Public Utilities Committee meeting tomorrow

Tomorrow is the N.C. House Public Utilities Committee meeting where H.1252 is scheduled to be heard. I hope to attend the meeting but it depends on whether I can schedule my work around it.

I spent my lunch break calling the members of the committee to urge them to oppose the bill. Many of the legislative assistants expressed marked awareness of the bill. Apparently they’ve been getting lots of calls, though for which side I don’t know. At least one said the assistant’s boss was reconsidering support for the bill, which is a good sign.

I hope our representatives know what a bad bill this is for our communities and vote accordingly, but we’ll have to see. It may come down to the wire.

Also, there’s a Facebook group where you can lend your voice in opposition. The more avenues for expression, the better!

Tornado sighting

We had a particularly large thunderstorm move through Raleigh this evening. I watched it on the radar as it approached from Cary and turned my ham radio on to the Skywarn net as we got ready for dinner. As we were finishing dinner, the skies grew darker and the kids got more excited.

I suggested to Kelly that we move the family to our safe room. Even if nothing happened it would be good practice, as we’ve never done this in our new home here. So with that, the kids began to gather pillows and blankets and put them in our utility room.

A minute or two afterward, I heard a report on the radio of rotating clouds above the NCSU belltower not far away. I suggested Kelly go to the utility room and told her I would join her when things looked safe. I then went to the back porch, which has the best view of the sky.
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Google, Intel, and other heavyweights oppose H1252

Google and Intel announced today their opposition to H1252, the so-called “Level Playing Field Act.”. In a letter to legislators, the companies joined Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Telecommunications Industry Association, the Fiber to the Home Council, Educause, the Utilities Telecom Council, Atlantic Engineering and the American Public Power Association in saying:

We, the undersigned private-sector companies and trade associations urge you to oppose HB1252, the so-called “Level Playing Field Act.” HB1252 is “level” only in the sense that it will harm both the public and private sectors. It will thwart public broadband initiatives, stifle economic growth, prevent the creation or retention of thousands of jobs, and diminish quality of life in North Carolina . In particular, it will hurt the private sector by undermining public-private partnerships, hamstringing our ability to sell our goods and services, interfering with workforce development, and stifling creativity and innovation. …
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Bringing the Heat

I snuck out on my own Friday night and headed to Carrboro to see the Reverend Horton Heat (a.k.a. “Rev”) play the Cat’s Cradle. Boy was I not disappointed! It was almost the perfect show: tickets were just ten bucks, the opening act was entertaining, Cat’s Cradle is now smoke-free, the beer is reasonably-priced, and Rev. absolutely rocked the house. The only way it could’ve been improved was if Kelly could’ve been there, too, and the asinine mosh pit and the morons populating it had been somewhere else.
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Culture of privilege

cary_allred-ncgaI was returning home from a meeting or something an evening a week ago when I spotted a driver having trouble keeping his vehicle in his lane. A few times the vehicle wasn’t keeping speed with traffic and hugged the lane lines. This vehicle had state senate tags. I opted not to call it in, though in hindsight I probably should have.

If I fell for the aura of authority, it seems I’m not alone. Rep. Cary Allred (R-Burlington) was recently cited for driving 102 miles an hour on I-40. Yet rather than haul him off to jail like the trooper would’ve done with the rest of us peons, Trooper N.A. Mitchell let him go with a warning. Now Allred is complaining about getting a ticket days later, saying he’s been “unfairly singled out.”

Yeah, you were unfairly singled out, you moron. You should be cooling your heels in jail right now and catching the bus to the legislative sessions from there on out.

This culture of privilege is what drives me nuts about state politics. If you think our state representatives think they’re “regular folk,” you’d be mistaken.

On a totally unrelated note, have you noticed the resemblance of Cary Allred to the Ha! Ha! guy on FARK?

Marsh Creek Skate Park

This Saturday is the official dedication of Raleigh’s newest park: the Marsh Creek Skate Park. It will be one park event my whole family will be attending, as my kids will probably enjoy watching the skaters as they give themselves broken bones and concussions …er, I mean skate to the extreme.

Rumors that I will suit up and skate are patently false, in case you were wondering. Just watching will be dangerous enough for me!

More fun with Asterisk: automated outgoing calls

Up until recently I have been content to let Asterisk answer my phone, routing incoming calls as I please. That has worked just fine, but I’ve always wanted to get Asterisk to automatically place outgoing calls as well. I found out how to do this this week using a simple text file dropped into a certain directory.

How can this be used? Take my home alarm system for instance. Instead of simply sending a text message to my mobile phone whenever the alarm is tripped, I can now send a recorded clip which states what sensor got triggered (or anything I want, really). I could get really fancy and create a challenge for whomever answers the call when the alarm trips: punch in the proper code and the police aren’t dispatched. Or I could call and have Asterisk pretend its really “Aunt Betty” saying she heard the alarm and is everything all right.

If I was feeling especially confident, I could have this system call the dispatch center itself and announce the event. There are laws against automated calls to dispatch centers, so I’m not quite ready to take this one on. It’s still intriguing, though!

As I am politically minded, I can now easily use my Asterisk system to place outgoing “robo-calls” on behalf of candidates or causes. I could create an application which leaves an identical voicemail on the phones of all of a committee’s members at once.

For security or neighborhood watch use, I could create an instant phone tree where one neighbor could record a crime alert message which could be instantly delivered by phone to an entire block, sort of like a small “reverse 911” system.

I could create a simple application which automatically dials a busy number in the background and then rings my phone when the number is free. Or if I travel to a foreign country I can have Asterisk do an automatic callback so that I can pay the cheap U.S. phone tolls rather than expensive foreign phone tolls. The possibilities are endless!

I look forward to experimenting more with this aspect of Asterisk!

Tune-up day

I worked from home today because I had a dentist appointment in the afternoon. I thought I should take advantage of being at home so I also tacked on a trip to Labcorp in the morning as well as a trip to the optometrist in the afternoon.

It was a spring tune-up for me in a matter of speaking.