The streets tell me when school’s out

We’ve lived within a mile of Capital Boulevard for a few years now. I’ve developed the ability to tell if a day is a holiday based on the lack of traffic noise coming from the roads. The same applies to school delays. The morning traffic is not nearly as heavy when the schools aren’t open.

That makes me wonder just how much resources are wasted in getting kids to and from school every day. Its got to be enormous. School has a big impact on morning traffic, and to some extent afternoon traffic, too. When kids are bused to schools across town that makes the problem even worse.
Continue reading →

Freezy stuff on the way

Word has it that we’re doomed to get some freezy stuff tomorrow morning. As long as it winds up in my rain barrel when its done melting, I’m fine with that.

A snow day is one of the few times working from home becomes a pain. Problem is, when it really get stormy around here, working from home is next to impossible because everyone who’s normally at the office is tying up neighborhood phone lines that are normally available for my use.

We’ll see what happens, though.

Astounding water savings

Last week Raleigh mayor Charles Meeker drew some flak for putting forth the goal for everyone to limit themselves to using only 25 gallons of water a day, per person. The mayor’s own water bills showed his household consumption to be around 33 gallons per person per day.

Being of the curious mind, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and see just how MT.Net was measuring up against this goal. Last Monday evening, I carted a flashlight and screwdriver out to the meter and noted the usage. The meter displays water use in cubic feet, and mine read 7,936.7. One cubic foot of water equals 7.48 gallons for those keeping score at home.
Continue reading →

Great awakenings

I’ve slept terribly the past few nights. I think it has to do with the lingering cough I’ve had since before the holidays. Kelly and I took the kids to a puppet show at the N.C. Museum of Art on Saturday morning and I fell asleep right in the middle of it.

Last night, though, I slept beautifully. You can tell any morning you catch me singing and dancing that I must have slept well. I don’t know what made the difference, though. Maybe I’m getting over my cough, or a change in diet, or the absence of allergens after we vacuumed Friday. I wish I knew. I was even going to set up a video camera to film myself sleeping last night but thought it too much work. If I had, it would’ve showed me sleeping like a baby, which isn’t particularly telling.

Last January I had another sleep study set up but I had to cancel it due to business travel. I never tried rescheduling it until a few weeks ago, when Rex Hospital told me I had to get it reauthorized. Though I slept well last night, I’d like to know why sometimes I don’t. It sure would be nice to wake up like this every day!

Disconnected, but a converter box saves the day

We don’t watch much TV at MT.Net. In fact, our TVs are one decade old and two decades old, respectively. One day we’ll move to HDTV but with the dreck that passes for TV entertainment lately, why bother?

Fortunately the gummint (or specifically the FCC) is moving things along. The analog NTSC TV signals that first debuted in the 1950s will be turned off for good next February. That would normally give TVs like mine a one-way ticket to the landfill, but there is a way to use them with the new, all-digital signals. The government is offering coupons for purchasing converter boxes that allow old TVs to see the new signals.
Continue reading →

Disconnected, but in a good way

I’m about to cancel the $10 DSL I’ve had after having tested it and deciding we don’t need it anymore. The plan now is to drop Bellsouth service entirely and go to VoIP over our cable service. I’m still mulling that change over, though.

As I perused Bellsouth’s FastaccessDSL page, I note that the FastAccess DSL Direct service – the DSL service without phone service I mentioned earlier – is now listed on the DSL page. Its near the bottom of the page, mind you, but at least it’s there.

And to think you heard it here first on MT.Net!

Disconnected

I tried to make a phone call just now and instead I got a recorded message I’d never heard before:

“We’re sorry, due to telephone facility difficulty your call could not be completed. Would you please try your call again later.”

Hmm. I wonder if this has anything to do with the FBI not paying the bill on my phone’s wiretap?

Female Marine dead, sheriff says

Ed Brown, the Onslow County sheriff investigating the disappearance of missing Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach now says she’s dead and a search is on for her body. Lauterbach was 8 months pregnant and had previously claimed to have been assaulted by a superior officer.

What I don’t understand is how the sheriff could be so sure she’d dead. No one has been able to find her body, nor can police find the guy they suspect of killing her. A lot of what I’ve heard seems to indicate she had planned to go away, so what would make the sheriff say she’s dead?

Converting Raleigh’s streaming media into open formats

The City of Raleigh now makes the meetings of the city council and other boards available as streaming media hosted by the company called Granicus. These streams are helpful for getting citizens (particularly geek citizens locked in a cubicle) a look at government happenings but they are offered in a proprietary Windows Media 9 format and not an open format like Xvid, MPEG4 and the like. Linux media players like Totem and Mplayer can play the existing streams but the streams’ lack of an index makes it impossible to skip through the sessions.
Continue reading →

U.S. doubts source of Persian Gulf radio transmission

Did I call it right or what? I was happy to see that the U.S. Navy now doubts the source of the radio transmissions accompanying the Iranian speedboat confrontation this week.

It goes without saying the Persian Gulf is a tough neighborhood. Our big ships can be attacked at any minute with little warning or chance to escape. This necessary hair-trigger posture usually keeps sailors safe but can occasionally cause tragic accidents in the confusion and rush to act.

I give our ship captains a lot of credit for taking a deep breath and making the right call in this latest incident.