WombatNation

For the last month or so I’ve been playing around with Arduino (”open-source electronics prototyping platform “) and Processing (”open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions”). Both are very, very cool. The Arduino programming environment is based on Processing, so learning both isn’t much extra effort.

So far with Processing I’ve mostly been working with existing code examples to talk to code I’ve written that runs on the Atmel microcontroller on the Arduino board. I’ve lately been hacking with the Minim library for working with audio, inspired by a link on someone’s Twitter feed to someone else’s experiment with Minim and an Arduino. I’ve cleaned up and reformatted his code in my own fetishistic manner, and now I’m looking to extend it. After all, I’ve got a pile of LEDs begging to be soldered to something.

On the Arduino front, I’ve been working my way through Ladyada’s tutorial and the first couple of chapters of Tom Igoe’s book, Making Things Talk. At first I was kind of annoyed when I realized how incomplete the explanations where for some of the projects. But then I decided that that just motivated me more to figure things out for myself. And they’re really not that incomplete, anyway.

Arduinos are quite inexpensive, so if you’re the least bit motivated to combine your programming experience with some basic electronic hardware hacking, I highly recommend checking them out. I bought most of my gear from Adafruit and Spark Fun.

The Daily Show on Wednesday was brilliant. Jon Stewart and his team did a fantastic job of letting Karl Rove, Bill O’Reilly, Dick Morris, and Nancy Pfotenhauer demonstrate their extreme hypocrisy by playing recent videos of them completely contradicting videos of them from the last few months to a year ago. Palin provides a message for Clinton on sexism that she should take to heart herself.

Rove gushes about Palin’s great experience as being the mayor of the second largest city in Alaska. But when Obama was considering Tom Kaine, Rove ridiculed Kaine’s experience as the mayor of such a small city. Let’s see, Richmond, Virginia, has a population of over 200,000. Wasilla, Alaska, comes in at 9,000. Hmmm, so being the mayor of a city of 200,000 counts for almost nothing, but being mayor of a tiny remote village makes you ready to be Vice President. Rove belittles Kaine’s having only been Lieutenant Governor followed by three years as Governor, but lauds Palin’s two years as Governor. He claims a selection of a person with only Kaine’s experience would mean Obama isn’t concerned about whether his VP is capable of being the President. Somebody send that man a calculator, because Rove needs to run the numbers to find out that by his own standards, McCain made a far worse selection than the person Obama passed over.

Bill O’Reilly gets all sensitive saying that Bristol’s pregnancy, like any other teen pregnancy, should remain a private issue as long as American taxpayers don’t have to support the cost. But then here’s some video of him ripping into Jamie Lynn Spear’s parents and calling them pinheads for letting her get pregnant. No way American taxpayers paid for that pregnancy. Wow, double standards from O’Reilly? Never expected to see that happen.

Next up, Dick Morris claims that criticism of Palin is “deep sexism” and shouldn’t be tolerated. But what about when Hillary Clinton was under attack? Hmm, I think I transcribed it right when he said, “When a woman wants to be President, she shouldn’t complain based on gender.” He says a lot worse, too. Maybe there are special rules for VPs. Jon nails it on the head when describing Morris, though.

Nancy Pfotenhauer, McCain’s senior policy advisor, attacks Clinton for “playing the gender card”, acting like it is an affront to all women. But, then Palin shows up and suddenly Pfotenhauer is pulling a gender card out of every sleeve. Her Palin message seems to be 1) Play the gender card 2) Whine about sexist attacks. Pfotenhauer claims the attacks on Palin are one of the most outrageous examples of double standards she’s ever seen. Jon’s got some footage she needs to see.

Then we get some nice video of Palin attacking Clinton for complaining about sexist attacks, saying “work harder, prove yourself to an even greater degree, …” Hey, before you complain any more about sexist treatment of yourself, listen to your own recorded statements. And while you’re at it, make sure Nancy and Dick listen in, too. And stop flip-flopping on the bridge issue. Just admit you once supported it, but reserve the right to get smarter and change your mind. Unlike the current President who reserves the right to stick to stupid decisions, no matter how overwhelmingly the arguments build against them. Except, of course, when he regularly switches to worse decisions, cutting off his nose to spite his face.

The University announced they were trimming some of the contested oaks this morning. Well, I’ve heard from someone on site that they’ve “trimmed” seven of them to the ground. They’re now trying to get the rest of the tree squatters out of the trees.

While I consider myself an environmentalist, I’m with the University on this one. Most of the faculty, staff and students also seem to have had more than enough of the squatters and are looking forward to them finally being gone. Not that the squatters are going to disappear tomorrow, though, just because the University cuts down the trees they planted and have legal permission to remove.

My favorite real conversation from tonight:

• Child: Do you kave Kit-Kats?
• Me: No
• Child: Then I’ll take a handful of whatever.

