Well, last weekend (10th Sept 2005 - 11th Sept 2005) I did something different.

10th Sept 2005 - 18 Sept 2005 is Route 66 On The Air - where hams like me either

1. go to Route 66 to operate, or
2. try to contact those who are on Route 66.

Since I upgraded to Extra a couple of months ago, and can now operate on the HF bands, I thought "What the hell - let's go".

Some of you may have noticed that I submitted this to Technocrat. Now, some of you might wonder why I didn't submit a story to /. about this (and write about it here). Simple. Bruce is a ham, and Technocrat needs stories - I know I had a pretty high probability of getting it accepted there.

However, given that the average /bot's attitude toward hams is "Duuuuh, y'mean those l@m3rz who are keeping from getting my pr0n over the power lines? Su><or!", the fact that I would be mentioning Kansas (which most /bots seem to think is still in black and white), and I believe (rightly or wrongly) that I am on a shitlist with the /editors - I put my probability of getting that story slightly less than BillG giving RMS a big wet kiss on the lips - so why bother?

And yes, Virginia, Route 66 does go through Kansas - the extreme southeast corner, for about 13 miles. We many not get a mention in the song, but we ARE there. This is the first year that Kansas has had an official, recognized Route 66 special event station, but we've actually had folks there for 4 of the past 5 years.

So, I packed up my gear, and rolled down there after work last Friday. It's about a 3 hour drive from here to there (less, if you don't fear the deer. I really don't want to have to get my car fixed.)

Now, if you know anything about shortwave, you will know that we are pretty much in the "solar minimum" - the time when there are relatively few sunspots, and the ionosphere is, shall we say, not exactly conducive to HF propagation. Or put it another way, the bands are deader than a sack of hammers. Add to that the fact that last Wednesday we had an X17 solar flare that stirred things up enough to drive everything too far the other way (and kill the bands), and you don't exactly have a recipe for lots of action.

Also - we were operating out of the the Eisler Brothers Trading Post - which has been around since 1925. Just a couple of blocks away is a big coal fired power plant. Again - not a thing you want when you are trying to work HF.

However, Eisler has good sandwiches, that part of Kansas is very pretty (yes, Kansas does have scenic parts. How do you find them? Easy - look near the big highways - the scenic bits are no-where near them.) We got to talk to the tourists coming through on Route 66 - a whole busload of Brits came though on a tour.

The bands were DEAD. We took turns calling CQ, and occasionally getting a contact.

I was on the radio, calling CQ, when suddenly, "the band, she openna up!" We went from dead to a pile-up so bad I was working stations like it was a contest. I was having to say "OK, let's do this by prefix - stations with a Kilo prefix, call Whiskey-six-mike" just to be able to make out the calls instead of one big mush.

That lasted for about 80 contacts. Then, just as suddenly - THUD! the band closed up, and that was that.

Sunday, we never had any good openings like that. But it was still fun - the proprietors of Eisler Brothers came by to open the front porch up at 09:00, but the store itself was not going to be open until 11:00. So, here we are, trying to hear anything in the noise, when this couple pulls up in their rental. They, too, were from England, and they were taking a 4 week tour of Route 66, and wanted to stop at Eisler's. We told them the store was closed right now, but it will open in thirty minutes or so, and they decided to stay and chat. I gave them a few pointers on places to go and things to do (I've run out on I40 to CA about every year for the past decade over Christmas, so I know that stretch pretty well).

HEre's some pictures of where we operated from.

Per SOP - I've submitted the following, we will see if it gets accepted.

Wowbagger writes: Over on Eric S. Raymond's journal he shows a letter he received from a recruiter at Microsoft, trying to offer him a job. Eric's response is everything that one would expect.

PS 08:47 CDT - rejected. Now, again, to see if some other submission makes it to the front page, how flamebait-y the story is, and when it was submitted.

OK, so the /crew break Slashdot's commenting system.

