.
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U.S. doubts source of Persian Gulf radio transmission

Did I call it right or what? I was happy to see that the U.S. Navy now doubts the source of the radio transmissions accompanying the Iranian speedboat confrontation this week.

It goes without saying the Persian Gulf is a tough neighborhood. Our big ships can be attacked at any minute with little warning or chance to escape. This necessary hair-trigger posture usually keeps sailors safe but can occasionally cause tragic accidents in the confusion and rush to act.

I give our ship captains a lot of credit for taking a deep breath and making the right call in this latest incident.

TriLUG Zenoss presentation

Hours before last night’s Zenoss presentation at TriLUG, a friend offered me a ticket to the Canes game happening at the same time.

I should’ve taken the ticket. My demo was anything but impressive as my laptop’s VMWare session blew chunks in the middle of demonstrating Zenoss. I hope folks got something from the talk but it was certainly not my best presentation. Luckily, the Zenoss project succeeds wildly in spite of my meager attempts to show it off.