I, For One, Welcome Our New Telecom Overlords

I'm filled with wonder, hope, excitement, fear, and dread.

Yes, my children, we're changing our broadband, cable, and ½ of our phone service from Comcast (broadband & cable) and Verizon (phone) to Verizon FIOS.

Specifically, we're getting the Verizon package for all three services, which is supposed to cost $99/month, but actually costs about $135/month when you factor in the DVR, and the movie package (we chose HBO) that they require you get in order to get the installation charges dropped. That's about what we pay now for Comcast's cable and broadband service, and it allows us to drop a copper phone line.

Of course, Comcast has its own “Triple Play” which costs about the same. However, that all goes through the same coax that provides our service now, and which is sometimes inadequate (it was first laid over 20 years ago, what do you expect?). And friends have Verizon's FIOS phone and broadband, which seems to be decent. No one I know has the TV yet, as far as I know. We're pioneers. Hence my dread.

But we get this really neat $200, 19 inch high def TV, which I plan to mount right by my computer, so that I never have to leave this chair — OK, maybe to go to work, but otherwise. (Or we can get a $200 Best Buy gift card, for a down payment on a really big HDTV.)

Anyway, installation is scheduled for Wednesday next week, so I'll let you know how it goes.

Such as today: Last Friday Miss Utility came out and painted orange paint on the snow in our yard, along with flags marking various cables. Today, the line-digging crew came out and installed the fiber from the street to the house.

Along the way they cut the Comcast cable — unfortunate, as we're still using the cable until Wednesday next. They did manage to repair that.

The Verizon-owned copper phone line, however, they shredded.

This does not comfort me.

I'm sure it was unintentional, as we told them that we wanted to keep one of our copper phone lines, because we've had many power problems in the past. True, the FIOS box comes with an 8-hour telephone battery, but there have been times when I'm sure we would have run through that. Hence we want to keep the copper.

Verizon is supposed to come back tomorrow and replace the copper. If the don't cut anything else I'll report later in the week.

Oh, yeah, the deal's for two years. We'll see what kind of offer Comcast has then.

“Units”

The other day I had to convert the quantity 150 wavenumbers (the inverse of the wavelength of a certain frequency of light) to meV (the energy of a photon of that wavelength, in milli-electron Volts). I have a spreadsheet somewhere that does this, as it has the values of Planck's constant and the speed of light encoded. I could also have gotten the current best value of these constants and done the calculation on a calculator. However, this time I had an epiphany: I opened up a terminal window and entered:

$ units
2438 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: 150 wavenumbers
You want: meV
        * 18.597628
        / 0.053770298

A yes, I'd finally remembered the old unix command units, available in Ubuntu with the command

$ sudo apt-get install units

It's a pretty powerful program. It has some weird roundoff errors, though. For example

$ units
2438 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: 1 mile^2
You want: acre
        * 639.99744
        / 0.0015625063

Instead of 640 acres exactly. But you can ask the age old question of what is the speed of light in a somewhat popular unit:

$ units
2438 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: 299792458 m/sec
You want: furlongs/fortnight
        * 1.8026175e+12
        / 5.5474886e-13

The Strange Search

Occasionally I look at the SiteMeter logs for this blog. Other than the fact that readership has been going down lately, probably because I've concentrated on “Things” rather than “Linux,” this lets me know what people are interested in. (Mainly in making transparent PNGs, it seems. It hasn't changed, people, unlike much of the GIMP.)

Anyway, we get sometimes get strange search requests, like this one:

images of hawk girl, courtesy of Prodigy (that's still around?)

Note that they had to match hawk out of hawknotes to get anything at all.

While Google® found:

Hawkgirl pictures

Immediately.

Trust our Guaranteed Non-Evil Masters®, fellow websurfers.

Drat

And other, stronger, words I said during the game.

KU got beat by a better team. Hopefully MU will beat Oklahoma this time, which should get KU into one of the BCS bowls.

Go Tigers!

Just for next week, mind.

Who'll Travel to New Orleans

Yeah, this is another college football post. Deal with it. We've waited over a century for this, we're going to make the most of it.

As previously noted, I'm not a huge fan of the BCS. I'd rather have an eight or sixteen team playoff. We've got from Dec. 1 to January 8, so it's not like there isn't enough time. However, since my team has a reasonable chance of getting into the final game, let's have some fun with it:

In addition to its noticing KU, the Washington Post examines possible match-ups in the BCS title game. Part of the story isn't in the online edition, a list of possible scenarios, e.g.,

• LSU and KU win out. No question who plays in New Orleans.
• LSU and Misery win out. Almost no question. MU should get to go.
• LSU wins out, Oklahoma wins Big 12 title game: Probably West Virginia plays LSU.

