Coming on the heels of yesterday’s solar panel post, here’s a short YouTube video showing how solar panels are made that I found on Hugg today. Serendipitous!
I didn’t know making panels was so labor-intensive! Each one takes an hour to build. Is this how they’re mass-produced?
March brought the sad and unexpected news that my Uncle Don passed away. He was a few years into his retirement and enjoying it from all accounts: playing golf and tennis on a regular basis. Don went to bed one night and never awoke. He was found by his daughter that morning, a day he was supposed to play golf.
I was wandering around Best Buy when my mom called with the news. I was stunned. Don had seemed so healthy and happy. Just a night or two before, I was exchanging emails with him because he wanted to pick my brain about VoIP. I never got a chance to answer all his questions. I was also leaving that weekend for a business trip to Australia, so I missed his funeral to my great regret.
I couldn’t help but think of my own father, who was retiring that very month from the job he held for 37 years. Don’s retirement was how I saw my dad’s retirement – happy, secure, and full of activity. I was sad Dad and Don weren’t going to be able to share their retirements together.
If you love somebody, let them know. Hug them, laugh with them, and enjoy their company because there always comes a day when it’ll be too late.
The 2006 International Remote Viewing Conference I attended in May was a mind-bending (and spoon-bending) experience. I learned things there that I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. Some of those things I probably never will fully understand.
And I discovered that it gets frickin’ hot in Las Vegas in May. Whoo wee.
When sizing up what it costs to add solar panels to your house, someone will inevitably say “it’ll take 20 years before you’ll get your money out of it.”
That may be true, but what do you have to show for twenty years of electric bills?
Put on your tinfoil hats, folks. We’re going for a ride.
The news about the FBI’s knowledge of former Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s psychotic episodes and drug addiction got me thinking about the process I once went through to get my security clearance.
When you apply for a security clearance your past is laid bare. You fill out a form listing three or more character references. A team of federal detectives, then goes out and interviews them, getting even more references. These are checked, and then cross-checked.
You also are asked somewhat personal questions. Among other things, you may be asked whether you’ve ever committed a crime, what your sexual orientation is, and/or whether you’ve done drugs. What surprised me later to learn is that the investigators don’t really care what your answers are as long as you’re honest. Chances are they already know the answers, in fact. What they are looking for is anything in your past that can be held against you.
The reasoning is simple: they want you beholden to Uncle Sam and no one else. If you’ve got a deep, dark secret somewhere that would be devastating to you if revealed, you will understandably do whatever you could to keep it secret. If a foreign agent were to discover your secret, you could be easily blackmailed into doing whatever they wanted, up to and including betraying your country.
I thought of my trip through this security-clearance gauntlet when the Hookergate story first surfaced of crooked Randy “Duke” Cunningham. Cunningham was up to his neck in hookers, illegal cash, and God knows what else when he was brought down along with Jack Abramoff. Sidestepping for a moment the question of whether he is the world’s biggest idiot, Cunningham’s antics were an obvious threat to his security clearance and so became easy leverage against him. Abramoff could play Cunningham like a Top 40 station, getting The Duke to do whatever he wanted.
It’s simple stuff, really. Spycraft 101. Prehaps that what attracted Cunningham’s fellow partier, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo. That Foggo was the number 3 person at the CIA should raise some eyebrows. Coincidence? The CIA is obviously quite familiar with these techniques. They own these techniques. This should raise the question: why was the CIA involved in the compromising of a congressional representative?
I’ll say that again: why was the CIA involved in the compromising of a congressional representative?
The news stories make it seem that Foggo was a party boy who just happened to get caught with the other party boys. Boys will be boys, ha ha. Nothing to see here, folks. Just some overgrown frat boys having a little fun.
But its no joke, people. The CIA was involved in the bribing of congressmen. Doesn’t that alarm you a little?
Foggo was appointed to his high CIA post by its new Director, Peter Goss. Goss has been rumored to have attended Foggo’s parties, although his spokesperson denied it. Goss and Foggo were said to be “good friends.”
Let’s go a little deeper and speculate on the nature of Foggo’s hiring. Could it be possible that Foggo had some dirt on Goss and leveraged it to gain his position? Goss’s sudden and never-unexplained resignation when the Hookergate story broke certainly raises yet-unanswered questions.
I find today that the CIA is not cooperating with the investigation of Dusty Foggo, according to the Wall Street Journal. Strange, isn’t it? Why is the CIA reluctant to turn over documents for an investigation into a misbehaving direector? I’m sure the CIA isn’t pleased with the publicity this case has already gained. One would think they would be eager to wash their hands of it and hang Foggo out to dry. After all, if the CIA was unaware of Foggo’s extra-curricular activities, why wouldn’t they choose to cooperate?
Methinks they doth protest too much.
The CIA wrote the book on blackmail. It’s a commonly-method to gain the cooperation of foreign agents. Who’s to say it isn’t also being used against domestic agents: our own politicans? Crooked guys like Cunningham were sitting ducks and ripe for the picking. Foggo, Brent Wilkes, and Abramoff used Cunningham like an ATM machine. Surely the CIA saw an opportunity here!
