I thought the same thing. The second point in the first sentence of the student's Project Overview demonstrates that the students are trying to talk smart about music without actually understanding music. It's worse than that. They offer up a bunch of mathematically derived mumbo jumbo graphs, but miss the math behind the music: If you start with one reference tone (Do), the musical fifth ('So') is 1.5x the frequency, the octave ('Do') is 2x the frequency, and the musical fourth ('Fa') is 2/1.5 the frequency. There's math behind the entire structure of simple pleasing vibrations. So it's pretty much some fancy shmancy mathlike pictures of music data by self proclaimed internet math wizards that don't understand music or math. I would fail them based on the first sentence. They could have have gotten the answer right if they'd wiki'd their initial premise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_progression#Three-chord_progressions Of course then any music pedant notices that wiki has no G note in their G chord. It's almost like they let any bozo edit it.

I've been trying for over 6 months to get USPS to pay on a computer that was evidently stolen by a postal employee. They don't pay. Package was registered, signature required, insured, and they don't contest that they never delivered. Still the beaurocracy doesn't stop. Here's what I've learned: USPS doesn't really track anything; they have little idea whatever happened to a package or where it went when. Postal employees know this and the bad ones will cherry pick expensive packages. When a package goes missing, they don't pay; they require you to wait before filing. By the time you file, they will forevermore tell you they don't have any information on your package & insurance number; their computer system finds the number but all the information is 'archived' and the archive has no online access and requires days to look up, which they say they will do, but they don't. Eventually, they will tell you to resubmit all your paperwork, and you repeat this process. Also, when you insure a package for $1000, you might assume they will pay $1000 when they admit they never delivered, but no. They will require you to furnish proof of this value, and they will evaluate whether your proof warrants the insurance value you bought. Then they will continue to not pay. Good luck escalating, because all escalation procedures will require that they get back in touch with the people that have been ignoring the problem all along.

I wish I was joking!

Without a spectrum analyzer, you are blind to the real problems. With a S.A. you can see the signal that your radio is trying to decode, and you can see what is obscuring your signal. With a little practice, you learn to see the signature of every radio/antenna combo. In the frequency domain, a radio looks like an ubrella centered on the frequency of your channel, and in the best case, you'll a big umbrella for your radio and a weaker umbrella under it that is the access point talking back.

If all the radios around you are tuned to non-overlapping channels (1,6, 11) and you look "down the spectrum through time" you have 3 distinct bands that all the radios can tune and demodulate easily. When people use an intermediate channel like 3, it doesn't get them away from the channel 1 signal so much as it fills in the spectrum that makes the neighbor channels tunable. Intermediate channels just interfere with 2 channeles, it doesn't get you clear of either. Tuning is difficult when the spectrum is filled out without separation, it's like trying to listen to a distant flute concerto while you're in the shower.

The best way I know to really tune your wireless environment: Run Kismet on a linux laptop in one window, and run Wi-spy Chanelyzer in a vmware unity windown next to it. The USB wispy works perfectly in a virtual machine, and you can correlate the Kismet traffic to the radios you see in the spectrum graph. Makes it real obvious what the problems are, and what the best solutions will be, assuming you have good solutions available. In a crowded environment, the unregulated microwave spectrum can be a noisy mess, but until you see what a radio sees, your actions are likely to be little better than random changes.

By the way, you can't really trust your wireless card to give you a good picture of the spectrum. It misses all noise that is not its own protocol, it tunes 1 channel at a time and scans and samples slowly, and even when it recognizes a signal the strength that it reports to the driver may not be calibrated in a meaningful way.

The Alps keyswitches you like were found in many top quality keyboards of that era, and I do agree that these are about the best ever done. Northgate used them, so did the keyboards of SGI, Control Data, Dell, and others. I know this because I used to cruise Silicon Valley thrift shops, and on quite a few occasions I would bring home an excellent used keyboard, only to realize it was exactly the same as all my other favorites.

I also have a bunch of IBM model M's. I like them, but they make quite a commotion when you are cranking code, and they are comparitively high effort, almost like playing a piano. I did some tests and found I had better speed and accuracy with the Alps, which requires no deliberate effort and is less fatiguing for long term use. I still keep model M's on my servers both for nostalgia and because they are just fun to use, plus the keyboard change at a server console reminds me to be a bit more deliberate.

I used to keep an old pre-AT IBM keyboard around just to remind me of what a keyboard could be. I think it was an XT model, smaller than the modern 101's but it weighed about 10 pounds and every keyswitch was a beautiful machine. The action was less jarring than any model M, still klicky but oh-so-fine, felt like precise bearings. No way I know to make this work on any modern keyboard controller and the layout isn't what I would prefer in this world, but this is what keyboard would be if people payed hundreds of dollars for them.