There's an old comic that appeared in Dragon Magazine, of the DM to the players:
"... and that passage leads to the unfinished part of the dungeon you feel strangely compelled to avoid."

Sometimes you find that on web sites too. And what's more fun than finding such a site on Google?

I backed into a way to find some street level data that evidently is NOT yet linked into the main data base. Here's how to see some of it:

Follow this link - it will set up a route from one of the repeaters I maintain, just outside of Hutchinson, KS, to KCK. The important bit here is that one endpoint of the journey ends where there is a street view available.

Next, make sure you have the "street view" enabled.

Then, re-calculate the route. You should now have a camera icon at the first turn of the route. If you click it, you will be right outside the gate of the site. That's a 1400' tower, by the by, and my antennas are up at 1200'. Also, that road is a muthaphucker of a washboard - I feel sorry for the poor Googlites going down it.

You cannot zoom into the Hutchinson area and keep the street view yet - I'm guessing they are in the process of loading the data and linking it in, and haven't finished yet.

I've found quite a few areas that are in this "Schroedinger's Cat" state - it looks like there is going to be a drop soon.

Looking at the area around my house (no, I'm not giving a link) I've been able to data this sometime last fall (i.e. September to October, 2008).

(Google folks: If you read this, take US160 from Medicine Lodge to Coldwater, and take US166 from Arkansas City to Riverton. We actually DO have scenic roads in Kansas, they just aren't the major ones.)

I occasionally read the Bible. Never all at once, just interesting pieces with which to frighten door-to-door evangelists. I love finding little pieces with which to end a conversation, and put the believer completely on the defensive -- "Seriously, you believe in stoning rape victims? For being raped? Jesus says you have to..."

I've got a brand new one, though, to end conversations about the importance of religion, or the definition of religion. I'm talking, of course, about Scientology.

Well, that or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or the Invisible Pink Unicorn, but reductio ad absurdum works so much better when you can actually point to said absurdity in the real world. There is actually a large and vocal group out there which believes an evil emperor named Xenu sent aliens called Thetans to earth on DC-8s (which fly through space), and then nuked them in volcanoes.

Note to religious people: Yes, I do think it's stupid of you to believe in religion. Understand two things:

First, it doesn't mean I think you're stupid. Smart people do stupid things.

Second, I won't attack you for it. I'm a bit trigger-happy with my atheism, but still, if you don't bring it up, I won't. It's a bit like homosexuality -- I really don't care what you do in bed (or elsewhere), or who you do it with. It only becomes a problem if you start hitting on me -- or evangelizing to me.

This is a repost of a story I've put up on Technocrat:

As a variant of the old "tree falling in a forest" question, if a radio DJ blabs for an hour and nobody hears him because he forgot to hit the "Live" button, is he still annoying? Well, an intrepid DJ in the UK has tried to provide an answer.

This is a pet peeve of mine, and I'll address this to the (probably very small) set of DJs that might read Technocrat:

I don't listen to FM radio to hear you yap. I don't care what you think of the previous song, the next song, the weather, politics, the latest Hollyweird scandal, sports, the latest sports scandal, local events, or anything else. I don't care to hear you braying like a jackass over your not-funny "jokes" - no matter how much you horselaugh, you aren't going to make me think the joke's funny.

To put it bluntly: You suck. Every second you talk sucks. If you talk for more than a couple of seconds I will change the channel. If I wanted to listen to talk radio I'd be down on the AM dial. All I want to hear out of your gob is

• The artist and title of the previous "N" songs (where "N" should be larger than 3)
• The artist and title of the upcoming "N" songs
• Any news of critical importance: severe weather alerts, traffic alerts, and matters of world altering importance (hint: if kids won't be studying the event in history class fifty years from now, it isn't important.)
• Station ID *when required by the FCC* (as in, I don't need to hear that I am listening to "Bob FM" every five seconds - I am a man, not a goldfish.)

The only reason I am listening to radio rather than my MP3 player is that I've listened to my music collection until the edges are worn off the 1's. So have a nice frosty glass of shut up and play the next song.

For awhile, I've had this signature:

DRM? Trusted Computing? Fine, but not with my code.

I do start to feel like a hypocrite looking at that. After all, I'm now working as an HD-DVD developer, making quite a bit of money, enjoying what I do, and not at all close to wanting to quit in outrage about the DRM.

But while I don't have to deal with DRM every day, I do have to deal with it often enough. While I have not personally written any code that does DRM, all my code will eventually be DRM'd on-disc, and one of my co-workers has, in fact, written some utilities to manage AACS stuff.