AND Techocrat is down (HEY ZOGGER!)

It's a conspiracy, I tell ya!

If Groklaw goes down, we will know this is The Day Of The Final Attack On Free Software By The Forces Of EVIL!

First, look at this Freshmeat entry for a streaming audio server.

Now, look at the license: LGPL.

Now, look at the main "claim to fame" - " Stream rippers are now detected and blocked automatically...."

It seems to me that "one of these things is not like the other."

OK, some people will argue that they have the right to stream data but to dis-allow saving of the stream.

Some people argue that the world is flat.

Look, if you stream it to me, I can save it. It may take some work - I may have to use a virtual audio device to capture the data, I may have to use a network proxy, I may have to hack the client, I may have to take the audio out of my computer and capture it on another computer, but if you stream it to me, I can save it.

And consider this: if I am using a GPL audio streaming client, I can modify the source to capture the data.

So how can you be logically consistent using a GPL streamer to stream data to me and expect that I won't use a GPL program to capture the stream?

If you don't want me capturing the stream, don't stream it.

As before - anytime I submit a story to /., I will also put it here.

Take a sound system, a couple of shoes, a pair of pants, and an otherwise unoccupied men's room stall, and you have RoboDump 1.0 There are some people in this world with too much time on their hands - and we salute them. I expect the guy's sound effects MP3'w will be making the rounds, sure as, well....

Addendum 9:00 9 Aug 2005 - rejected. Now, to see what other crap shows up today.

Somebody take the Gnome UI team out and beat them senseless, or better still, beat them senseFULL.

For all the Gnome team talk about improving the UI, they keep FUCKING IT UP . They keep dumbing down the UI, and eventually it will be "My First Computer, by Fischer-Price".

They've removed the "Open Terminal" option from the right-click menu for the desktop. Why? Because "Terminals are icky, and the desktop user should NEVER use one, so we will hide the icky terminal option a couple of menus deep on the start^WGnome menu."

Great. So now developers, like myself, who are CONSTANTLY opening terminals, either a) have to add a Terminal icon to our desktops, or b) have to constantly go into the menu to open a terminal.

Of course, they COULDN'T POSSIBLY add any sort of an option to allow you to turn on the old behavior - because The Gods Of User Interface Design What Are Not To Be Ignored Hath Decreed That Options Are BAD And Thus The User Shall Have No Choice.

For all these morons talk about UI design, they seem blissfully ignorant of Fitts' Law - the fastest places to get to are the 4 edges of the screen and the point directly under the mouse right now - so frequently used things should be on the context menu since it is RIGHT THERE.

But of course, allowing mere (l)users to add items to the context menu easily would violate the Purity Of The User Interface.

Gaaaa!

So I either run Gnome - and watch my computer turn into a big block of useless Nerf, or I run KDE, and watch...
my...
computer...
become...
a...
ZX-81...

Or I run some other environment, and have no meaningful program integration.

Damn - there are times I am tempted to pull out my old Atari TT and run a decently simple, fast environment.

As I've said earlier, I wonder if I'm not on some shitlist only the /crew can see, as I've had many good stories rejected.

So, anytime I submit a story to /., I also put the submission in my journal - that way at least SOME people see it.

And I am also submitting this to Technocrat.

Update 26 Jul 2005 11:16 CDT - story rejected. Let us see what crap does make it to the front page.

Update 26 Jul 2005 13:46 CDT - story accepted at Technocrat.

OK, suppose you are in Marketing or Sales.

And suppose you are an idiot.

But I repeat myself.

(with apologies to Mark Twain.)

Let me preface this by saying that I work closely with several marketing and sales types every day - and I do not assert that ALL marketing or sales types are stupid.

Just the ones I am talking about (with apologies to 2 Live Jews).

One of my pet peeves with any sales web site (i.e. any web site which has as its primary purpose trying to convince you to buy produce or services) is when they do not list some form of price - be it a firm price or just a Manufacturer's Recommended Sale Price.

