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Exams are over, but as one thing gives way to another, I’m departing Florida for a week beginning tomorrow.
Don’t panic. I’m taking the laptop with me (though it’s limping along without a hard drive thanks to the incompetency of FedEx drivers; the pizza guy can find my house, FedEx ought to be able to! This parenthetical aside has grown too long for it’s own good, though.)
Flippancy aside, (pun intended) I intend on blogging at least once from the road. Look for things to come when I get back. Thanks for reading, everyone, and stay tuned for further updates.
A few people from my Electronic Music class are putting on a concert at the New World Brewery. Sadly, I won’t be there as I’m heading out of town on Friday, but if you can make it you really should. They’ll be playing a pair of Moog synths. How very vintage!
And now for the linkage. They’re called History and you can listen to them here.
Inspired by Dave Pinero’s description of the New Tampa Hartline user input tour, I dropped in at the Temple Terrace meeting before one of my exams last night.
A few interesting ideas were tossed around. First, the Hartline people seem really excited about BRT, a solution that BloGax has mentioned before. Also, I asked about computer tracking and smart signs of this ilk and Hartline has apparently just started a major project to install routes with this enabled. Cool. There are a number of solutions in place for catering people from North Tampa to Downtown and for making the bus faster than a car.
I mentioned Google Transit and a possible route planning framework, maybe in partnership with Google, or in-house through their own website. This mainly got them talking about all the cool things they’d like to do with their website and its current woeful inadequacy. I had to agree, most of the information is static and unhelpful to a potential commuter. Some dynamic or real-time content would be nice, I must say. So I asked, how many responses have you gotten to that online survey of yours? The answer? About 72 a day. Gasp! I could double that if all of my blog’s unique visitors were to take such a survey. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more. (Some of you don’t live in Hillsborough County, so local residents only on this one)
Then I popped the (insert-government-budget-number-here) dollar question. Light Rail? Any chance in the near future. The answer, the federal dollars were there, but no local commitment meant we got passed over. All the plans are still there, and the idea’s ready to fly if the political climate changed just slightly. Remember that at the polls. Or mention rail in that survey of theirs.
HARTLine buses servicing New Tampa will have free wi-fi, says a one sentence paragraph at the bottom of an article in the St. Pete Times. Now that’s a fringe benefit.
Mass transit always has the benefit of giving its passengers some extra time in the mornings. Since one doesn’t have to worry about evading traffic, one can catch up on reading, study, or do some much needed work. With wireless access on the bus, one can also whip out one’s laptop pull up one’s email or favorite blog and kill some extra time. Sounds like a great idea to me, now they need to install that on all the lines (equip the 6 first, though.)
I’ve thought for a while that this is the most accurate comparison to draw in order to understand the magic of why Google works the way it does. Others have noted the similarity as well. Even some former Bell Labbers have flocked to Google Labs.
It’s a fascinating sort of environment to watch from the outside, which might explain why so many of us are waiting (im)patiently for Google to throw us the next uber-cool 20% project.
So what happens when you throw the best and brightest minds of a generation into a crucible of creative development and let them spend 1/5 of their time working on whatever happens to inspire them personally? Well, in this author’s opinion, take a glance at history and draw your conclusions.
Also, just as a post-script. When Google really does take over the world, does anyone else think we might have “Google World Conquest Beta” first?
Everyone knows by now that you can use Google to find a taxi. But now, residents of Portland can use Google to plan an excursion using mass transit. This is incredibly cool, especially considering that Google compares the cost of driving the same distance. Google is going to save the world and save us some cash while they’re at it.
This is a bit more practical in Portland than it would be in Tampa. For one, there’s a train, which bypasses traffic quite neatly. For another thing, departure times are listed as 6:21, 6:34, 6:49, and 7:05. Yeah, in Tampa, the trip planner would include a good book or the paper (and an abundant helping of patience.)
Still, a part of me is inwardly begging them to partner with HARTLine. If you work with HARTLine and you’re reading this, check this out, please.
I thought that I might have called this one a little early.
The geniuses at Sony who brought you XCP are at it again. In a story that reads too familiarly these days, Sony and the EFF have announced a vulnerability in the MediaMax DRM software.
Before you wolves begin the next round of Sony boycotts, let me point out a few key facts here. First, Sony admits to this one right up front. Second, the media is rarely clear on what kind of exploit they’re reporting on; in this case it’s a privilege escalation exploit. This means the code can only be exploited by an existing unprivileged user to gain administrative privileges.
The bad news? You don’t have to install the software to be vulnerable to this exploit, as reported by the EFF.
This wouldn’t annoy me so much if it actually addressed the problem, but all such software really seems to accomplish is aggravating casual music enthusiasts while acting only as a minor speed bump to people who are copying music. I’d also sympathize more with the labels if their rhetoric about artists making money off their music was, you know, real.
The St. Pete Times reports this morning that Sami Al-Arian is not guilty on eight charges. So when Mel Martinez built a campaign against Betty Castor that consisted of, “Betty Castor is soft on terrorism,” what he meant to say was, “Betty Castor is soft on innocent residents of the US that haven’t been convicted of anything yet.”
Al-Arian isn’t a US Citizen, but he was a tenured computer science professor at USF. There are talks of deporting him after the conclusion of the trial. Sadly, if allowed to remain, he won’t be rejoining the computer science faculty. His plans? He wants to become a lawyer.
Linux users, you and I are losing our excuses. You know which one I’m talking about: “No one makes a legitimate music download service for Linux, so I’m stuck using bittorrent or SharpMusique.”
Real Networks is making a preview of its music subscription software, Rhapsody. Here’s the catch. All the music is streamed, so it’s not really a music download service so much as it is Internet radio where you can pick the songs.
That’s not such a good deal, I don’t think. Sure, legal music is great but if I can’t take it with me when I leave my computer, what’s the point? What amazes me is that they’ve put all their effort into this, but premium content still doesn’t work fully on Linux. Getting streams digital music isn’t that cool, but I’d pay for the BBC news in high-resolution.
Bad news first. The skunks in the Big East garden stunk it up tonight with a 28-13 loss to West Virginia tonight. Looks like our impressive defense couldn’t quite hold off the Big East Champion. However, (good news) after Louisville knocked Connecticut out of the running, the Bulls wrapped up a bid to the Meineke Car Care Bowl in Charlotte, NC!
This is huge. This will be USF’s first bowl game and with rumors of C-USA runner-up UCF bringing home a bowl berth, there could be five Florida teams playing in the post-season. Big Five, anyone?
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