stupid technology

April 26, 2004 by Eric Richardson

My cold beat me up last week, but it's been reduced to an occasional cough now, so I think it's about done. The end of the semester is no time to be sick. 15 more days and I'll be done (well, at least until my summer class starts up mid-June).

When I bought my laptop I also got a Linksys WPC11 pcmcia card for wireless. It was cheap, and people seemed to say it worked with Linux. Of course then I got it, and it turned out to be a version 4 card, which actually doesn't work well with linux at all. I sent it to Linksys, they replaced it with a version 3 card, and all was well.

Until recently.

Recently the card started driving me crazy by fairly frequently losing sync with the network and claiming signal strength was 100%. It would have to be ejected, reinserted, and then the interface re ifup'ed before it would work again. And about every fourth or fifth time it did this it would lock the machine up hard.

Last Tuesday night, after the card had locked the machine for the half-dozenth time that day, I got fed up.

So I threw the card at a wall, and the problems stopped.

Granted, the card also now didn't work. So today I bought a new card, this time a... wait for it... Microsoft MN-520. $29.99 at Circuit City and based on the Prism2 chipset, so it has great Linux support.

My desktop also has a Microsoft wireless IntelliMouse. Hmmmm... My keyboard, though, is still firmly Silicon Graphics.

fun with history

April 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Sometimes I wish I could just sit around and read about history all day. Today, while looking for nothing in particular, I ended up at losangelesmetro.net. That led me to experiencela.com, where I clicked around for a little bit before discovering their tour of the Figueroa corridor. Stop number four on that tour is the Stimson House, something I've passed by many times and always wondered about. Interestingly, the Stimson House is an example of Richardsonian architecture, the same as Hackley Public Library in Muskegon, MI. I only remembered it was Richardsonian because I was bored once and stood outside the library reading the historical information sign.

Anyway... Looking up more info about the Stimson House I happened across the fact that there once was a Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. I had never heard of it, but it was home to the Dodgers for parts of the '58 season and home to the Angels for '61. That means that my grandfather played there, which is cool.

Here's a question... Why can't I find a site that lets me look up the box scores for random old games? For instance, I know that the Yankees visited the Angels May 5-7, 1961, so why can't I look up those games?

T minus 25 days

April 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It's kind of a weird feeling to not know where you're going to be living in just 25 days. My rent at City Park is up May 15. Conveniently that's just 4 days after my last final. The place where we want to live next year has a 2br available, but we need to move on it quickly. We've also been unable to so far find a third for the summer, which is annoying.

So, uhhh, if anyone needs a place downtown for the summer, let me know.

I'll be glad when all this is taken care of. Really, I'll be more glad when I graduate and can put all this behind me and just work like a normal person.

doh

April 20, 2004 by Eric Richardson

So I went off for the weekend, had a little fun at a waterski tourney, came back with a nice sore throat, and am now sucking on cough drops like it's a job.

It's still kind of amazing to me to go to these tournaments and hang out next to people like Jimmy Siemers. Take a look at that list of accomplishments. And here I am, out there on the same lake he is, theoretically competing in the same tournament, but... not really. It is kind of funny sitting at the lake reading the article about Jimmy in this month's Waterski Magazine while he's throwing a football fifteen feet behind me.

Now I'm back in the grind, trying not to die while catching up on schoolwork before the semester ends. This whole being sick thing really didn't pick a great time.

The Development of Cable and Satellite

April 16, 2004 by Eric Richardson

(This post is part of a series on FCC regulation of indecency. To see the whole series, click on the FCC Category.)

With the introduction of cable, broadcast slowly started to lose its prominence. This wasn't what it was meant to do. Initially cable was simply a means to get the broadcast channels to homes that for reasons of terrain were unable to receive them. The first cable companies consisted of a central antenna which through size or location was able to pick up the broadcasts. The channels were then sent over cables to homes which paid to be hooked up to the system. Over time cable evolved, adding channels from farther away, and then channels that weren't broadcast anywhere. A fundamental characteristic of cable systems is the requirement that the user pays the cable company to deliver programming to their home.

Satellite -- which in this case we're using to mean just DBS services such as DirecTV and Dish Network -- developed much later but shares this same characteristic. The user pays not just for the hardware, but also for a subscription. While satellite is "broadcast" in that the signal is wirelessly sent via the spectrum, the signals are useless without a subscription, which serves as a key to decoding the digital signal and accessing its content.