Posted on 23 March 2011
I wrote my representatives in the Indiana house of representatives again today. I hate to beat a dead horse, but I think this is an important issue which is being ignored. I like the fact that Citybus of Greater Lafayette provides exemplary bus service to the area and I do not want to see that change. My email:
I have been made aware that HB1001 is proposing an almost 18% decrease in the funding for public transportation. I believe this is a very large funding cut and should not be implemented. It will have a dramatic impact on public transportation availability. With the volatility of the oil market and likely gasoline price increases in the coming year due to unrest in the Middle East, I foresee public transportation becoming more important to everyone in the near future. Gas prices have risen from around $3.35/gal to $3.65/gal since this bill was introduced, and are expected to rise as high as $3.75/gal within the next few days.
Cheap gas is no longer a reality for America and you must consider this when voting on the public transportation budget. Public transportation is vital for the people of your districts and will become increasingly more so as gasoline prices continue to rise. It must be preserved! Forcing people to drive to work and pay outrageous prices for gasoline will only further depress our already depressed local economy.
I implore you to vote NO on this legislation unless funding for public transportation is kept at least at it’s current levels.
For anyone in Indiana who reads this and considers public transportation important, I ask you to do the same.
Posted on 16 December 2010
Weight. It is becoming an increasing issue in this country. Americans are some of the most overweight people in the world. It’s really an issue that needs to be solved. I don’t claim to have all of the answers; it’s an issue I’ve struggled with myself on and off my entire life.
I suppose I was normally sized in grade school, though I don’t really remember, but I got a reasonable amount of exercise as a kid. My parents were very poor when I was growing up, and as a result (and the fact that home video game systems weren’t big in the early 80’s), there was nothing else to do than ride my bike around the neighborhood all day.
As I entered junior high school my parents were finally able to buy me an NES. We had also moved to a new place, and there wasn’t much to do outside there, so I began to get more sedentary. I gained weight, and I remember some of the kids poking fun at me about it. It hurt my feelings, but I really didn’t think much of it or really care that much.
As I entered high school I began to gain interest in basketball, and it practically became an obsession for me. I often played 3-4 hours a day, and my weight problems disappeared even though I began eating more. At the beginning of my senior year of high school, someone broke the rim on the only court near my house, and as a result I stopped playing basketball as much. I didn’t stop eating as much, however. If you see pictures of me at the beginning and end of that school year, you can really see the difference - I put on about 40 pounds, going from about 180 to a hefty 220. I wasn’t seriously overweight at that point, being 6ft. 1, but that was the real beginning of my weight problems.
Over the years since then, my weight has gone up and down, up to 240, back down to 200 when I started working out seriously for a while, back to 220, then 240 again. It didn’t become a huge problem until I quit smoking in 2003. I worked at a convenience store at the time. I needed something to replace the cigarettes, and unfortunately there was a rack of sweets right in front of me every day. I gained about 40 pounds in a month or two, and never really lost it. By the time I graduated from college in 2008, I had balooned up to about 290.
I’ve recently made a strong effort to fix the problem, with decent success. I have lost 65 pounds this year, and 75 all together, with proper diet and a lot of exercise. I currently weigh around 215 and my current goal weight is 195 (The CDC recommends 140-190 for somone my height; we’ll see). I’ve also been trying to change my eating habits so as not to have this problem again.
I’ve been reading a lot about weight management and such, and I’ve become more aware of the epidemic of weight gain in this country. If you live here, I’m sure you’ve heard about it, but an article I read on the CDC website really highlighted it for me. This country’s health is spinning out of control. If something doesn’t intervene, I’m genuinely concerned about the overall health of the average american. As of 2 years ago, 8 percent of the U.S. population was diabetic. In some parts of the country that is doubled. Despite the fact that many people like to laugh at Wilford Brimley when he talks about “diabeetus”, it is no laughing matter. It can and usually does have devastating consequences on a person’s health. The sad part is most cases of adult onset diabetes are preventable. And it’s not that hard. If you have excess weight, then you consume more calories than you burn. You either need to eat less, or exercise more (or both). It sounds oversimplified, but in reality it’s not that difficult. The difficult part is sticking to it.