I've got another one, wilder than the last:

LSU loses to Tennessee in the SEC title game. Arizona gets beat by USC. West Virginia loses one of its remaining games. Meanwhile the Kansas-Missouri game is close, both teams play well, and the game is decided in the last two minutes or in overtime. The winner blows out Oklahoma in the Big 12 title game. Ordinarily you'd think Ohio state would back into the title game to play the Big 12 champion, but it's possible the voters would go for:

A KU-MU rematch.

Border War

As you probably know, on August 21, 1863, a band of Bushwackers led by William Clark Quantrill sacked and burned the town of Lawrence, Kansas. What you probably don't know was that shortly thereafter a group of Jayhawkers traveled to Columbia, Missouri. They left the town standing, a horrific act of revenge that has since been condemned by international tribunals.

Things have been somewhat calmer over the last twelve dozen years, but there is still considerable animosity between the citizens of Lawrence and Columbia, particularly during football and basketball games between the University of Kansas and the University of Misery. These days they call it the “Border War” (now politically correctly called the “Border Showdown”). Actually, when I went to KU it didn't really have a name. We just knew that the only reason to go to Missouri was to see the Royals, and to visit bars that served something other than 3.2% beer. Otherwise, these two schools plain don't like each other.

It's also either the oldest continuous college rivalry west of the Mississippi, or the oldest Division I rivalry west of the Mississippi, I'm not sure which. We've been doing this for 116 years. If your schools have been doing it longer, leave a note below.

And come Saturday is the biggest game in the history of the KU-MU rivalry. Ever. With KU at 11-0 and ranked number 2 in the BCS, and Missouri 10-1 and ranked number 4, the winner of this game gets to play either Oklahoma or Texas for the Big 12 championship on December 1. If they win that, they will almost certainly (KU for sure, MU probably) play for the National Championship on January 7 in New Orleans. (Probably against LSU. What's this about a neutral site?)

Anyway, though KU has had quite a bit of success in basketball, the KU-MU game has never had National Title implications. This game does.

I don't want to get too emotionally involved in all this. I've had a few sports disappointments in my life, not counting the time we lost to Natoma in the Regional Basketball quarter-final. This KU team is a surprise and a pleasure, and a loss will not diminish what they've done.

But a win Saturday, and next Saturday, and then the long wait until January ... Hmm. I'm supposed to go to New Orleans in March, maybe I can show up a few months early. Got a spare room, cousin Ted?

Just Don't Call Him a Monkey

Well, I finally upgraded to Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon.”

Yawn Maybe it's because I still use FVWM as a window manager, but I don't see a lot of difference between this and 7.04. OK, they've upgraded to Thunderbird 2.0, and changed the executable name from mozilla-thunderbird to thunderbird, which messed up my FVWM configuration script. There have also been enough changes to the Gnome Toolkit that my venerable copy of the old “Electric Eyes” image viewer doesn't work, even after I recompiled it. Fortunately I was quickly able to find a substitute image viewer, qiv, which is just about as light-weight and serves my need to read web comics without actually going to the web page.

There's also an updated version of the Gimp, but Penguin Pete has already told you about that.

So, nothing all that interesting. Which, in a way, is quite comforting.

And it leaves me plenty of time for tonight's Kansas — Oklahoma State game, which is on National TV everywhere except here, where we are going to be graced with Maryland — Boston College.

Rock Chalk, y'all.

The First Generation (Part II)

Once upon a time I think I mentioned the Trek TV-fanfic Star Trek: New Voyages, which purports to tell us of the last two years of the NCC-1701's five-year mission. Tonight I finally got around to watching the latest episode, “World Enough and Time,” which features a guest appearance by Mr. Sulu himself, George Takei, who plays Sulu thirty years out of time.

Of course, there's another (amateur) actor playing the young Sulu, John Lim. The script has to explain how Sulu can be both 30 and 60 in a one hour episode. It does so reasonably well, much better than in New Voyages' previous attempt, “To Serve All My Days,” which has Walter Koenig as an older Chekov. That script sucked, IMNSHO, not to mention it was non-canon, even within the context of New Voyages.

So how was it? The sets are superb, better than the original series. The special effects make you wonder how we settled for the simple models-on-a-starry-background of TOS. The acting, except for Takei, is definitely amateur.