I do capital equipment for a living - gear costing over US$20,000. Now, for such gear there is rarely a single, firm, Saturn Motors-style price - the price can vary depending upon number of units purchased (and over what time frame they are purchased), the existence of other contracts (government purchase contracts and the like), the options ordered, and how many drinks you bought the sales guy. I understand why you cannot always give a firm price.

However, when you are on the other side of the screen, and you are trying to put together a basic proposal to purchase something, you want a ballpark price, just to weed out the "If you have to ask, you cannot afford it" entries - a guy who has at most US$8000 for a service monitor is NOT in the market for a US$30,000 monitor, and you really don't want to waste your sales guys' time or his time when there is no friggin' chance of a sale.

There's also the predatory way some sales guys behave - you want a rough price, and they attack like a shark smelling blood - and then you cannot beat them away with a stick until you buy, or convince them you died.

OK, so, what motivated me to write this JE?

I live out in the country - not incredibly far, but enough that my choices for an ISP were pretty limited - I have my phone company, or my phone company, or my phone company. Sure, I could go for some oversubscribed dial-up service (PeoplePC? NetZero?), but then I'd be paying long distance charges to the phone company to access the Point of Presence.

Nor is my phone company such a bad choice - they offer DSL in my area, they understand that the world is not all Windows, and they offer pretty good service. But for US$44/month I get 384K/128K - not the fastest in the world.

Now, they've been offering DSL for many years (I was one of their first customers), and over the years they have brought the price down a bit. But unlike in Wichita proper (where you have competition between cable, DSL, and wireless), there has been no price pressure on them.

Until now. Now there are some point-to-point wireless companies offering service where I live.

OK, so first, I want to check my ISP's web pages to see if I can bump my existing service.

But they have no price list ANYWHERE on the site.

So I bring this to their attention via email, and the sales person does The Right Thing (almost)- they email me back, giving me the price for the next service level up and the one-time charge. The only thing they didn't do right was say "Oh, and thanks for pointing out the deficiency in the web site - we will look into fixing that."

OK, so I have a rough idea for one option - US$10 a month more for 512K/256K. Not an order of magnitude increase, but respectable.

So, I check out the wireless company, Pixius. I am in the service area - good. They give good info on the way it works, even giving the rain fade attenuation and link budget (which means a communications guy like myself can compute how likely losing comms due to rain would be). They give a list of "authorized resellers" in the area. They list the specs on their residential service plans and business service plans - bandwidth, IP addresses, mail data, domain hosting, and several other pieces of information.

What they don't list is (see if you can guess):

Price.

OK, so maybe the price is on the "authorized reseller" web sites.

Nope - in fact, not one of the authorized resellers even MENTIONS Pixius on their web site.

Now, I know that were that to happen to us - were OUR authorized resellers to not list us on their site - they would be hell to pay when our marketing director found out.

So, I send an email to the Pixius sales contact address. I did *NOT* include any contact data other than my email (which was my work email address, simply because that's where I was when I looked this up over lunch). I pointed out the absence of price data, and the absence of mention of Pixius on the authorized resellers' web pages. I stated my goal was simply to gather information on possible residential service options.

I expected much the same sort of response as I got from my ISP - an email saying "here's our basic prices, if you want a more detailed quote please contact me."

Instead, this joker shows up at my place of work and tries to get a hold of me there - he leaves his business card with the receptionist (as I was out to lunch at the time) and says to her "It's too complicated to explain our offerings in an email."

BZZZT! Wrong answer. This is a request for a simple residential account - that should be a fairly simple list of prices and options. If your price structure is not well enough defined to supply this, I don't want to do business with you.

Also, when you are contacted by email, you respond by email unless otherwise directed.

So, guess what - Pixius isn't going to be getting a sale from me any time soon.