In fact, if they could target Cunningham (and obtensibly Goss), what would stop them from going after others? Why wouldn’t they push for the appointment of compromised (and thus CIA-friendly) officials for important posts? The CIA has assets with which to frame domestic media coverage. Why not use them to generate support for their preferred candidates?
I smell a story here as big or bigger than Watergate, one that could shake the very foundations of our alleged democracy when it breaks. The real question is: when will Americans start paying attention?
Read more about the shady characters involved in Hookergate at Firedoglake.
This was one headline today on Fark:
When news is distorted by political correctness, everyone loses. Especially you, retard
I couldn’t help but laugh.
I had one of the best nights of sleep last night after a visit yesterday to an Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) doctor. The doc tells me my deviated septum may be to blame for sinus infections, snoring, headaches, and global warming. Okay, I made up that last part, but the rest was enough to get my attention.
I’ve never taken care of my nose. As a kid I was prone to fall out of bed in my sleep. I lost track of how many concussions that led to (this explains a lot about me right there, eh?). I’ve also gotten my share of bloody noses from these. There was also the time ten years ago when I face-planted while rollerskating at Lake Johnson park. I wound up fracturing my cheekbone from that incident. It healed on its own but may have packed my sinuses even closer than they were.
On the other hand, the deviated septum may be congenital. That happens, too. No matter where I got it, its time to get it fixed.
The doc hooked me up with an antibiotic, a nasal spray, and some steroids. I don’t know which ones made the difference, but the result was a fairly-restful night. I awoke at 5 AM feeling like it was 9. I was so happy that I laced up my tennis shoes and took a long walk around the neighborhood! It was 32 degrees out and still dark but I enjoyed every minute of it. I got to walk by the moonlight and to see Venus rise in the eastern sky.
I’m still checking into the ins and outs of septoplasty surgery (where the ENT reshapes the inside of my nose). The doctor said I would notice an “immense” improvement in how I breathe. Anything that will improve on dramatic difference the drugs made is worth exploring! Not only will I sleep better, I’ll breathe better during exercise and the long-winded demos I often conduct. My dentist says that breathing through the mouth dries out the gums, so my teeth will also benefit.
Breathing: its the first thing and the last thing you’ll ever do. It makes sense to get the most out of every breath.
Congratulations to R.E.M. for being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This is from one of their best albums, Life’s Rich Pageant.
I Believe
R.E.M.
When I was young and full of grace
and spirited–a rattlesnake.
When I was young and fever fell
My spirit, I will not tell
You’re on your honor not to tell
I believe in coyotes and time as an abstract
Explain the change, the difference between
What you want and what you need, there’s the key,
Your adventure for today, what do you do
Between the horns of the day?
Continue reading
Thought I’d give y’all an update on my switch to Net10 for cellphone service. I’ve literally spent over 4 painful hours on their tech support line but everything is now settled and working.
Why did it take 4 hours? An MVNO like Net10 uses a hosting cellphone company’s network and voicemail (in Net10’s case, Cingular). The MVNO provides all the customer handholding itself. To minimize costs, Net10 of course oursources its front-line support to Belize. To gain even greater savings, Net10 uses VoIP links to Belize. Thus, when one calls their support, you have network latency issues, dropped packets, AND a cultural barrier in addition to the language barrier.
The folks on the other end are polite and are as professional as they could be. Gosh darn it, they really do seem to want to help. Unfortunately, the bad connections and cultural divide are hurdles just too high to overcome. When you provide information to them, they repeat it back to you digit by unending digit. Providing them a twenty-digit IMEI number (in other words, the phone’s serial number) is an exercise in insanity.
I also hear them say “I’m waiting for my system” quite a lot. At first I played along and assumed their call center had sucky Internet connectivity. After my last call, though, I realized the agent is simply plugging my complaint into an internal search engine and the wait is for the result. I’ll tell you more about that call in a moment.
I ordered a refurbished Motorola V171 from their website for $50. It’s a great deal: phone plus 300 minutes for 50 bucks. My only beef was the phone didn’t seem loud enough for driving around in my noisy Honda CR-V. I called them back and got an RMA for the phone. They quickly had a postage-paid box shipped to my house and a new phone in my hands, only it wasn’t the phone I asked for. It was another V171 when I asked to try a Nokia phone. The rep had noted my call as “phone defective,” rather than actually listening to what I was asking. The mighty search-engine strikes again! Fortunately, I found that I’d only thought I’d turned the phone’s volume all the way up but it still had a few notches to go. When I upped the volume everything was golden.
For a while I had two cellphones. To avoid paying outrageous forwarding fees to $print, I put an “extended absence” message on that phone’s voicemail, directing callers to my Net10 phone. I then went about the issue of porting my old number to my new phone.
Here’s where the fun really began. On November 30th I spent another one of my hours talking to the Net10 rep to get this porting done. They put in the paperwork and told me I’d be getting a new SIM card for the port (which also entails reprogramming all your phone book entries, by the way). The only problem is, Sprint ported the number and Net10 never sent me my SIM card. Callers to my old number were sent to hyperspace while I wondered when my “any day now” SIM card would arrive.
