I was moaning about how the R.E.M. that played Friday night at Alltel Pavilion was not the same R.E.M. I once loved. My big gripe was the lack of original drummer Bill Berry.

As my buddy (?) Scott pointed out, Bill Berry WAS at the show, surprising the crowd (and apparently the band, too). He took to the skins for a few songs, too.

The crowd (and band) went wild. I would have been in heaven. Now I’m kicking myself for not making it out there.

Thanks anyway, guys!

I thought up a neat way to let DHCP help keep a network secure. The way most DHCP servers are set up now, they dish out IP addresses to random systems which appear on your network. Once the box is on the net, it can do all sorts of damage, like release the Blaster virus.

I’m going to play around with making DHCP send a “quarantine” IP address to any new systems on the network, providing it no gateway or other info. Once that system has been suitably vulnerability scanned, THEN it would get a real IP. It would initially get a low renewal rate on its quarantined IP, so that once it was clean, it will immediately get its new address.

It won’t stop all problems, but it does bring an extra measure of security to the network.

An ancient manuscript of Archimedes has been discovered that shows the mathmatician dealt with concepts of infinity.

If modern techniques had been around much earlier to revive his ancient scribblings, modern mathmatics might have been centuries ahead of its current state.

Cool stuff!

A Greensboro woman is so controlling that she insisted on using science to guarantee she gave birth to a girl. If that wasn’t enough, she demanded that the girl be born on her birthday.

How’d you like to have her as a mother? Can you say “dysfunctional family?”

The company that offered her this miracle is Microsort (not to be confused with Microsoft), a spinoff of the Fairfax, VA-based Genetics & IVF Institute. While I’m all for the advancement of medical science, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. Tipping the gender scales one way or another has global ramifications. This is just going too far.

Woohoo!!!!!11!!!1

After years of trying to grok the Asterisk open-source PBX app, I’ve finally got my head wrapped around it! And this thing is sooo damn cool! I now have a fully-featured PBX installed in my desktop PC. I have a phone jack USB adapter on my desk that I can use to actually dial out to the world. What’s more, I can make and receive calls on my Sharp Zaurus using a SIP-based application called tkphone. I’ve turned my $300 PDA into a $50 wireless phone! 🙂

Seriously, though, I was jonesing for a way to cut the cord for my office conference calls. I’m the kind of guy who likes to walk around while I’m talking, so the traditional wired headset seems more like a leash. A wireless headset can be had for $50, but install a SIP-based app on my Z and my PDA becomes a $300 VoIP telephone. And wireless, too!

With a few more tweaks to my home firewall, I will be able to place calls directly over the internet to my Packet 8 telephone. It will never cross the Public Switched Telephone Network. The Packet 8 terminal adapter has the capability to automatically register itself with my Asterisk PBX (instead of Packet 8), if I chose to cancel my Packet 8 subscription. That might be an option in the near future, now that I’ve got Asterisk ironed out.

I was telling one of my friends last week about the revolution in telephony that SIP and other network-based phone technologies are bringing. Tonight’s success really lights up the possibilities in my mind. Amazing stuff!

I’ve got to put together a presentation for a TriLUG meeting so that my fellow geeks can be wowed by this technology. The world’s phone systems might never be the same!

Kelly, Hallie and I will be heading over to Cary’s Bond Park today at 1PM for a free bluegrass concert today. My coworkers James Goodfellow and Larry Karnowski will be taking the stage at 1 PM, followed by the “real” musicians. 🙂

The show goes until 5, though we probably won’t be. Add together the spectacular weather, a free cost-of-admission, and a half-day full of toe-tapping bluegrass music and you’ve got yourself a recipe for fun!

I’m sorting through the pile of paper which has accumulated on my desk here at home. One pamphlet which crossed my hand was from the cable monopoly …err, the cable company. It is a helpful “consumer guide to cable and home entertainment equipment.”

Reading its explaination of how some TV’s need descramblers to pick up descrambled signals made me realize something (even if I’d figured it out before, I probably forgot it). The days of needing tiers to receive cable programming are LONG since gone.

Tiering is a throwback to the days when descrambling signals was expensive. Back then, all cable signals were analog, and all descramblers were quite crude, compared to the ones of today. Tiers were created to provide a clean way for the cable companies to divide the pay channels from the free ones, thus cutting down on the complications of scrambling. Of course, another way to look at it is that tiers provide a way to hide the good channels from the stuff that’s strictly regulated by local governments: the basic service tier.

I suppose that’s why when Michael Powell insists that the wealth of cable channels provides choice to television viewers, it rings hollow to me. There are more televisions than citizens in our country. While many can afford to pay outlandish fees for “standard tier” cable or satellite dish packages, a large percentage cannot. Where is TV competition for these families?

To get back to my point, today’s technology makes tiering obsolete. New “digital cable” services provide access to far more channels than was once available. Their computer-based set-top boxes could easily provide “a-la-carte” selection of channels. Thus, when you buy a tier just to get ESPN, you don’t have to pad it with a bunch of channels you don’t want.

Tiers are just another way the media companies inflate their worth.

I’ve been reading the James Bamford book Body of Secrets. When the book came out in 2001, it broke the news of a secret military plan called Operation Northwoods which aimed to incite anger towards Castro’s Cuba through the use of domestic terrorism against Americans.
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