PhoneBoy Says

Audio: Show us cover art or share a track from the first band or solo artist you flipped for.
Submitted by Red Pen.

Pink Floyd. Dark Side Of The Moon. Need I say more?

I remember that my mom had this album when I was a young lad. It was one of the first "adult" albums I chose to play. Side 2 of DSoTM was my favorite.Pink Floyd has continued to rock my world throughout my life. Their music has been a staple throughout my life. I was lucky enough to see them play live (without Roger Waters) in 1994 at Oakland Coliseum. I was beyond ecstatic to see Roger Waters reunite with the other members of Pink Floyd to play at the Live8 concerts last year.The second Pink Floyd album that rocked my world was The Final Cut. I first heard it in high school in the dorms. I could safely say it was my favorite album back then, since it fed my depressed state of mind.

I was searching for graphics for this post and I happened across the official Pink Floyd website. They had a section on there dedicated to the re-release of The Final Cut. Here they had a short film, basically a "video" of several of their songs. I was disappointed that they used the Obscured version of Not Now John, but I assume that was for the web and that the "real" version, wherever it is, has the word "stuff" changed to the proper f-bomb.And, of course, there's a metric ton of Pink Floyd videos on YouTube if you are so inclined.

One of the reasons I started blogging over here, aside from the fact I eventually got an invite to Vox back in the beta days, was that I felt the readers of my main blog, where I write about VoIP, Telecom, and Technology, may not be want to constantly be exposed to things like,for instance, pictures of my kids or a random thought about stuff goingon at home. Or other things not related to VoIP, Telecom, andTechnology. By having another place to write, I can keep things separate. Everyone wins.

Partof the challenge of keeping more than one blog is keeping them active.Some days, I struggle quite a bit to post something on both blogs eachday. Most of the time, I can manage, though there is still 1 or 2 daysa month I can't quite manage it. And I try and generate unique content for each blog. I rarely crosspost things, though I felt it was necessary on this blog. That's forgivable as a reader of aregularly updated blog written by one person.

Once in a while,something major happens. Blogging, at least as it happens normally,stops. For example, power outages here at the end of 2006 made itdifficult for me to blog for a few days. I posted brief notes to bothof my blogs to let everyone know I was still alive. This past week, mybuddy Ken Camp, who writes on both his IP Adventures and Realtime Unified Communications blog had to deal with the fact his wife ruptured her intestine and spent a couple of days in the ICU. Obviously, dealing with that became front-and-center in his life.

WhileKen didn't post much to his blogs during the ordeal, aside from an oddsnapshot from the hospital to his Vox blog, he did manage to eek out afew updates on Twitter to give us an idea something was wrong. Theupdates were very brief and to the point. We knew something was up, andthus his absence from his blogs was completely understandable.

It was nice that Ken followed up and posted an epilogue to his experiences on both his "highly visible" blogs. While Ken may be struggling with the privacy implications, problogger.net's Darren Rowse suggests this helps build credibility as a blogger. Not that Ken needs more credibility in my book.

In any case, my thoughts are with Ken and his wife. Let's hope her recovery continues to go well.

Took three tries and another dad behind me to get this shot.

If you could make a magic wish for a futuristic gadget or high-tech innovation, what would your item do?
Submitted by Red Pen.

Transporter, without question. Would make traveling for work a heck of a lot easier.

I had no idea that the last KPLUG meeting we had in December was the last time I'd see Bruce "Renigaid" Kingsland. The membership knew he was battling cancer, and had been for a while. It sounded like things were looking up. Obviously, they took a turn for the worst. While I wasn't particularly close to Bruce, he did add a great deal to our little Linux community and he will surely be missed. The long-time KPLUG members are planning to go up to Port Hadlock for his funeral this weekend.

I suppose I can take some solace in knowing that the last time I spoke with him, I helped him with something. It was related to his Linux box at home. He kept a Linux box nailed up to the Internet through a dialup modem--yes, there are people that still do that. He was trying to reach this box from the Internet. He had set up dynamic DNS so that his machine would be reachable. His machine had stopped being reachable and didn't know why.