But Sulu's not the star of the show. That role falls to one Christina Moses, who has all of one other role to her credit, when she must have been about five years old. How can I say it? She can act, folks. It doesn't hurt that she's beautiful, but she can out-act half the cast of ER or Boston Legal. This girl needs to get a good agent, 'cause she's got a career in show business.

You can watch the show online, or download it via BitTorent (except, of course, on Comcast).

Go get it. Watch and enjoy.

Spoilers below, folks...

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Still here? OK, I warned you. The script is a reworking of Tom Godwin's classic “The Cold Equations”. There is no miracle save at the end. If you want a happy ending, don't go here. A hopeful ending? Yes. A happy ending? No.

Those of you who have heard Takei lately will find it ironic that Sulu finally has a female love interest, even though that takes place off-screen. Of course, an actor acts, but it's interesting that Sulu-finally-gets-the-girl happens just as Takei tells us he prefers men. Oh, well, it's not a big deal.

Next up for the series is the introduction of Peter (nephew of) Kirk, from a script by David Gerrold. From the trailer, it looks as though Peter and Sulu have something in common, but I might have misinterpreted.

Next up after that is one Harcourt Fenton Mudd.

The Bemused Kansas Jayhawk Football FAQ

I haven't posted for a while, possibly because I'm in a state of shock. In case you haven't heard, the Jayhawks are 9-0. In Football, no less. (In basketball, a team that doesn't start 9-0 is considered suspect. Anything worse that 7-2 is considered a failed season.)

Since this is a rather unusual situation for us all, I thought I'd put together a small FAQ:

1. Is our RPI good enough to get us into the tournament? Uh, well, ... You see, there isn't a tournament.
2. Huh? No, the NCAA, in its infinite wisdom, does not hold football playoffs for NCAA Division I schools. All other divisions, including Division I-AA (don't ask), have a championship tournament, but D-I does not.
3. Then how does the NCAA determine a Division I champion? It doesn't.
4. This is going to sound repetitive, but ... Huh? No, there is no NCAA D-I football champion. There is, however, a Bowl Championship Series, and the winner of the BCS is usually considered the D-I champion.
5. So is KU in the BCS tournament? Uh, there's no tournament. It's only one game.
6. ???? I agree.
7. So who picks the teams in the game? Some writers and some computers.
8. Sigh All right, how are we doing with them? This week, we're fourth, behind Ohio State, LSU, and Oregon.
9. But LSU and Oregon have a loss! Yup, but the writers and the computers think KU is a weaker team.
10. Why's that? Two words: Southeastern Louisiana
11. Oh. OK, what has to happen for us to get into the game? KU has to win out, beating Oklahoma State, Iowa State, and Missouri, and the win the Big XII Championship Game. And the opponent there better be Oklahoma. LSU & Oregon have to lose another game, and it wouldn't hurt if Ohio State loses to Michigan. If all that happens, we'll get into the BCS game.
12. Otherwise the season's over after the Big XII Championship? No, we'll get to go to a bowl game, if we win out. Probably in the Orange Bowl game, if we win out.
13. And that's, oh, a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving? No, it's on January 1.
14. After the BCS Championship game? No, that's not until January 7.
15. What? You mean that the supposed two best teams in the nation have to wait for a month to play each other? Yup.
16. Why? $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
17. Oh.
18. So basketball will be in full swing before this BCS game? Yes.
19. Won't people forget about the BCS by then? Strange as it may seem, in many parts of the country football is more popular than basketball. I don't know why, either, but for some reason people care about football.
20. But they still don't have a true National Champion? No.
21. So apparently they don't care all that much. Well ... they do, but it's mostly about professional football.
22. What's that? I wouldn't know. I root for the Washington Redskins.

Best Thing He's Ever Done

I'm Going to Bed Now. Really

One More

I may not be able to stop myself.

Motivate Yourself

Augh! I should be in bed, and instead I'm doing this:

Remember those Star Trek Inspirational Posters? Well, I was downloading a few more tonight for use as wallpaper when it hit me, “gee, Dave, there really ought to be some StarGate Inspirational Posters on the web somewhere.” And, of course, there are.

This led me directly to the Motivator: Creator site, which lets you put in your own pictures and sayings. Neat, huh?

So, in honor of last weekend's NCAA Midnight Madness, and in keeping with the theme of this blog, let me get rid of any illusions you may have about the coming season:

How I Spent Columbus Day (Observed)

Last Monday was a Federal Holiday, and I'd done all the yard work I was going to do over the weekend. So how to spend the day? I know! said my Internal Optimist, Let's rebuild the Windows machine!! It will be fun!!! I should have shot him after the first exclamation point.