And, in general, I still feel that DRM is useless and should not be done, but I also have seen it done in ways that aren't really that bad, and even seen some things which benefit the consumer. Steam, for example, allows me to download the same game (unless it's Bioshock) anywhere I want to, anytime, so long as I remember my password and only log in at one place at a time. (So that's one download and/or game being played at a time.)

Steam is actually an example of "not that bad", as everything they do which benefits the consumer, they could've done without DRM. No, an example of something which benefits the consumer are the "music rental" services. After you get to a certain amount of music, it just makes more sense, financially, to simply rent your music rather than buy it. If the service goes away, and the DRM isn't cracked, then yes, you lose a bunch of music -- so you join another service and download the same music again.

I prefer to own my music, but I'm a bit of a fanatic.

So, while most days I'd rather see DRM go away forever, this signature is starting to be a bit hypocritical. After all, DRM is being done with my code, and most of what I write is not GPL'd.

So why do I have it?

Simple: Since I started using this signature, I've seen almost none of the retarded arguments against GPLv3 -- the arguments which talk about the GPL being used to attack DRM, that it's overstepping its bounds as a software license and attacking hardware... Whatever.

Because this statement makes all of those arguments go away. Licensing software under the GPLv3 is not directly attacking DRM, it's not even saying that you hate DRM and want to abolish it. It's simply saying that you may not use it with this code.

People point to the TiVo as an example -- shouldn't I want to license my software such that people can make cool stuff like the TiVo? Well, why should I, unless I'm getting a cut? It's simple: TiVo can either have my code for free, on my terms, or they can go somewhere else. There's plenty of GPLv2 or even BSD-licensed stuff they could have for free, or they could buy some commercial software -- maybe even from me.

I don't see that as inconsistent with what I do for a living, but this whole essay doesn't exactly fit in a signature. So I am posting a consistent position here:

I don't like DRM, and I don't like closed software that I don't have access to. Therefore, software which I release for free will have no part in this. If you're willing to pay me a living wage to develop software, I will develop pretty much whatever you want, so long as it's not wholly unethical (I won't write Lotus Notes for your Killbot). But if I release something as free and open, it's probably because I intend for it to stay that way.

So, if you have a problem with me using the GPLv3, either hire me or use somebody else's code.

I live in a small town in Iowa. An ISP here is offering fiber to the home for $60/mo, free installation. That's 100 mbits, and they do support net neutrality -- meaning that if they can't build enough bandwidth to support everyone on YouTube (or BitTorrent), they'll simply move to a metered model, but apparently they don't have to yet.

We spend enough time talking about the ISPs we hate -- which ones do we love? Anywhere else with fast, cheap, neutral Internet?

(The following is a copy of a posting I made to Technocrat, just in case there are any fans of mine who don't read Technocrat, and who are hams)

Well, we are T-5 days and counting to Route 66 On the Air 2007, 8th Sept. 2007 to 16th Sept. 2007. I will be out in Riverton, Kansas, representing the fine state of Kansas and reminding everybody that, yes, Route 66 does go through Kansas.

I'll be operating as W6M, an official Route 66 On the Air station. Any Technocrat readers who want to make the trip to The Eilser Brothers General Store, please do!

Also, if anybody cares to head over to Wikipedia and state that you feel that this is at least as notable as every minor character in Yu-Gi-Oh, be my guest.

The frequencies this year are:

. 80 meters | 40 meters | 30 meters | 20 meters | 17 meters | 15 meters | 12 meters | 10 meters | 6 meters
CW 3533 kHz | 7033 kHz | 10110 kHz | 14033 kHz | 18080 kHz | 21033 kHz | 24900 kHz | 28033 kHz | 50033 kHz
SSB 3866 kHz } 7266 kHz } N/A | 14266 kHz | 18164 kHz | 21366 kHz | 24966 kHz | 28466 kHz | 50166 kHz

I'll be operating SSB mostly, probably in 20 meters, but it will depend upon the band conditions. Hopefully, this year I should have a G5RV up about 50 feet for the whole event, rather than operating most of the event on the screwdriver on my car like last year. I may have a few other operators show up as well (I sure HOPE so!), but I'll try to operate as much as I can.

Here's the sponsor's web page, as well as The Wichita Amateur Radio Club's page (my club's page).