OK, first read some of these stories which are breathlessly indignant about the fact that *gasp* some US states have actually allowed people to drive faster than 55! And that many places the cops will actually take into account the concept that your speedometer might be in error up to 10 MPH! How shocking - WE MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS.

About the only thing the articles I read didn't do was use the "Think about the children!" line.

Here's my response:

How about we do something about tailgating?

I would rather be on a highway full of cars going 10 over the speed limit but respecting the 2 second following rule than a highway of cars going 10 under, but at .5 second following distance.

One time here on /. (I don't have the article linked any more) I commented that what I wanted was a mine launcher that would launch a mine at zero speed relative to the road, with a 2 second fuse. (of course I was not serious). I had several /bots who were indignant about the "long time" - they had no clue about the 2 second rule (of course, if you spend most of your time in your parent's basement you don't exactly get a lot of skill in driving on real roads).

I've had several people egregiously tailgating me (.5 second or less), and I've done the old "tap the breaks. Tap them again. STOMP on the breaks, then the gas before the idiot hits me" trick and they STILL tailgate me. (back when I drove a '73 Merc with more metal in the bumper than most modern cars have, I would have considered just hitting the brakes, and letting them total themselves out on my bumper. Unfortunately, Ford does not build 2004 cars to quite the same spec....)

And they do this when the whole rest of the highway is EMPTY! They could be miles behind me, miles in front of me, but they insist upon being a half second behind me.

The afore-mentions articles are all calling for more speed enforcement, no buffer, etc. - how about calling for cops to aggressively pursue tailgaters?

NOTE: I do NOT support speeding on city streets, and I think speeding in a school zone ought to be punishable by a swift beating by the side of the road. I generally run within 5MPH of the speed limit on the highways, and bang-on in town.

And the morons who go 100MPH in the city - confiscate and sell their ride, pema-void their driver's license, and if they get caught doing it again - confiscate and sell the vehicle they did it in (unless it is stolen - then hit them for GTA) and lock them up.

Well, I have to use 48 hours of vacation time before 1 July or I will lose it. So, I decided to take it starting this Friday (27 May 2005) to gain the advantage of the Memorial Day holiday.

Normally, when I take vacation, I have a fairly specific set of objectives in mind, but this time, I really don't.

So, I thought I'd see if anybody had any good suggestions for things in the Kansas and neighboring states.

Now, let's see if anybody can come up with a suggestion I've not already done.

I am thinking about a scenic train ride in Colorado that I've not done - the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railroad.

And maybe swing through Baton, New Mexico and go to the Whittington Center.

The good news:

I have mod points.

The bad news:

On Technocrat.

Not that it is bad to have mod points on Technocrat, but rather that there is a paucity of posts on Technocrat, and that I am concerned that there may be no good (or bad) posts upon which to moderate.

Of course, since I got fed up with meta-moderating on Slashdot without getting moderator points for several years and removed myself from the pool of willing fools^Wdupes^Widiots^Wmoderators, I will never receive moderator points on Slashdot.

I have Freshmeat as one of my slashboxes, and this comes in useful sometimes as I see packages that are interesting that I would not have seen otherwise.

I also see a fair number of "Mystery Meat" packages - the ones with incredably helpful names like "Sporkwacker 6.2 zarph version", as opposed to "Fred's DNS 0.6". Now, you can pretty much guess that "Fred's DNS" is yet another DNS server or cache or resolver, or at least that it has *something* to do with domain name services, but you have no clue for something like "Sporkwacker".

So, every once in a while I will follow a Sporkwacker link, just to see what it is. And I've made an observation, and come up with a game.

So, here's the funny game - read all the steps before you follow the link:

1. Read all the instructions.
2. Follow this link: 1060 NetKernel Standard Edition 2.0.5 (Default branch).
3. Read the About text, but DON'T LOOK AT THE LICENSE.
4. Now, having read the description, guess what the license is:
   • Free license
   • "free to use but proprietary"
   • "Free for non-commercial use"
   • "Free trial, pay for continued use"
5. Now, check the license and see if you were right

Here's the funny observation:

Free software has very clearly written descriptions, few buzzwords, and usually a pretty clear use-case for the software.