Time marched on. Lives were born and lost. Planet Earth sailed farther around the sun. I got sick of waiting and burned another hour on the phone. “It has already been mailed,” yada yada yada. Give them a few more days.
Kelly goes through the porting routine herself. When her card doesn’t arrive as promised, she lets the rep have a piece of her mind. Somehow she gets a native English speaker on the line. The next day, her new SIM card is in her hands. While she’s on the line with the clueful rep, she helpfully has them ship a new card out to me, too. Saturday before Christmas was the promised arrival day.
Of course that didn’t happen. The day after Christmas the card finally arrived. Finally I had all the parts to do the port. Another frustrating telephonic visit to Belize and I had my familiar cellphone number on my new phone. All seemed good, right?
Wrong. The new SIM card had no voicemail number programmed into it so I didn’t know how to retrieve my messages.
Friday was my last communication with my friends in Belize. After reading and rereading the zillion-digit IMEI number and explaining at least four times that I simply needed to know which number to dial to retrieve voice mail, I heard the clueless rep begin reading the script for resetting the voicemail password. WTF?!?
“I’m sorry,” I said politely but curtly. “I don’t think you’ll be able to help me. Goodbye.” I hung up the phone before strongly considering hurling it across the room.
Here’s when I finally got wise. Net10 is owned by TracFone, a Miami-based company. Their letterhead has their corporate number on it, which can also be used for support. I called it and got a cheerful American voice on the first ring. In another moment, I was speaking with an American tech who not only corrected all the problems introduced by her Belize counterparts, she waited on the line while she hustled the Cingular rep through the process of setting up my voicemail. Only when she had verified the voicemail was working did she let me go, and by this time it was closing on 6 PM on a Friday. In other words, their internal support did an outstanding job, in contrast to their well-meaning but hopeless outsourced call center.
So where does that leave me? It was a lot of pain to get here, but I’m now satisfied with my service. I love not paying for my phone when I’m not using it, I can carry minutes over for a whole year, and if something fancier catches my eye I have no draconian contracts locking me in. I can think of little reason to call Net10’s support department again now that things are set up, so the earlier bumps don’t really concern me. Especially now that I know which number to call.
This MVNO stuff is frontier-type stuff. It can be frustrating and bewildering. If you know what you’re doing, though, you can get the same service coverage and features that you’re using now for a fraction of the cost. To me that’s worth a little bit of trouble.
I’ve rediscovered a passion of mine long left dormant. It’s photography, and digital photography is what’s inspired me. Sure, we’ve had a digital camera (a Canon Powershot S50) for years now. While I enjoyed its compact size and resolution, its fixed lens was uninspiring and the shutter delay made capturing the moment a frustrating experience.
The big break came when my employer sent me to Australia for two weeks. I couldn’t go without taking pictures, nor could I leave the family without a means of taking pictures. We finally agreed to get a Nikon D50 to augment our Canon Powershot. In an ironic twist, the Powershot mysteriously stopped working a few weeks later.
I have fallen in love with the D50. It takes beautiful pictures so quickly that snapping the shutter is like a hit of crack: you just can’t stop! I take my camera with me practically whereever I go, looking for that once-in-a-lifetime shot.
I took two weeks’ worth of beautiful pictures in Austalia, although it resulted in an altercation I still don’t fully understand. I toted it to Holland a month later. Finally I could share the beauty of my travels with the folks at home.
I shot wondrous pictures at the America’s Sail event in Beaufort this spring. I arrived the day before most ship tours but landed quite a few pictures of the host of honor, Beaufort’s own privateer, Horatio Sinbad. Which reminds me that I owe him some pictures . . .
I took my camera to Artsplosure this summer, too, little knowing it would result in controversy. As we were finishing up our tour, I heard a Squirrel Nut Zippers song playing at a nearby stage and snapped some pictures of the Maxwell/Mosher band warming up. In my blog entry I made note of how N & O music critic David Menconi’s recent story about the band’s breakup made them sound like . . . well, dicks. Well, the bandmates surf the net with the best of them and zeroed in on my blog, unloading on me with their side of the story. Either I touched a big nerve or the guys were looking for a place to vent. Or both, who knows? Once the lead had stopped flying I was left a bit bewildered at it all but was happy to provide a forum for their side. My blog still gets a ton of hits for that entry, so much so that I disabled comments. Menconi’s blog entry still links to my site as an example of the bad blood among the former Zippers.
I took my camera to our family beach vacation. In spite of the comical scene of herding the Turner clan around the beach for a few family pictures, I got two job offers from spectators to shoot pictures for them. I took one of them up on their offer the next day. I turned 15 minutes and 100 pictures into a handful of cash and some unforgettable mementos of a family’s beach visit.
Seeing the pictures of the Raleigh Flickr group have inspired me to take my photography much more seriously. As a fine musical instrument inspires a musician to play better music, so does a fine camera inspire a photographic artist.