I am a professional software engineer. I make my living THINKING - long, hard and deeply. Interruptions are very expensive, and I don't suffer them lightly. Magazines, email, and things like this journal entry aren't interrupts: they are tasks I run when I am blocked on my main tasks (e.g. during compiles and downloads to the target.)

Phone calls, on the other hand, are interrupts. And since I don't know who is calling me until I take the call, I cannot leave that particular interrupt masked most of the time.

As a professional, I can get a very large number of professional magazines free of charge - EDN, EE Times, and the like. They get their money by selling ads, and their revenues are based upon their circulation.

And I have no problem with that - I will look at the ads that relate to my current situation, and ignore those that don't. They don't cost me time.

Now, when a magazine wants me to renew, and sends the renewal form on the front of the magazine, and they pay for postage, then I will renew the magazine if I find it valuable. If I don't find it valuable, and they pay for postage, then I will do them the courtesy of sending them the renewal with a "No thanks".

If they think I am going to chase up a stamp to send the response back to them, they are stupid. I am not going to spend 39 cents to tell them I am not interested - they can infer that from my lack of response.

I *also* do NOT give out my fax number, telephone number, or email to magazines - if they wish to communicate with me, they can do so by the US postal service. Again, I don't want to be interrupted.

Long ago, I decided upon a very simple rule with respect to magazine that call me on the phone about renewals: I cancel them. Immediately. I waste no time on the phone - I say "I'm sorry, I don't take magazines that call me on the phone at work. Goodbye. <click>".

That's a pretty clear "NO", isn't it?

Evidently, not for EDN. They have been calling me about once a week for the past month. They called me yesterday. They got the standard response.

I also decided that the next time they called me I was going to be "smart lazy" rather than "dumb lazy": I would spend more time on the line to insure that I wasted no more time in future.

Guess what happened a few tens of minutes ago? If you guessed "they called me again" then you are paying attention, which is more than I can say for the phone monkeys employed by the company that EDN employs for "circulation retention".

So, I made it very plain that:

1. I had no interest in any magazine that called me on the phone.
2. EDN was such a magazine.
3. I was NOT going to renew.
4. I had so informed them on multiple previous calls.
5. I wanted my name removed from their calling list.
6. I wanted my name and number ADDED to their DO NOT CALL list.

Now, I know how these telemarketers (and that is who I am dealing with, telemarketers) operate. Anything less than a clear "FUCK OFF AND DIE NO I DON'T WANT YOUR CRAP STOP CALLING ME" is ignored - these guys are judged on their "retention rates", and paying heed to a NO that doesn't fit their narrowly defined parameters will hurt those rates.

I don't give a shit about their rates. I said NO. Honor it.

Of course, this being a business line, it is NOT eligible for the Do Not Call list.

So, instead, I will pass this on:

DO NOT SUBSCRIBE TO EDN (Electronic Design News).
DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, GIVE ANY "FREE" MAGAZINE ANY CONTACT INFORMATION BEYOND YOUR ADDRESS.
SHOULD THEY GET YOUR EMAIL, FAX NUMBER, OR PHONE NUMBER, TELL THEM IN NO UNCERTAIN TERMS TO REMOVE YOUR INFORMATION FROM THEIR DATABASE AND NOT CONTACT YOU AGAIN.

Well, where I work we just bought a new DSP development station, to evaluate a potential chip for our RF signal processing. Any chip that can spit out a 16 million point complex FFT in 43 milliseconds is well worth investigating.

And it was a steal at the price: most such platforms cost several thousand dollars, this one cost less than US$700.

It was really fun, calling our IT department and saying "I need a monitor and network drop for my PS3" and it really being work related.

Now, we just have to get a screen on it and install Linux.

I've got a server in my house, which always stays on. I can use cron and WakeOnLAN to wake my desktop, and with a bit of hacking, I can probably feed KOrganizer reminders from my desktop into the server's cron, and set my desktop to do something once booted, such as play some loud music. The one missing component is speakers -- how can I turn them on programmatically? (Thinking programmable power strip here.) Even better, are there some cheap, decent-sounding speakers I could get which can be entirely software-controlled, including volume and forceably switching to speakers, even if I leave my headphones plugged in?

Over a decade ago, I signed up with my phone company when they got into the ISP business. At first, they were clueless, but they rapidly became clueful. Then they passed cluefulness and became excellent.

Then they outsourced their residential ISP functions (although they now provide business ISP "solutions"), and service started slipping. You can get away with that when you are virtually a monopoly.