Proprietary software usually is buzzword-complient and gives you no clue as to why you would want to use the package.

Try it out yourselves and tell me your results.

The depths to which some companies' stupidity decends never fails to amaze me. You have a perfectly happy customer, so let's piss them off!

I received a spam from Meineke (an automotive repair chain). Now, in the past I have done business with Meineke, but I know that this email was spam because:

1. It was addressed to my work email address, which I do NOT give out for personal business.
2. I don't give out my personal address to businesses either, unless there is a damn good reason they would need to email me - and few businesses have that need.
3. If I *do* give out my email, I explicitly opt out of any mailings other than those directly associated with the business at hand.
4. By 1, 2, and 3, the email was unsolicited, and commercial - thus UCE by definition, thus spam by definition.

Now, my usual modus operandii on dealing with spam on behalf of an otherwise upstanding company is to forward the spam on to legal@, postmaster@, spam@, and any other "admin-like" email for that company - some companies hire scummy spammers unknowingly, or hire a company that hires a spammer. So, by letting the company know they are being besmirched, if they are a good company they will stop doing business with the spammers, and the spammers won't make money. Also, oft-times you can get the company to pursue trademark infringment charges against the spammer - yet more costs for the scum.

If the company responds with a "Thank you, we will look into it" message, then they don't go on my shit list.

Companies that respond with "harrumph! We are legitimite biznessmen! We don't spam." - they go on my shit list.

(Thus, I will never stay at a Super-8 willingly - when I contacted them they not ONLY asserted they were legit, but how DARE I say anything bad about them! But that's off-topic here....)

So, I contacted Meineke - and got the standard "We don't spam, we feel our customers want to be contacted, and if you don't like it, you can use the unsubscribe link on the page."

Remember, I never gave them permission to contact me - my conjecture is that they are using a spammer service who does database mining to match harvested email addresses with names ( since my given name is not terribly common, and my work mail is just my given name and my place of work).

I've responded to their response, reiterating these facts, but the simple fact that Meineke sees no problem with an opt-out mailing model is sufficient to make them spammers - the ONLY way to do email marketing is confirmed opt-in.

So, Meineke loses a customer, and gains a detractor.

Meineke spams.

Heeere, Googlebot. Here boy!

Meineke spams.

I've submitted the following to /. and Technocrat - now to see if anybody publishes it.

wowbagger writes Have you received Gevalia coffee spam? Are you angry at Kraft Foods for continuing to support this spam? Do you wish somebody would do something about it? Well, somebody has. Hypertouch.com, an ISP, has sued Kraft for US$11.7 million due to continuing spams for Kraft's coffee service. I've written the attourney handling the case to offer copies of the spams I've recieved, and to ask if he's thought about making this a class-action suit. We shall see what happens from here.

Update 09:21 CDT: Technocrat accepted the article and it is up on the main page. /. rejected it.

Now, to see if anybody else submits it to /. and gets it accepted.

I don't know which day in April is worse - 1 April or 15 April.

The 15th ticks me off as the reminder of how poorly our elected officials handle the money they take from us virtually at gunpoint (and if you doubt this and you live in the US, try not paying your taxes and see what happens).

The first ticks me off due to the sustained idiocy of people who have no conception of what "humor" is or how to properly effect an April Fools' Day Gag.

The only thing is that I can (and do) chose to deal with my taxes earlier, while the only choice I can make on this day is whether to read the various online sources or not.

Even this year's 1 April RFCs are a bit lame.

Perhaps I should flesh out my idea for an April RFC and submit it next year:
IP over ammunition - datagrams at 600 bps (bullets per second) and 1100 meters per second (not compatible with IP over avian carriers).