It’s been over two years since I posted anything new here. Actually, I’m mostly tweeting, using Google+ and posting to some other group blogs.

I do get traffic from people who find the information on this blog useful. As of now, I don’t think anything is so outdated that it is wrong… but use caution. I might have more to post here in the future, but I’m mothballing it because I don’t have time right now.

Be safe, everyone!

I just tried a test in a suburban area in a large parking lot. An FRS radio worked reliably at 100 feet and 80% of the time at 250 feet.

One thing I did notice was that if the signal gradually increases, such as walking toward the scanner with the talk button down, the scanner did not activate.

There didn’t seem to be much actual numerical information about this feature on the web, so I hope this test is useful to others considering a scanner with this feature.

Rackspace CloudServer 1.35 to 1.65 seconds
Rackspace VPS running Apache 2, consistently 1.05 seconds
LimeLight CDN 0.404 seconds

The differences are pretty profound, I think. I’ll be looking at CDNs in the future…

The transit speed was about 1.6Mbps both ways, but it seemed to have some sort of use limitation. When transferring files, they would go at 1.6Mbps for the first 2 megabytes, then drop instantly to around 24kbps.

The latency varied greatly between 120 and 2000 milliseconds, making SSH connections hard to use. Additionally, packets were sometimes returned out of sequence. Service quality seemed to come and go, perhaps a sign of our proximity to ground stations or the ebb and flow of user traffic.

64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=688 ttl=53 time=778.819 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=689 ttl=53 time=128.547 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=690 ttl=53 time=162.566 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=692 ttl=53 time=156.998 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=693 ttl=53 time=165.286 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=694 ttl=53 time=181.222 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=695 ttl=53 time=124.276 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=696 ttl=53 time=138.904 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=697 ttl=53 time=146.648 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=698 ttl=53 time=174.594 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=699 ttl=53 time=427.510 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=700 ttl=53 time=1039.029 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=701 ttl=53 time=159.956 ms
64 bytes from 66.70.44.140: icmp_seq=702 ttl=53 time=179.433 ms
...
777 packets transmitted, 711 packets received, 8% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 119.437/303.578/2274.701/289.599 ms

I completely forgot that I should make my recommendations since I have so much material. Here are a few that top the list:

• Acid Planet Electonica
• The Accidental Terrorist


• Astronomy Cast with the incredibly awesome sounding Dr. Pamela Gay (who’s also a really nice person in meatspace.


• Atlanta Pecha Kucha


• The podcasts over at HowStuffWorks.com


• TV Free Burning Man


• Security Now
• Official Lost Podcast


• Scientific American’s 60 Second Science


• IT Conversations


• Framework: Ambient Sounds

For starters, my November order still hasn’t arrived. After spending 55 minutes on hold last week, I was told that the reason for the delay was that I listed a post office box for an address (it had to match my credit card) and that they weren’t equipped for that until just a few weeks ago. But after reviewing my bank statements, it appears they refunded the donation back in December. Why are they still shipping it if it isn’t paid for?

I have had the opportunity to see a few units from friends, and while they are all very impressed with the unit, I’ve been underwhelmed by the speed. It seems like you spend a lot of time waiting. It frequently runs so slow that they just reboot it. Granted, my friends mostly try to stretch the limit on hardware, but I have yet to see it load anything quickly, even the bundled applications.

The feature that really made the deal worth it was the free year of T-mobile HotSpot service. I already buy that service, so the laptop was just a few bucks more. But this week, Starbucks announced that they will switch to AT&T (which I think will provide crappier service), so the T-mobile service looks less appealing.

For a company backed by so many tech people, their web site can’t tell you if your order shipped or not. Right now, after entering my tracking number, it says “Your donation is ready to be shipped and is in our shipping queue. Please check back with us every few days for updates If you have received this same response after several days (2 weeks or more) please contact Donor Services to verify your shipping information.” Why it would still say it is shipping to me when they refunded my money is beyond me.

So, I really don’t know if I’m getting one or not… but I this point, I kind of don’t care anymore. If it arrives, I’m sure it will be useful at Burning Man. If not, it’s $400 towards my next iBook.

Anyway, this is why I was excited about it several months ago, but am not talking about it anymore these days.

I have taken foreign language classes before, but always found them to be very difficult. In particular, I never did well with the so called “immersion” classes where they don’t speak any English, just whatever language you are learning. Supposedly this is good “because that’s how you learned your first language; however if we had to learn everything from scratch I don’t think we would know as much. After taking this immersion class, I think the success or failure of the students largely rests on the skill of the instructor. In our case, the instructor was excellent and walking us through our mistakes until we understood them. My brain hurt after each class, but I can use more ASL after one semester than I could use Spanish after five semesters. The language itself is rather neat, but it is pretty hard to learn on your own. There aren’t any dictionaries that you can use to look up an unfamiliar sign that you see, and the ones for you to look up the sign for a word you know are often not very clear (video based ones on-line are much better.) Similarly, there’s no easy way to “take notes” in class.

ASL is “American Sign Language.” Sign language varies from one country to the next. ASL is based more on French Sign Language than on others. It is not very international, which was disappointing. No one knows for sure, but the best studies I have seen are that there are maybe 500,000 signers in the U.S. I’m betting that number will increase with the aging population and the Walkman and iPod generations loud music habits catching up with them. Despite Rush Limbaugh praising his cochlear implant, fixing deafness is not a quick, overnight, LASIK-like procedure.

Even though I use my fingers to type all the time, it was surprising how sore your hands could get after a few hours. Also, your eyes get sore from constant tracking. I’m sure it was good exercise.

With practice, it seemed pretty easy to pick up and after a few weeks I started having moments where I thought “hey, I can sign what I just said.”

Sadly, I’m not continuing with the classes because they were excessively inconvenient. They started in the middle of rush hour and were only in Clarkston. I can’t find any classes that go beyond one semester other than Georgia Perimeter College, and they only offer classes at the Clarkston campus.

I also really need some friends to do it too. Flipping through my notes, I realize that in just a few short months I have forgotten a lot of it. You really need to be able to use it to maintain it as a skill – it’s not like riding a bicycle.

If you want to learn sign language, start with fingerspelling. It is the first thing you will learn, and you will use it everyday. Proficient signers fingerspell so fast it is almost a blur. Find someone to practice with as reading it is much harder than signing it. With time, you will develop a Scrabble like mentality where you can miss some letters and will still figure out what it is. And, if you talk to someone who is deaf and don’t understand a sign, just repeat the sign back with a quizzical look and they’ll spell it out for you. :)

Perhaps if enough people are interested, we can hire an interpreter and get a class started in Dunwoody, Roswell, or Marietta? It wouldn’t be “accredited,” but it beats the pants off traffic. Let me know!