Then that changed. However, I wasn't thrilled with the way the competition handled a simple request for information, so I continued to wait.

Well, several of my cow-orkers have service with the competition, and are pleased with it. Since I can get about ten times the bandwidth for the same monthly price, it is hard to justify staying with the phone company. However, I felt that giving them one more chance to keep my business was in order - they are a small phone company, not a Baby Bell, and I like doing business with small companies where possible. Also, giving them feedback about how their pricing structure is hurting them might just help them change their ways.

So, I went in to see them today. I laid it out for them. I asked them if there was anything they could do.

"Yes, we can give you 512/256 for US$10 more a month."
"OK, but the competition can give me 3000/512 for the same amount a month. Can you see why I might be thinking of switching?"

No dice - they cannot, or rather WILL NOT, do anything for me.

OK, they just lost a DSL customer. And since I don't need the twisted pair for data, why do I need it for voice? I can get cell service for about the same amount I am paying a month for wireline service, AND have a phone I can carry with me. And with number portability, I don't even have to deal with changing my decades old telephone number.

It's sad - this is happening a lot to the smaller telcos. I know a guy who used to own a small telco - built it up from nothing. He's retired now, and other than having several notes in the company no longer has any official position with them. He laments that they are losing business left and right, but that the Money types in New York who bought out the company don't care - they see revenues rising in the short term, and they don't care about the long term.

These guys just don't recognize that the days of telephony service being a natural monopoly are gone - your competition doesn't have to plow cable to your customers, or even run off your cable. They put a stick in the air and go wireless.

Unfortunately it's the small companies that are making this mistake, and are going to be run out of business or assimilated by the big companies....

I've heard quite a bit about frightening memes lately, particularly neo-conservative astroturfing. It's become pervasive enough that Occam's Razor tells me that it can't be wholly astroturf, it must be a successful meme.

I think of myself as mostly immune to memes. By that I mean, it takes more than a catchy slogan or a bit of thought to make me adopt a meme. I'm immune to advertising, peer pressure, etc. And of course I realize it's impossible to be completely immune and still remain human and relevant.

And yet, far too many people aren't even close. I have a good friend who is one of the smartest people I know, and yet he has at least a couple of memes he's accepted and never questioned thoroughly. He thinks very well about them, too, builds on them, and his beliefs are self-consistent, but choosing that memeplex over another is, as Spock would put it, "not logical."

What we need is a powerful immunizing meme. A meme that is more than a fad, that is potent enough to spread as easily as MySpace or emo/anti-emo, but which carries a payload that immunizes against other, similar memes. A meme that tells you to stand up and think for yourself, and to fight for your beliefs, never relax and stop caring.

With people actually thinking for themselves, it should be much easier to accomplish most political goals I share with most people reading this. For instance, a demand for verified voting would be much easier with people actually thinking -- we know they at least claim to care about democracy. Ditto to a boycott of high def media (DRM), a mass exodus from Windows where possible, or voting for the candidate who's actually an honest man, instead of the one who has the most corporations to finance his campaign.

In fact, I think much of my political beliefs can be distilled to a simple and effective meme, but I'm thinking of this like democracy. The original reasons for any democracy could've been solved with a monarchy -- with the American Revolution, we could've done away with the tea tax, stamp act, etc, and still made George Washington King, instead of President. But we chose democracy to make it last, based on the theory (if I may theorize) that if the new government had a flaw, or developed one, democracy would correct it without the need for another revolution.

Same for memes -- if we, as a species, can become fundamentally resistant to being so easily subverted by advertising, politics, astroturfing, and dishonest memes, and develop a habit of thinking for ourselves, and questioning our every assumption, then we get an automatic benefit: If any aspect of our government or society has a flaw, we will correct it, without the need for a massive grassroots, campaign, mememetic engineering, whatever. If the flaw is as blindingly obvious as, say, Diebold, then we will independantly and automatically reject it, Stand-Alone Complex style.

Oh, it won't eliminate the need for these things. People do disagree, so we will need to construct memes or campaigns for, say, Linux vs Windows. Some of you will be on one side, some on another side, each calling the other a fanboy, and that's ok. But I would much prefer an intelligent dialogue than the willful ignorance of the majority.

