More public service

25mph-sign (c) FreeFoto.Com
I got a little more public service in during the last few days. I decided to help my neighbors on Edmund Street get the speed limit changed to 25 MPH. This requires 75% of the residents to sign a petition agreeing to the change. I spent parts of Saturday, Sunday, and today walking the street with a clipboard in hand and asking people to sign.

Tonight I got the 30th signature, making the petition valid. Now it’s off to the Transportation Services department of the City of Raleigh to be checked, after which it will be sent to the City Council for approval. The new speed limit signs should appear.within seven days of Council approval. Yay!

Happy Birthday, Linux!

150px-Tux.svg
Today is Linux‘s 18th birthday. On August 26, 1991, Linus Torvalds announced Linux to the world:

Hello everybody out there using minix –

I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

(h/t Warren Myers)

Cheviot Hills Golf Course virtual edition

Cheviot Hills Golf Course

I put up the last webpage of the now-defunct Cheviot Hills Golf Course that formerly stood on Capital Boulevard between Gresham Lake Road and Durant Road. I’ve had this floating around for three years and figured I’d finally find a home for it. The webpage mirroring isn’t perfect as it missed some of the Javascript mouse-over graphics, but most of the content and photos are there.

Revisit the long, gone Cheviot Hills here.

Ted Kennedy

Ted_Kennedy,_official_photo_portrait_crop

One one of our weekend trips early in our marriage, Kelly and I were waiting at the Boston airport for our flight back to Raleigh. I happened to look up from my Boston Globe long enough to see an older gentleman in a suit walking with an assistant up to the gate.

My jaw dropped. It was Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy. Before me was a living legend, one of the most powerful politicians in America. This man had seen so much history in his political life (and had so many triumphs and tragedies in his personal life).

I just stared at him because one does not approach a living legend unless invited. I kept a respectful distance as he finished up his conversation with his assistant and then boarded his U.S. Airways flight to Washington. I know Sen. Kennedy was holding up his flight but I still was kicking myself for not asking for his autograph.

Early this morning, Ted Kennedy succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77.

MythTV fully in tune with digital TV

mythtv

A few months ago I bought a used motherboard with the goal of upgrading my MythTV backend. The upgrade went smoothly from a hardware and operating system point of view but Myth was never the same for some reason. Adding to the confusion was that I could tune and watch channels using the command-line tool mplayer but Myth would never properly scan channels.

After a little tinkering (and Googling) yesterday, I decided to try increasing the scanning timeouts using MythTV-setup. Where the previous 3 second timeout was once adequate, I bumped both the tuning and signal timeouts to 10 seconds. By feeding the channels.conf file I created using atscscan, I avoided having Myth tune through all 83 channels. That mitigated the pain of the longer timeouts. Presto! I successfully added the channels back into Myth.

And boy, do they look good. The previous HDTV signals were good, but they were also spotty. Now that the digital antennas have claimed the top spots on the stations’ transmission towers, the digital signals are coming in rock solid.

Myth should save our sanity a bit at home, as the kids can now watch something other than the DVD shows they’ve seen 1,000 times already!

No evil genius’s lair is complete without one

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Check out this unbelievable pipe organ built in the house across the street of my friend and fellow Wikipedia contributor Ken Thomas.

Says Ken:

Apparently the guy was a dentist and a fairly high-ranking officer in the Army. He retired after 30 years, and moved to Lenoir. I gather he had both money and time on his hands, and according to my tour guide “He just really liked pipe organs.” She didn’t come right out and say it, but I could tell from her responses that he may have been a little bit eccentric too. Considering what I was looking at, that little data nugget wasn’t exactly a shocking revelation.

I’ve seen pipe organs before, such as the one at the Rosario Resort on Orcas Island and this one appears to have homemade pipes.

I’d consider patching those hoses myself just to hear it play!

Active weekend

We had an active weekend as we wrapped up the last one before school starts again. Saturday was sweltering, with a high of 88F and 74% humidity. We joined Travis for his soccer practice in the morning. Then it took a while for me to mow the lawn as the heat sapped so much energy.

It had begun to sprinkle here and there by the time we grabbed lunch and went to Optimist Pool to dive off their diving boards for a bit. We hadn’t put 20 minutes into it before thunder kicked us out. We hopped over to Target to pick up the game “Clue” before returning to the pool in the hopes that the thunder would pass. We weren’t so lucky as the rain began to come down. So, we returned home, showered up, and played Clue for a while.

Sunday morning we slept in a bit. I took the dog for a walk in the cooler weather. Kelly took the kids to get their pictures taken while I walked the neighboring street with a petition to get its speed limit lowered.

We all returned for a late lunch. Then we scrambled to get prepared for another pool visit in the short time we had until our dinner guests arrived. A fun hour full of dives off the board followed! Then we got home and got ready for our guests.

Last week, Kelly discovered that a high-school classmate of ours lives in the neighborhood next to ours. He and his wife have kids that go to Hallie’s school. Both our families have been living here for a year without knowing about the other. We fixed that by inviting them over for pizza and conversation. The parents and kids both got along very well, so we forsee this as the start of many such visits.

It’s nice to have such cool neighbors in our area!

Time for the flashlight

This morning was the first time since spring that I had to take a flashlight with me on my morning walk with Rocket. Fall is definitely returning.

UNC-TV back at full power!

I wrote UNC-TV today to ask when their antenna upgrades would be completed. It turns out the job was done just this past Friday evening!

Here’s the word from Gary Coble, Transmitter Site Supervisor at UNC-TV:

At 7:19pm on Friday August 21 WUNC-TV Channel 4 began full power maximized operation. The operation is at 1 Million Watts on the top mounted main antenna. For those viewers using outside antennas please aim your antenna towards the transmitter site in Northern Chatham County, just Southwest of downtown Chapel Hill and rescan your converter box or digital TV tuner. Thank you for your patience and thank you for watching UNC-TV!

After rescanning my channels, I can report the signal is coming in better than ever. I’m glad to have my PBS back!