Network troubleshooting is something I do fairly well, so of course I dug in and figured out that I didn't have enough information to help him. I told him I'd send him an email when I got home asking for the things I needed to go deeper into this. He sent the information, and lo and behold, I figured out what the issue was--his dynamic DNS wasn't updating properly.

It does make you think, though. If you knew that this was going to be the last time you saw someone, would you act differently towards that person? Would you say some things to that person?

I actually did see someone just before they died. In fact, they keeled over in front of me, quite literally. I was living in Hawaii at the time and was having lunch with Ray Beak, an older man whom taught me a lot about amateur radio. In fact, he had helped me get my amateur radio license (which I have since let expire). I did various things to fix his computer and we were going out to lunch after a session of beating the computer into submission. We were having lunch at the local Sizzler in Kona. We were sitting at the table waiting for our food and, all of a sudden, he gurgled and keeled over.

I ran up to the cashier to ask them to call an ambulance. An ambulance ride later, we're at the hospital and the doctors are checking him out. I wasn't family, so I wasn't allowed in with him or anything. I don't remember too much about it as I was very much in shock. But I do remember the doctor coming out to let us know he died. I also remember that a classmate of mine at school had committed suicide at around the same time.

Even though I knew it was the last time I'd see him alive, by then it was too late to actually say anything to him. Not sure what I would have said to him except "Thank you for everything." Maybe that's what I would have said to Bruce, too, had I known.

We were the home team today. Watching 6 and 7 year olds play basketball was less painful than watching our President jibber-jabber on TV.

How do you pass the time during a flight? What do you bring in your carry-on?

I either listen to podcasts that I have downloaded to my Nokia phone or I watch videos I have downloaded from online and encoded to the 3GP format for use on a Nokia N93. I wrote a procedure for how to do this on a Mac fairly easily, and you can see the results.

The flights I usually take are only an hour and a half in the air. When I went to Finland in October, I had a bunch of stuff encoded on my phone, laptops, whatever had a battery that could play these videos. :)

If you're a big fan of the show Heroes, take the quiz and find out which hero you are. For me, it was a bit of a shock:

You are like Sylar

Be careful, for your ability to absorb others energy may come with a terrible price.

And always remember, however powerful you may be as an individual, we are more powerful together than we could ever be apart.

So which hero are you?

Yesterday, I lucked out and got to sleep in until 9am IN MY OWN BED. Both children cooperated with this somehow. I'm sure it will never happen again.

Meanwhile, tonight, I had plans to be done a little earlier than now. However, a little thing called an Internet outage on my cable modem caused me some grief. Even with a backup DSL connection, switching between them does take a small amount of work. Undoing that work is also fairly easy.

What seems to happen with me is a matter of "one more thing." I think "oh yeah, I'll do this one more thing and be done. Okay, this one more thing and I'll be done." Repeat until sometime after 1:30am or later. The only way for me to successfully go to bed early is to not go up to my office after I'm done picking up around the house after the kids go to bed. And that almost never happens. ;)

Meanwhile, I'm starting to think Jaden might also be going down this road. This evening after I got done cleaning up downstairs, I noticed that Jaden's fishies were still playing about 45 minutes after he went to bed. I walked into his room to see what he was he was doing. He was laying in bed reading. While I didn't tell him to go to bed, I suggested that it was awfully late and that he was going to have to get up early in the morning to go to school. Whether that made him put down the book and go to bed or if he had come to that conclusion already, I don't know.

Meanwhile, it's 2am. The third cup of green tea I had after everyone went to bed is starting to weigh on my bladder (yes, the caffeine I get from the Costco Green Tea doesn't affect me at all). It's bedtime.

Anyone with kids in primary school should watch this. It explains the wacky crap that our schools are teaching kids with respect to multiplication and division.

At the moment, I'm happy that Jaden can do 2 digit addition in his head.

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

I am reminded of the Tom Lehrer song called New Math, which was from a different era (the 1960s), but kind of relays the same sentiment--you can't do your child's arithmetic homework. Thanks to YouTube, you get it with animation:

New Math (Tom Lehrer) Animation