That is the ultimate goal here: Eliminate ignorant apathy. By the time young John Doe buys his first gas-guzzler, he should be making a definite statement that he doesn't care about the environment. He should not simply buy it by default because he didn't know about hybrid cars. By the time Jane Doe buys her first Dell, she should either be making the statement "I like/need Windows and don't mind supporting MS" or "This is the best value I can get for this kind of hardware." She should not be buying it by default, because Dell advertising has given her a subconscious assumption of "computer==dell". Nothing done by default, or if you do, make sure it's consciously by default: I got the default Ramen because it's not worth my time to choose Ramen flavors, when they taste so much alike.

Comments! I want to know if this can work!

For those of my fans who are amateur radio operators, I'd like to remind you that the Route 66 On The Air Certificate Hunt starts this Saturday, 9th Sept 2006, and runs through Sunday, 17th Sept 2006.

The Route 66 On The Air certificate is available to any station that

1. Operates one of the special event stations W6A through W6
2. Operates from Route 66 signing "mobile 66"
   or
3. Operates any station on Route 66 signing "mobile 66"

(Certificates are US$3.00 from The Citrus Belt ARC).

I will be operating from Eisler Brothers in Riverton, Kansas (yes, Route 66 DOES run through Kansas, for about 17 miles) as W6E.

Suggested Frequencies (All Frequencies +/-QRM

Band CW Voice
80M 3533 3866
40M 7033 7266
30M 10110
20M 14033 14266
17M 18080 18166
15M 21033 21366
12M 24900 24966
10M 28033 28466
6M 50033 50166

(however, the odds that I will be working CW are next to nil - but I might work PSK31).

(NOTE: The various Citrus Belt ARC links are slooooooow - so give them time.)

I could have (still could, technically) submitted this to Techocrat, but really Techocrat doesn't have a "humor" section. So I submitted it to Slashdot.

Big surprise, it was rejected. So, I'll put it here in my journal, so that at least my fans will see it:

We've all seen Demotivators - well, how about Motivational posters for gamers?

I haven't been here since the beginning, but at 1060 comments, it's really time for me to explore a bit more about Slashdot, such as the social networking bit.

Looking over my own stats, I only have one friend, and I can't remember when I added them. I've also got no foes. I guess I never thought it was worth it to add trolls to that list.

I do have the Profanity Blacklist as a freak, and have for a long time -- what a fucking surprise, that!

What seemed weird to me was, I have no other freaks, and I do have five fans. Seems odd -- either I've been doing pretty well, or I've just kept my head down. I know others have a long list of freaks. I've been looking at that list to try and find some insight as to why these people picked me, and whether I should add them.

There's a very large part of me that wants to ignore the whole thing, and call it something only MySpacers would do, but looking through some of these people, I do find interesting discussions I'd have missed otherwise. I guess it's something to do when I feel like reading Slashdot, but there've been no updates.

Woah. Maybe I'm an addict.

Anyway, no particular point to this exercise, but I've left comments enabled. Drop me a note. And no, this will not be a weblog, but until I decide to get something like that set up, I may as well post Slashdot-related rantings on Slashdot.

S9+20dB - those of you in the hobby know that's either very good, or very bad.

In this case, it's very bad.

Since Christmas, I've bought an IC-7000, and strung up a longwire on an IC-AT4 from my tower, and it works very well, thank you.

Hamvention was last week, and I went, and bought a Mini-Tarheel screwdriver antenna, and a controller for it. I had hoped to do some HF on the drive back from Dayton. No such luck - I didn't get a good ground from the antenna to the trunk lid to the frame. "Oh well, an easily corrected problem when I get home" I thought.

So, some nice half-inch ground braid, some lugs drilled into the car, and that problem was solved.

Only to run into the next problem - S9+20dB of ignition noise. And of course, ignition noise is a pretty fair approximation of a series of Dirac impulses, so it clobbers most frequencies.

So I bought a bunch of split-core ferrites, and put two of them on each injector lead and each coil-on-plug assembly wire. I was hoping for 10 dB, dreaming of 30 dB of noise attenuation.

I got 0 dB. No reduction at all, at least as far as my radio's S meter indicates.

Now, the IC7000 has a pretty damn good impulse noise blanker - one of the advantages of being a software defined radio. But still, if you have too strong a signal coming into the ADC, there is no signal processing magic that will pull out a signal below the quantization noise + decimation gain. I know - I do this for a living.

So, I guess the upshot of it all is that my mobile HF work will be limited, and if I want to get serious, I had better pull over and shut down the engine. Which from a safety perspective isn't such a bad idea, I guess. (And no, I am NOT planning on operating anything other than voice while driving - I know there are folks who do CW driving. There are folks who watch TV while they drive, or read books, too - and I don't do that either.)