She’s lucky the broccoli was in the kitchen and not close at hand. Instead, I gave her more candy than anyone else.

A thief recently scraped the registration sticker off the license plate on my car. The California DMV charges $17 for replacement stickers.

I just hope whomever stole it puts it on their plates and then gets pulled over by the police for some other infraction. Then they will get to explain how the DMV’s computer system shows their license registration is not update, but they somehow happen to have a current sticker. Hopefully, that will get them a trip to jail.

Update 6/14/2007: After another quick visit to the DMV office at the Oakland Coliseum, I picked up a replacement sticker for $17. I also took the opportunity to get a clear title for my wife’s car. Even though we paid off the loan about nine years ago, the financing company’s name was still listed as a lienholder on the title. Getting the title correctly reissued cost $15. Altogether, I was in the DMV building for only 15 minutes. Of course that was possible only because I had already downloaded and filled out the replacement sticker form.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1 (improvements to the editor on the “Write Post” page alone are worth the time spent on the upgrade) and have run into an issue with get_links(). The first argument to get_links is the category id. If you don’t specify an argument or pass in -1, all links are returned.

I manage the Tutorials, Friends, and Blogroll sections of my sidebar using get_links() to return link info. After upgrading, this stopped working. If I pass in -1, all links are returned, so the functionality isn’t totally broken. But, specify the integer value for the category id no longer seems to work.

It embarrasses me to know that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales not only attended my alma mater, Rice University, but was actually granted a degree. Throughout his reign of cluelessness in the Attorney General’s office, he has made many statements that have left me cringing and wondering how he can say these things with a straight face.

Robert Parry of the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel recently reported that in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 18th, Gonzales made the claim that US citizens accused of a crime do not have the right to due process and a fair trial. He made the rather audacious claim that “There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away”. I don’t know what you’re thinking Alberto, but Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution states that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” You’re splitting some pretty fine hairs if you’re trying to claim that something the Constitution specifically calls out as not being suspended cannot be assumed to be granted.

Committee member Republican Senator Arlen Specter was shocked by the outlandishness of Gonzales’s remarks. Or as Specter put it, “You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense.”

But Gonzales’s weasel words are not only rivaling Clinton’s alleged statement about how one defines “is”. Parry points out that Gonzales is probably just wrong. The sixth amendment makes postive statements about granting many of the legal features expressed by habeas corpus.

But then this shouldn’t be a surprise from a man who described the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and “obsolete”, before flip-flopping on his statements when attention was drawn to them. Even then, he suggested that it was fair for the US to choose to make exemptions to this international law.

My brother was recently quoted in several newspaper articles, including one in the Austin American-Statesman, discussing the controversial Texas Universal Service Fund. The fund pays large telecom companies hundreds of millions of dollars per year to provide local phone service to rural customers. The justification for the fund is that the cost to provide phone service in rural areas is so high that few people in those areas could afford the full market rate cost to receive the service. Therefore, phone service subscribers in more urban areas are taxed so as to subsidize the cost of the rural service. Although my brother was primarily interviewed about the Texas Universal Fund, this issue applies to nineteen states.

On the face of it, this fund sounds like a reasonable thing, but there are quite a few catches. As my brother points out in these articles, the telecom companies don’t have to provide any public accounting records to document how they spend the money they receive from the fund. Also, the tax rate was determined many years ago, but the amounts haven’t been adjusted adequately to reflect advances in technology that should have lowered the costs to the telecom companies to provide service to rural areas.

In addition, mobile phone subscribers must also pay this tax, even though it was originally intended to apply to wireline services. In many areas that were declared rural under the original rules, expanding suburbs have made the cost of service cost effective for telecom companies to provide. However, these areas are still counted as rural areas with respect to requiring subsidies. In addition, many rural areas now receive adequate enough mobile telephone service that wireline service may not even be needed.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran article by an AP writer with the same basic info, but focused more on the situation in California. California, like Texas and ten other states, requires that mobile phone subscribers pay into the Universal Service Fund.

To make the issue even more confusing, there is also a federal Universal Service Fund that the telecom companies pay into which, in part, is also intended to subsidize the costs of providing phone service to rural areas. Of course, many of the big telecom companies pass on these costs to consumers, including mobile phone subscribers.

In addition to the interviews for these articles, my brother was also interviewed for a news piece that ran on Austin’s 90.5 FM KUT radio station. Go Roger!

Fortunately, the contents of this box weren’t fragile. It was just some biking and soccer clothes I had ordered. USPS says, “Received in bad condition”, i.e., “Not my bad.”

When you buy new eyeglasses, it’s a good idea to keep around the old pair, especially if you are lucky enough such that the prescription does not change much between the old lenses and the new. It’s always possible that you will take your newest pair in to be adjusted because they no longer sit evenly on your face, and the person adjusting them will break the frames. I’m just saying, it could happen.