Mokka mit Schlag

I expect to be moving into my new apartment near UC Irvine shortly. (In fact, the movers are here today in Brooklyn to collect our belongings.) Who do people in Orange County recommend for basic home Internet for multiple users and computers?

The local cable provider is Cox. I think the local phone company is AT&T/Pac Bell. (Didn’t we break them up for a reason?) Presumably there are other DSL providers as well.

I want a provider who doesn’t bandwidth throttle BitTorrent, block the sites I can surf, or monitor what I do. A provider that won’t bend over for the RIAA, the Feds, or anyone else who shows up with a scary letter would be nice. I do not need a static IP or to run externally visible servers. Indeed I’d prefer a dynamic IP. I would like to run an open wireless network. What are my best options?

Red-tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis
Prospect Park, 2007-01-21

I really wanted to turn this juvenile redtail into a Goshawk today, but it stubbornly persisted in remaining a Buteo. :-(
Read the rest of this entry »

According to the Associated Press, Bobby Jindal, “is to take office as the nation’s first elected Indian-American governor and the first nonwhite governor of Louisiana since Reconstruction.” Indian-American I’ll grant him, but “non-white”? Only someone who doesn’t understand Louisiana could say that.
Read the rest of this entry »

Few companies seem to feel as free to violate Apple’s human interface guidelines as Apple itself. One thing that has annoyed me consistently for years now is the poor Undo support in iPhoto. You can make edit after edit to a photo, but as soon as you leave editing mode or export photo Boom! The edits are all committed, and the Undo stack is cleared. You better like what you did because there’s now no going back. Or is there?
Read the rest of this entry »

Shoreline Park, Mountain View, CA, 2007-12-16

This is the only bird I know that’s even more impressive in winter plumage than breeding plumage.

I am decidedly unimpressed with Parallels 3.0. In fact, I would almost call it completely non-functional and a fraud except that I have been able to install Ubuntu 6.10. However, it’s completely unable to manage Windows 2000 as advertised. The install repeatedly and reproducibly hangs with a spinning beach ball of death. Sometimes I can’t even Force Quit parallels. Even kill -9 failed once, and I had to reboot to get rid of it. Installing Windows NT 4.0 got a little further and at least did not create a spinning beach ball of death. However it still failed:

Furthermore, attempts to report these problems hit any number of bugs ranging from choosing the wrong e-mail program (not everyone uses Apple Mail) to server errors when I try to submit the bugs via their web site:
Read the rest of this entry »