Follow: Some months ago I had to reinstall Windows XP on Hal's Evil Twin. Well, I pretty much made a hash of it. It's extremely slow. (I'm a Geek, but I don't claim to be a Competent Geek.) Nevertheless, I don't use Windows, and the complaints from the natives were rather quiet, spouse having consented to read her email on Hal.

Then I read that Penguin Pete was playing around with a Windows machine, just to see how fast he could make it. I also remembered that I'd done a test install of XP on Hal's Other Twin, where, unencumbered by anti-virus protection, it boots up very fast (convenient when I want a quick game of Pinball).

I suspect that my problems come from loading up GooglePack and the Comcast supplied McAfee anti-virus software. Both of these packages add a large number of tasks to the start menu. Well, I mainly put in GooglePack to install Firefox and Thunderbird, and McAfee anti-virus because it was free. Pete, however, turned me on to the Open Disc project, a successor to the Open CD, which includes Firefox, the ClamWin anti-virus scanner, and a whole lot more. Good enough, I think.

So to start we:

• Back up Hal's “Documents and Settings” directory, which contains most user settings, as well as the shared “My Music” and “My Pictures” directories. This is much easier than last time, as I now have a 400 GB external disk. It's also easier to do this from the dual-boot Ubuntu partition I put on the Evil Twin. Just go into root and copy everything over as needed.
• Put a copy of the Network Install version of Windows XP Service Pack 2 on a CD, along with the Updated drivers for the Wacom CTE-430 (Sapphire, aka Graphire3) tablet/wireless mouse that we use for drawing. I downloaded both the newest tested version, 5.03, and the 5.01-9 driver I used last time. I'll try 5.03 first, knowing that I have a backup. (It works fine.)
• Make a copy of the OpenDisc CD
• Get a copy of Going Postal, which I'm re-reading before I get to Making Money, since I've forgotten such important plot points as who Adora Bell Dearheart is, and why she's so interested in Golems. I need a refresher course. (Look it up. I Could Tell You, but then I'd have to Lend You Thirty-Some Books.)
• Make sure the current Windows setup can read the backup data.
• Print out all the steps I took last time — something surprisingly difficult to do from my current Blogger template — to serve as a template.
• Take a deep breath — it's too early for a shot of whiskey.

Oh dear me, here we go again. Note that the times noted below are skewed by the fact that I'm doing other things while this long, long process is going on.

