Satellite delight

I saw an ad on Craigslist a few weeks ago for some Free to Air satellite receivers that were being sold. The price was right and I’ve long been interested in seeing what I could pick up freely and legally from the skies, so I bought the receivers and later went back for some bigger dishes.

I had the day off Friday, so I set it all up, tuning in Galaxy 19 at 97°W, which is a satellite that carries a few hundred mostly-international channels. After some brief fiddling with the aim of the dish I was watching Al Jazeera straight from space. It was actually the moment I first heard that Hosni Mubarak had resigned.

This is really cool stuff, though there isn’t much in English worth viewing on this particular satellite. I plan to set up other dishes to pull in other, more interesting satellites, but for now I’ve proven that it works. In time I should be enjoying all types of radio and television beamed freely from space.

Witnesses, survivor gather to remember B-52 crash

I’m reading a book about the Cold War right now and found it interesting that this reunion took place yesterday. The book, At the Abyss, An Insider’s History of the Cold War by Thomas C. Reed, discusses this Goldsboro B-52 incident and other events.

Pikeville, N.C. — Eyewitnesses, firefighters and a survivor of a 1961 crash in Wayne County involving a plane equipped with nuclear weapons gathered Tuesday to remember the day."No one knew what was happening outside," said Adam Mattocks, who was among the Air Force crew members in the B-52 plane. At the time, the plane was carrying two nuclear weapons, each one containing more than 200 times the power of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Military officials have since said the weapons came close to detonating during the crash.

via Witnesses, survivor gather to remember B-52 crash :: WRAL.com.

Pheasant Run Resort

Pheasant Run's indoor New Orleans

I’m in St. Charles this week to conduct training for my company. This trip, I decided to roll the dice with a Hotwire hotel: the Pheasant Run Resort. I’d read mixed reviews of the hotel on the Internet, with some really hating the hotel and others really liking it. After a few days here, I have to say I really like it. The place certainly has some character!

I arrived Sunday evening (what some call Super Bowl Sunday), and was shocked to find the hotel practically deserted. Expecting to find guests in the hotel bar, watching the game, instead I found one couple – and I almost overlooked them. My coworkers pointed out that greater Chicago in February isn’t exactly a vacation destination.
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Cheap thoughts: the Super Bowl revolution

I got to thinking with the protests in Egypt going on for the past two weeks how alive those people must be feeling right now. Millions of people are taking to the street, braving water cannons, rubber bullets, real bullets, whips, and Molotov cocktails – risking their very lives – to demand their freedom. They are standing up to their hated, repressive government and taking charge of their own future.

All this stood in sharp contrast as Americans everywhere spent Sunday evening parked on the couch watching the Super Bowl, during which the television commercials are often the highlight of the night. Hey, sometimes we can’t be bothered to get up to change the channel, much less march for our freedom.

Porno scanner

I made my first trip through the porno scanner at RDU’s Terminal A. Didn’t quite mean to, but I didn’t look up from my rush to get through security to realize in time why the line I chose was so short. Almost all the other travelers were choosing to use the metal detector but I failed to notice until my bags were on their way through the X-ray.

I stood on the mat as instructed as the TSA guy said “and your pockets are completely empty, right?”

“Yes,” I said, absent-mindedly.

“Do you have a belt?”

“Yes, I do.”
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Reluctant (but successful) customer service

I had an amusing interaction yesterday with the guy in the shop of Agri Supply in Garner. Agri Supply is an amazing warehouse-style store, stacked from floor to ceiling with mechanical parts of all types. The guys from Mythbusters would have a field day in this store. I knew it was the place to go when I realized my hand truck tire needed replacing.

After quickly finding the proper replacement tire, I asked the man at the counter if there was any way I could get the store to install it. “Is there any trick to it?” I asked.

Another customer leaned over. “Oh, yeah!” he answered. “It’s a lot more trouble than it seems. You’d be much better off getting the store to install it.”
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AOL Mail is hopelessly FUBAR

You've got stupid!

I swear, the folks running AOL Mail couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.

First, they lose their customers’ email in a huge crash, taking until yesterday to restore the email archives of users. Then in the middle of this disaster, they mistakenly flag my mailserver on their spam list. Only one anti-spam list (Barracuda Network’s) out of a dozen showed my server as blacklisted, but that was enough to kick me off of many services, as I said before. Barracuda immediately cleared my server but AOL continued to show it as a spam source. When I learned that a friend’s mailserver had also been mistakenly blacklisted, I grew more concerned.
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Cantiga Pa Pedra

I’m on a Mario Lucio kick now. This is a great album.

CANTIGA PA PEDRA
(Song to a stone)

Lyrics & music Mário Lúcio
© 2009 Africa Nostra (SACEM)

Pedra pedra
De parduero de obelisco de capela de pirâmide
De jade de xadrez de construçon de vulcon
De enxofre de sal de açucar de um pedrada
De Buda de moinho de mula faca e espada
De espuma de mar de algum lugar de lua
Fundamental divina filosofal preciosa
De Pedro de Sisifo de Jesus de Madalena
Esculpido lascado polido rolado
Ngabado sustedo ncunhado perto de ncunhal
Na sapato na bolso na mon
Riba cabeça
De alicerce
De pula e salta de brinca e trinca
De pedra pardo pa arde
parte
Perto prata pedra ingrata
Chã de Pedra
Pedra contra pedra
Que pena Pedra empena cristal de agua
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Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted

The Internet’s growth reached a major milestone today when its original IP address space, IPv4, assigned the last of its free addresses. That means the Internet’s growth will now depend on the new IP addresses, IPv6.

IPv4 provided for a mere 4 billion (or 4,000,000,000) addresses. The new IPv6 provides for 340 undecillion (or 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) addresses. Hopefully that will last us for a while!

The Number Resource Organization NRO announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority IANA allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry RIR for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

via Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted | The Number Resource Organization.