I had a big day today for it being a day off. I started the day with a trip to Wilson to take a tour of the city’s municipal Internet system. After lunch in Wilson, I headed back to Raleigh to meet a friend for coffee and a discussion of local politics. Then I headed home to have dinner with the family before I left again for the Raleigh CAC meeting.
That’s a pretty busy day off, if I do say so myself!
I’ve been enjoying the Internet coverage of the Tour de France, though the local media never covers it enough, in my opinion.
Yesterday’s stage 10 was an agonizingly slow ride, as riders apparently protested a decision by tour organizers to ban radio contact with the riders’ team managers. It was dull-city for the most part except for a few diversions, such as when a bored cameraman showed a group of snails crawling towards the path of the peloton.
A viewer texted to the BBC live text coverage, asking “any snails spotted yet?”
The BBC commentator didn’t miss a beat:
No sign of any snails yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long before they make their move. With a little more luck one of them could have won yesterday’s stage…
How true!
Courtesy of Popular Science.
The family and I went to the flea market at the fairgrounds Saturday morning to window shop for some furniture. We enjoyed looking around at all of the wares for sale and chatting with all the people there. While talking about furniture with one man I felt myself comfortably slipping into my old Southern self, with plenty of friendly y’alls and an added accent.
It made me appreciate again how rich my heritage is; how I can slip back into this friendly Southern mode without thinking about it. It’s not forced, it is who I am. The bigger surprise to me is that I tend not to talk Southern most of the time. I tend to be a bit of a chameleon with accents, as I’ve mentioned here before. Maybe it’s because Raleigh has such a mix of people from all over. Still, I’ve enjoyed those visits I’ve made to the deeper South (and to flea markets) and the chances they provide to reconnect with my roots.
Kelly and I were amused at our dog Rocket’s attempt to hide himself in our closet at bedtime last night. He’s usually banished to the den so that we aren’t kept awake by his snoring. Occasionally, he’ll park himself outside our door when he wants company but his sneaking into our closet was quite unusual. Four hours later, at 2:30 AM, thunder first rumbled outside. Like most dogs, Rocket is terrified of thunder.
Today I’m left wondering: did our dog somehow know about the thunderstorm long before it arrived? If so, how? Was it the drop in air pressure? If air pressure is the answer, why doesn’t he react similarly when fronts move through that don’t cause thunderstorms?
In other news, I’m thinking of selling my weather radio. 🙂
I don’t know what it is, but I’m growing tired of the rude drivers I encounter every morning on my way to work in RTP. There’s so much tailgating, people cutting other people off, line cutting, and the rest that it raises my blood pressure. I don’t know if it’s too many Type-A personalities, too many people who bring their bad driving habits from (ahem) places they used to live, or too many just plain jerks but it’s really annoying. It’s definitely in sharp contrast to what I experienced when I was working downtown (or working in west Raleigh).
Hey, I’m happy with my job, too, but I’m not going to run everyone else off the road to get to it. Sheesh.
There is no better sanctuary than the great outdoors.
A few weeks ago, Netflix delivered Revolutionary Road to our DVD player. During the middle of this excellent film is a bar scene with a band. As the camera focused on the characters in the foreground, I noticed the guitarist in the background looked oddly familiar.
Then I suddenly knew who it was: musician Dan Zanes, his trademark spiky hair combed into a pompadour for the role. In real life, Zanes has perpetual bed-head at all times, so it was just as amusing to see him spike-less as it was to see him at all.
Raleigh will host the spiky-haired version of Dan Zanes when he plays Saturday at the N.C. Museum of Art in a rare show this far South. It should be a good time.
I was geeking out a bit while I was cleaning this morning, thinking about how wonderful journaling filesystems are. My computers here at home occasionally lose power and crash, yet their filesystems almost always repair themselves.
Back in the Ancient History days, dropping power on a DOS and Windows 3.x box meant almost certain file corruption. That changed when Microsoft’s Windows 2000 added journaling to the NTFS v3.0 filesystem, and from that point on most every filesystem had a journal. (NTFS wasn’t the first journaling filesystem, but the first one for the masses. I believe the first was IBM’s JFS, released for AIX in 1990 and then for OS/2 Warp Server in April 1999.)
Now with improved manufacturing techniques and journaled filesystems, filesystems seem to last until the drive itself wears out. So now you whippersnappers know how good you’ve really got it!
I’ve discovered a few more swarm streamers for broadcasting multimedia to potentially millions of viewers: Coolstream, PPLive, and SopCast.
SopCast seems promising as it has a contributed Linux interface for the SopCast player, called (duh) sopcast-player. I’m still trying to figure out how to “broadcast” with this system, whether from Linux or Windows.
Coolstream looks interesting but not yet fully-baked. The website keeps insisting I log in, and none of the supposedly-active video streams appear to be working for me.
PPLive appears to have active users, but the channels using it as listed on the PPLive iKan site are all in Chinese. The other channel listing site, PP.tv, is also in Chinese. Clicking around seems promising but it’s hard to know what I’m looking at. And some of the clips seem to be blocked here.
There’s another service called TV Ants but the company’s website isn’t coming up for me. That is one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a channel with one of these groups. In order for any of this to work, you need to have at least one server to help seed the stream. If the company hosting your channel goes out of business then all of the channels that company hosts vanish as well.
