Mark Turner

Anti-competition broadband bill killed again

Enjoy retirement, Sen. Hoyle!

Good news: Senator Hoyle’s anti-competition broadband bill is dead!

Let me see if I can summarize what took place early this morning. S.1209 and H.1840 both languished in the Broadband Connectivity House committee and never made it back to the floor. That’s all good. Then last night the House added a broadband study provision to the S900 studies bill, a provision which did not require a moratorium or study report be issued. The senate approved this and all seemed good.

Then an hour later Sen. Clodfelter gutted H.455, which was a “Kidney Awareness” bill, and inserted the “study” portion of S.1209, among other things. Clodfelter’s changes differed from the S.900 changes by requiring a report or suggested legislation by March 2011. The House did not concur. Though a committee report, a provision in H.455 favorable to municipal broadband was salvaged and that’s what was passed in H.455. End result: no moratorium and no report or new legislation required!

A big thanks to Reps Hackney, Holliman, Luebke, Weiss, Faison and Bryant in the House and Senators Snow, Atwater, Vaughn, and Queen (among many others) in the Senate. Now there’s a little time to put some law around municipal Internet and better hold off these challenges.

June was hottest ever for Raleigh – Durham

The National Weather Service says June 2010 is the hottest on record for Raleigh. Let’s hope the rest of our summer isn’t like the miserably-hot summer of 2007.

…WARMEST JUNE ON RECORD FOR RALEIGH AND GREENSBORO…
…RALEIGH-DURHAM INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT…

June 2010 at the Raleigh-Durham international airport was the warmest on record as long as records have been kept at the airport going back to 1944. June 2010 was also the warmest on record for the entire Raleigh area with records going back to 1887.

The monthly average temperature for June 2010 was 81.5 degrees breaking the previous record of 80.7 degrees set in June 2008. The top 5 warmest years on record for the Raleigh area dating back to 1887 are as follows:

81.5 degrees – 2010
80.8 degrees – 2008
80.4 degrees – 1943
80.0 degrees – 1952
79.2 degrees – 1939
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Cheap thoughts: the hallway pitch

A coworker noticed my Pandora shirt as we passed in the hall.

“Pandora … what’s that?” she said.

It took me a beat to answer. I was on my way to getting my first cup of coffee and wasn’t expecting a question.

“It’s a music service,” I responded.

“Oh, yeah,” she said as we continued in opposite directions.

It made me realize that this is a good exercise for entrepreneurs. In addition to an elevator pitch, where you get 30 or more seconds to describe your business, you also need a hallway pitch where you can summarize your business in the time it takes to pass in the hallway.

Update: looks like another extremely wise, successful, and attractive individual has thought of this, too.

RPD officer parks vertically

A friend forwarded this FailBlog picture of an RPD police car that inadvertently got parked vertically. It looks like a new model car, so I’m thinking this happened somewhat recently.

Anyone know any details, like when/where this took place?

Update: My brother Jeff thinks this is the area near Six Forks Rd. and Millbrook Rd. I think it might be somewhere along Six Forks Rd., or maybe Lead Mine Rd. near Glenwood Ave. It could also be Six Forks close to Strickland, near

Look at the light pole in the top of the picture: it seems close enough to make this a narrow road, perhaps two-lane. On the other hand, the retaining wall looks new, too, so perhaps this road has gone through some widening recently. The close telephone pole could simply be an illusion caused by a telephoto lens.

The large bundles of copper telephone wires seem to point to a location close to downtown. I’m trying to identify that building in the background, too.

Sen. Hoyle’s anti-competition broadband bill expected to die

Internet hero

It turns out that no news is good news for Sen. David Hoyle’s anti-competition broadband bill, H.1840 (and formerly S.1209). The bill, which would block North Carolina municipalities from offering a choice of Internet services to their citizens, is stuck in the Broadband Connectivity House committee.

This committee is chaired by Rep. Bill Faison, who appears to be none too keen on letting this bill see the light of day. Rep. Faison learned first-hand the dangers of this scheme when it was pitched last year as H.1252. Faison is also not happy that Hoyle tacked his municipal broadband moratorium language onto one of Faison’s bills.

So, what have I learned about this? It’s good to be the chair of the Senate Rules committee, but it isn’t necessarily successful in getting bad bills passed. Also, it’s good to have two houses of government. Thirdly, don’t let the media hear from only one side. And, finally, sometimes otherwise good people like Josh Stein wind up disappointing you, even after you’ve stood in the rain all afternoon helping to get them elected.

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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