May 2010

There were 40 posts published in May 2010 (this is page 2 of 4).

Sen. Hoyle tries to block municipal internet

Sen. David Hoyle (D-Gaston)

Remember the battles against the big telecoms in the state to keep the cities’ right to own and operate their own Internet service? It’s time for round three, courtesy of Sen. David Hoyle (D-Gaston). He’s pushing a bill, S.1209 (the so-called “No Nonvoted Debt for Competing System” Act), that will hamstring North Carolina municipal Internet projects into using only general obligation bonds. Not only will this hurt municipal Internet projects, it will prevent initiatives such as Google’s 1 Gb fiber Internet. Bye bye, Google Fiber!

Previous attempts by Time Warner Cable, AT&T, CenturyLink (Embarq), and others tried to make the case that municipal Internet should not use taxpayer money. Now they’re saying these systems should use only taxpayer money, not the revenue bonds that they currently use. I think it shows their real motive is to block competition, sewing up Internet for themselves. With governments sidelined, they will be free to impose caps on Internet service, killing competition from video services such as NetFlix. The public loses.
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Raleigh Speedway

Raleigh Speedway in 1965

Did you know Raleigh once had its own NASCAR track? It’s true, though you’d never know it today. The site is now a quiet industrial park that sits next to an equally quiet neighborhood north of the Raleigh Beltline. Back in the 1950s, though, the air was filled with smoke and the sound of revving engines at this track once located a mile outside the city limits.

Raleigh Speedway opened in 1952 as the Southland Speedway (or the Dixie Speedway), when it hosted an IndyCar event. It went on to host major NASCAR events, including Grand National events every Fourth of July. Raleigh Speedway was notable in that it was the first track NASCAR sanctioned for night races.
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Triathlete!

This morning Kelly achieved a goal she’d been working on for months: she completed a triathlon! She raced in the Ramblin’ Rose triathlon at the Baileywick YMCA, in the pouring rain I might add. Her parents drove down to see her and we and the Battaglias cheered her on every time she passed us.

It was great watching her do this. Inspiring, even. I suppose there’s nothing stopping me from doing something similar.

Cheap Thoughts: funding highways through tolls

My friend Billy posed a question the other day that got me thinking. I was surprised at how such a simple question could set off an hour’s worth of pondering. His question was this: would you be willing to trade the federal taxes on gasoline in exchange for paying tolls on every interstate highway?

My first reaction was to think well, who would want to pay tolls all the time? Then I thought, wait a minute – why should everyone play for highway construction and maintenance if only some drivers use it? This led to me to conclude that if highways all had tolls, drivers would be encouraged to make more local trips.

Since the opening of the I-540 Outer Loop around Raleigh I’ve been thinking about the problem of sprawl. Traffic engineers will tell you that new roads don’t solve traffic problems: they just shift it to another place. And it’s true. If 50,000 vehicles get on a highway all 50,000 are going to get off somewhere. The traffic jam is simply shifted. The Outer Loop caught my attention because its opening encouraged lots of development where there was none before, causing sprawl and stretching the limits of vital city services.
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Carefree Highway

Carefree Highway
Gordon Lightfoot

Picking up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream
I wonder how the old folks are tonight
Her name was Ann and I’ll be damned if I recall her face
She left me not knowing what to do

Carefree highway, let me slip away on you
Carefree highway, you seen better days
The morning after blues from my head down to my shoes
Carefree highway, let me slip away, slip away on you

Turning back the pages to the times I love best
I wonder if she’ll ever do the same
Now the thing that I call living is just being satisfied
With knowing I got no one left to blame
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IBM BladeCenter voodoo

I’ve been working with computers practically all my life and thought I’d seen it all, but this one really surprised me!

At $WORK we have a number of IBM BladeCenters hosting our VMWare environment. Each blade chassis has 14 IBM HS21 bladeservers in it, and the way the environment is designed to scale everything has to be identical. Well, my department needed to take a blade chassis out of this identical environment and repurpose it for another project.

The plan was to install Red Hat Enterprise 4 on these servers using a PXE kickstart process. On other blades and equipment this would go off without a hitch. For some reason, though, these particular blades caused a kernel panic right when the Linux kernel would load. Turning off acpi didn’t seem to help. That Red Hat 5 would load on these same systems made us even more puzzled.

Finally, one of the night shift UNIX gurus had the solution, which was provided years ago by our IBM vendor. Their solution? To swap the CPUs on each motherboard! Our team dutifully did this and somehow each blade successfully booted Linux.

I about fell out of my chair when I heard that this worked. It makes no sense whatsoever but somehow it worked.

Just when I thought I’d seen everything . . .

Wow! Two in one day!

Looks like the money mule job market is picking up. That’s two job offers in one day! Who could believe it? And I’ve always wanted to work for a guy named Inaptitude! Where do I sign up?!?!?

From: inaptitude Dobson inaptitudebxwdobson@hotmail.com
To: sgarrid1@gmail.com
Subject: Job Opportunity. id 396VQ
Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 08:13:27 -0500

Hello,

Please, read this letter.
Gold Investments Incorporated company is looking for an individual for the courier clerk position. It is a remote/part-time/full-time position and it is home-based.

GII inc was founded by several Polish businessmen and is functioning since 2004 with its head branch based in Warsaw,the capital of Poland .

GII inc provides the dispatching service of a middleman among sellers and customers from all over the World. You will need to have a personal computer and internet access including printer/scanner to work with us.
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East CAC success

I conducted yet another successful East CAC meeting last night. We had about 25 people in attendance: not bad for a day of non-stop rain.

This time around, the streaming video worked flawlessly to carry video (and sound!) to an audience of five. Unfortunately, for reasons I’m still trying to fathom LiveStream did not save a copy of my meeting as it usually does. I’ll have to figure out why.

Next month, Raleigh Mayor Charles Meeker is on the agenda to discuss growth in East Raleigh. It should be interesting!

New position. (id – 52ZC)

Looks like I’ve got another great job opportunity sent my way. I’m going to be rich!!1!!!1!1!!111!!

From: trek Stanley trekstanleyqnu@hotmail.com
To: riverad@consultant.com
Subject: New position. (id – 52ZC)
Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 05:06:38 -0500

Good dayHow are you? I am a Dealcom LTD staff manager and I’m responsible for headhunting among the candidates for the open positions with our company. We have read with interest your resume detailing your qualifications and relevant work experience and want to offer you a well-paid part-time vacancy. We believe you can be considered as a successful candidate for the position. If you are interested in our company as well as in more information concerning this opportunity please e-mail the recruitment at Recruitment@dealcomltd.com. Thank you for your consideration and have a nice day.Take care.

Of course, I’d have to risk going to jail as it’s simply a money mule scam, but what the hey.