July 2010

There were 50 posts published in July 2010 (this is page 5 of 5).

Email address bill winds through legislature

Looks like John Beimler’s email address stunt might result in a law that makes it harder to obtain email addresses from local governments in Wake County.

The bill, H.1921 reads in part:

The General Assembly of North Carolina enacts:

SECTION 1. Notwithstanding Chapter 132 of the General Statutes, when a unit of local government maintains an electronic mail list of individual subscribers, Chapter 132 of the General Statutes does not require that unit of local government to provide a copy of the list. The list shall be available for public inspection in either printed or electronic format or both as the unit of local government elects.

The bill has been kicked back into committee after returning from the Senate, so it remains to be seen if it will become law. With only a day (or two, tops) left in this legislative session we’ll know soon enough.

Update: it was just moved to be placed on today’s calendar.

Close, but not quite

I put on my geek hat last night to see if I could get Bluetooth audio streaming to work from my mobile phone to my Ubuntu desktop. I got tantalizingly close! After adding “Enable=Source ” in the /etc/bluetooth/audio.conf file and rescanning my laptop’s available services from my phone after I made that change (among the other steps outlined in this page, suddenly the phone would connect to my laptop. It wouldn’t last long, however as soon as I began to stream music to my laptop it would disconnect. I’m not really sure why, too. It probably has something to do with PulseAudio, which I have rarely messed with and don’t completely understand.

I bet you this is a cinch to do under OS X. Sigh.

Streaming music to Ubuntu from a Bluetooth device

I’ve been intrigued by my new Samsung phone’s apparent ability to stream music to my laptop via Bluetooth. Ubuntu doesn’t appear to be able to do this out of the box and I had no idea where to search for this.

Today, I found the secret, thanks to this page:

After a few people asking me how to use the A2DP Sink with BlueZ, I’ve decided to write this mini-tutorial with a step-by-step on how to establish a A2DP stream from any device to a BlueZ-enabled host.

Before we start the hands-on, let’s see a little bit of nomenclature. In our use-case we have an stream being transmitted between two devices through a pipeline. Our pipeline is constructed of the remote host, BlueZ and PulseAudio. Each element of this pipeline has a Source (SRC) and a Sink (SNK) interface. The stream is handled between different elements by being sent from one element’s source to another element’s sink. So, the big picture of our pipeline is something like this (with the stream being represented by an arrow):

via 1, 2, 3, 4, A2DP Stream « jprvita’s weblog.

It’s still wonky out the wazoo but it looks like it can be done. I will wrestle with this more this evening.

Back from Virginia

We arrived home from Virginia yesterday afternoon after spending some fun time with Kelly’s parents. Kelly took the kids up in the middle of last week, with me joining them Saturday morning. I took the train up to Fredericksburg, where Kelly met me for some food and sightseeing in town before we headed west to Warrenton. The Oskar Blues Gordon beer at the Capital Ale House was quite tasty!

Sunday, we participated in the Leesburg Independence Day parade, with the kids on bikes and dog in tow. Rocket’s tender paws didn’t enjoy the blazing asphalt we encountered on that hot day but the rest of us had fun.

Monday was spent underground at Luray Caverns in Luray, Virginia. It was quite a respite from the heat wave, where temperatures have been in the mid-to-upper 90s.

Good to be home now, though I’m already looking forward to the next holiday!

The sailor’s ring

Flickr image by Amy Palko

In 1990 I was in the Navy and homeported on a ship at San Diego Naval Station. One Sunday afternoon I was riding the San Diego Trolley back to base after a day spent downtown when the woman next to me struck up a conversation. By then I had been in town long enough to become attuned to those mentally ill people who occasionally rode the trolley and sometimes caused disturbances. At first I thought this woman was one of those sadly disturbed individuals but she was somehow different. A elderly Japanese woman who spoke broken English, she seemed friendly. Certainly harmless enough.

She struck up a conversation, asking if I was in the Navy and I responded yes. With this she gave an even bigger smile.

“My husband NAVY!” she beamed.
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Jam session

Last weekend’s fun jam session with the musician friends of Hallie’s violin teacher, Vicky Montague, made me wish I played more just for fun. I’m starting a standing invitation to get together and jam. Any of my Raleigh friends who play instruments, contact me by email and I’ll get this organized.

When I’m With You

When I’m With You (YouTube)
Sheriff
When I’m With You

I never needed love
Like I need you
And I never lived for nobody
But I live for you
Ooo babe
Lost in love is what I feel
When I’m with you

Maybe it’s the way you touch me
With the warmth of the sun
Maybe it’s the way you smile
I come all undone
Ooh babe
Lost in love is what I feel
When I’m with you
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RTP power failure

Yesterday afternoon around 2:45 PM we experienced a power brownout at my $WORK in RTP. Word was that a contractor working behind the Social Security Commission building in RTP was digging and “hit a primary.” This caused many of our systems to go offline. We get our power from Duke Energy.

I can’t seem to find any external reference to this power failure but I’m sure other businesses must have experienced it.

Change in slide presentation strategy

Inspired by the fast-paced slide presentations by Larry Lessig, I’ve decided that the presentations I create will be built like a video, not like a lecture. Slides will illustrate my talks like pictures illustrate the words in a book. The idea will be to use the power of emotion that images produce to emphasize whatever point I’m making. Visual presentation will be used to reinforce the verbal presentation.

I have a few months until my next GPS presentation at Conn Elementary so now might be a good time to practice this new technique.