22 Oct 2002
So Friday SprintPCS annouced new rates. One very intresting tidbit is they are doing unlimited CDMA 1xRTT data for $10 more to whatever plan you have. Apparently they got hit with a cluestick about how to get new customers and have people like me go and create some killer apps for it. Others think this is suicidal, but I think not. You need unlimited to get people to pay attention to it. I’m just have a hard time swallowing they fact that SprintPCS has a clue enought to do this.
So given that the cable co won’t even give me an estimate on running a 0.6 mile cable run to my house will be and Sprint, the local phone co, won’t return my calls, I’m going to get a Merlin C201 PCMCIA card (which works under linux) and give it a go. If I read the coverage map correctly the service will work where I live and if it works at all I should get over 28.8kbps which is what I’m stuck at now.
11 Oct 2002
2600 has an interesting article up about a current General Accounting Office report that says most satellites have next to no security. Anyone with the right equipment can send them commands. Ouch! Even more intresting is the link to article about a brit hacker who claims to be reciving “American surveillance pictures relayed from US spy planes”. There’s some “Must see TV”!
02 Oct 2002
I took a political test (my exact results if you really must know) which has me has a left leaning Libertarian. Libertarian I know, but left leaning? Holy Dittos, Batman! Where did that come from. The only answer I had that was left leaning was a vote for living wages, something have put much thought into. It’s funny, I grew up on a missionary base, listening to Rush Limbaugh, hung out with the College Republicans, a bunch of factors that I would think would result in a party line Republican, but now I think I care far more that many people vote and vote intelligently than I care if they vote right or left. And that we ask lots and lots of questions.
Ted Rawl is very cool. He claims he’s way over on the left, but I don’t care: he ask very good questions and researches them. Thus My Government Went to Afghanistan and All I Got Was This Stupid Pipeline. I can’t say that I’ve read it all but I’m going to.
02 Oct 2002
Yes a wreck. We are midway thru packing and unpacking at the new house. We’ll hopefully be out of the apt by Monday.
So many things I’ve packed I realized I never even once looked at in the year and 2 months we’ve lived at this apt. That’s ok for pictures/scrapbooks (or maybe not. perhaps I should be reenforcing my memory by looking at pictures from high school so that I can remember more about my life), but really, am I ever going to read all these Dr. Dobbs’ Journals? (but their covers promise so many intersting subjects! I can’t throw them away! Valuable information!) Or my Wired collection, from all the way back to Issue 1.2 (I tried to get 1.1 but very hard to come) to when it got really boring (unsure where that was, but on a bright note the last few issues have been great).
Also Adelphia hasn’t gotten back to me on how much it would be or even if they’ll run a cable to my house and Sprint hasn’t called back to say if they’ll run new phone lines in for DSL (fat chance, but traim tasol (that Melanesian pidgin for “no harm asking”), so it’s off to dialup hell for me for a while.
02 Oct 2002
… and I sit here reading about the Danger Hiptop. I was disappointed that T-Mobil doesn’t have coverage in C’ville, so I’ll have to wait for the CDMA2k version and Sprint PCS to license it. All I know is that if they get a ssh client I’m sold. And that should be too hard has you should only have to port MindTerm to the mutant version of Java that the Hiptop runs. Actually the only think wrong with the Hiptop is the closed platform, but perhaps that’s what it takes to get the big stupid phone co’s to spring for it.