1. 12 noon: Put Dell's SP1 Windows Restore drive into the computer. Boot. Do the “Press Any Key” option. Note that the computer has found the Microsoft Wireless Keyboard, and, presumably, the mouse. Wait a bit for the system to load up.
2. 12:15 pm: Choose the “Fresh Install” option.
3. I'd previously divided Twin's 120 GB disk into two partitions — one NTFS, for Windows, and one FAT32, where files can be easily shared with Linux. Well, now we can also share with NTFS, but let's keep everything as before, and put Windows on the 70$nbsp;GB NTFS partition. Reformat the partition, just to avoid problems.
4. 12:38 pm: Setup starts copying files to the Windows Installation folders.
5. 12:44 pm: Windows doesn't like something on one of the hard drives, probably the one holding Linux. That drive's failure started the first reinstallation. Go ahead with boot. The screen says 39 minutes left.
6. 12:48 pm: Missed the world famous 34 minute installation bug. Chose Regional and Language options, US/East Coast, naturally.
7. Give the computer its name: Hal's Evil Twin.
8. Windows wants to know how to make phone calls. Silly Windows.
9. 1:01 pm: Windows reboots, allegedly improving my screen settings — well, it might, but first we have to install the missing Drivers from the Dell driver list:
   • Audio
   • Mouse
   • Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility
   • Intel 845 G/Gl Integrated Video (Had to do this twice. My mistake, I think.)
   • Broadcom 4401 Integrated NIC Driver
   and reboot.
10. 1:24 pm: Change resolution to 1024x768 and 32 color (was 800x600 after driver installation.)
11. 1:26 pm: Install D-Link wireless driver. Reboot.
12. 1:29 pm: Set up wireless network. Well, try. D-Link's software doesn't seem to want to work. Reboot and try, try, again.
13. 1:36 pm: Wireless card still won't find network. Turn off everything before being tempted to throw it out the window.
14. 2:20 pm: Somewhat calmed down, bring up computer again. Still doesn't work. Get the installation manuals off the CD, which requires I install Adobe Reader 6.0. Yuck.
15. 2:27 pm: Finally. You have to uncheck the box that tells Windows to set up the network, then click OK, then wait for D-Link to get around to pulling up its utility. From there you configure access to a WPA-PSK network.
16. 2:29 pm: Network access established.
17. 2:30 pm: WACOM tablet driver, now. Hopefully this will cause it to come up early in the log-on sequence. Reboot.
18. 2:37 pm: Install Service Pack 2. Turn off network while we're doing this, just in case.
19. 2:50 pm: Finished with SP2. Reboot.
20. 2:53 pm: Turn on automatic updates, set up user accounts. Tell Windows that we have an anti-virus program, and keep the Firewall on.
21. 2:58 pm: Install first round of post-SP2 updates.
22. 2:59 pm: Reboot.
23. 3:00 pm: Get out the OpenDisc CD and install:
    • Firefox
    • Thunderbird
    • ClamWin anti-virus scanner. Since it doesn't do on-the-fly scanning, have it do its work at 1 am every day. Note that it takes a while to update the data files off the web. Also note that it only does a scan when someone is logged on, so remember to “switch user” rather than “log off” if we're not going to shut down the machine.
    • GIMP (graphics manipulation)
    • 7-Zip compression/decompression program.
    • OpenOffice.org version 2.3
    • PDF Creator (Note that OpenOffice can create PDFs out of the box, this is for other programs.)
24. 6:01 pm: No, it didn't take that long. We went out to run errands. As we were shutting down, Windows did another update, and now we have to accept yet another set of updates.
25. 6:04 pm: Reboot
26. 6:06 pm: Have ClamWin do a virus scan, just as a safety measure.
27. 8:50 pm: OK, I took another break, but it took a couple of hours to complete the scan on a more-or-less empty machine.
28. 8:52 pm: Install Microsoft Wireless Keyboard/Mouse software, just in case we need it.
29. 8:57 pm: Install drivers for Canon printer.
30. 9:07 pm: Install drivers for Visioneer 4400 Scanner.
31. 9:11 pm: Reboot
32. 9:15 pm: Install the ancient copy of Photoshop Elements (2.0) that came with the equally ancient scanner.
33. 9:18 pm: Install Nero CD/DVD burning software.
34. 9:25 pm: More XP updates have shown up. Load them up and reboot.
35. 9:31 pm: Load in the ancient copy of Office (97). (Why do we need this if we have OpenOffice.org? Because sometimes even really old real PowerPoint looks better than Oo.o's simulated PowerPoint. Don't like it, but there it is.)
36. 9:47 pm: Odd. Internet Explorer, I assume 6.0, hangs up every time I try to run it. Which means no updates, except by AutoUpdate? Scary.
37. 9:51 pm: OK, a reboot fixes that. Go through the update process, installing the “new” version of Windows update, including that Windows Genuine Advantage thing.
38. 9:59 pm: Install files that the users of this computer need, then quit for the night.

And then I ran out of energy to write anything down anymore. In short, the next evening I:

• Set up the individual user accounts: all with administrative access, of course, since you can't easily run Windows without it — actually I think I did this on Monday, but I've repressed many memories from that day.
• Found all possible updates to Office 97.
• Updated Internet Explorer from dreadful to barely acceptable — uh, I mean from 6 to 7.
• Installed VLC off the OpenDisc to enable movie-watching.
• Killed off Adobe Reader 6.0, installed the newest version (8.1?).
• Installed Java.
• Hey, what do you know? It's Update Tuesday. Download and reboot.
• Killed off start menu and bootup items that seem unnecessary.
• Restored everybody's files.
• Say “Good Night,” Dick. “Good Night, Dick.”

And done. So far, one week out, ClamWin has only claimed to discover two viruses, both of which are Win 97 files, which makes the detection look suspect.

And the system runs much faster. I guess we'll keep it this way for now.

50 Years in the Making

The future began 50 years ago today. I should probably make a long post about what the launching of Sputnik meant — for one thing, it directly led to my becoming a physicist instead of, say, a doctor or engineer (though an engineer might actually have worked in the space program). It also gave a big impetus to the fledgling semiconductor industry, as the US needed light-weight satellites to go on its relatively small rockets. As the Washington Post pointed out, Sputnik also lead to the founding of DARPA, which became ARPA, and, before becoming DARPA again formed something called ARPAnet. Wonder what happened to that?

Anyway, here's NASA's version of the day that changed the world.