The problem really stems from a combination of factors. For one, humans simply didn’t evolve in the environment we have now. We no longer have to perform as much manual labor as we once did to survive. We have a lot more leisure time, and we tend not to use that time in activities which burn a lot of calories.
Next, there is no shortage of food for most people today. We can eat as much as we want and know there will always be more tomorrow. Granted, some people have more access to food than others, but there is much less danger of starving to death than there was a few centuries ago.
Calorie dense foods are readily accessible, cheaper, and tastier than foods which promote good health. And we like high sugar, high fat foods. It is an instinct which has served us well for a long time. When food was more scarce, It helped us to survive. But as I said before, food is no longer scarce.
There are other factors, such as the fact that we drink a lot of calories today. There is also inconclusive evidence that things like high fructose corn syrup are harder for our bodies to cope with than normal sugar. But I’ll leave things like that to the experts. Personally I’ve decided to avoid drinking anything which has more than 10 calories per 8 ounce serving, with the occasional exception of juice.
At some point we are going to have to do something about this problem. I have tried to stop looking at food as enjoyment, and started looking at it more as fuel. Food is nothing more than the energy and substances I need to get through the day. I slip and forget that sometimes, but overall I’m doing pretty well. If we are going to solve this problem for everyone, however, something more drastic needs to be done. We need to stop our addiction to cheap, unhealthy food. We can’t survive as a society if a large percentage of our population is unhealthy. Our health care system is already problematic, things will only get worse if this continues.
Posted on 13 August 2009
I recently learned an important lesson about Blackberry cell phones. They don’t necessarily survive an impact with the roadway at 50 miles per hour. Of course I suppose I wouldn’t expect them to.
“How did I discover this?” you may ask. I have the wonderful gift of being forgetful, and I left my Blackberry on top of the car while driving to work. I was lucky that I at least heard it falling off of the car, just to see it skip off the pavement a few times before careening off into the grass on the side of the road.
I turned around, not actually sure at the time what had fallen, but on the way back, I checked my pocket and figured it out. As I walked up to the phone, I noticed it had come out of it’s case, but it looked intact. The case was lying about 10 feet away. When I first picked it up, I initially thought it was okay, minus the road rash. I later discovered otherwise.
Everything seemed to work, but it was obvious that the factory headphones which had been plugged in to it were garbage . The phone probably would have been alright if not for that, because the headphone connector was pretty well messed up . The plastic housing had cracked and one or more of the contacts on the board had possibly come loose. Now the phone doesn’t seem to be able to tell if headphones are plugged in or not - it keeps switching back and forth from the internal speaker to the headphones.
I decided I might be able to fix it at least well enough to get it to work, so I bought a T5 screwdriver from Menards and went to work on it. After completely disassembling the unit and closely inspecting the jack, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. I assumed some of the contacts were shorted due to the shattered plastic housing, but I couldn’ t tell where. After a few hours of probing, re-assembling and disassembling again to no avail, I decided it was time to just pop the headphone connector off of the board. Surely that would fix any shorts in the connector and at least allow me to use the phone.
Wrong. The phone still can’t seem to determine if headphones are connected or not. I even tried using a bluetooth headset, but the uncertainty about the headphones causes the phone to continuously try to switch inputs. Right now I’m of the opinion that of the 6 contacts inside the headphone connector, there must be some that are normally closed when nothing is connected, but I haven’t been able to determine which ones yet, as the board contacts are very difficult to get to when the phone is assembled enough to power on. Eventually I will probably solder some leads onto the board to allow me to do some further testing.
For now, I’ve found someone selling an unlocked T-mobile G1. I’ve wanted a G1 for a while now anyway. I met with him last night, but we couldn’t get it to work with AT&T. After some research, apparently there was an APN setting that needed to be changed to use the AT&T data network, because he apparently has it working now with an AT&T SIM, so we’ll try again soon I hope.
Posted on 10 July 2009
So it seems there has at least been a partial solution to the sound problem. Putting the line:
options snd-hda-intel model=asus-mode4
into /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf gives sound through the headphones, although the master volume control doesn’t work , and there is no sound from the built-in speaker. I am satisfied for now, and I’ll post any solutions that make this work better. Thanks to yorkzhang for the solution to this and for finding me on github to give it to me.
Posted on 23 June 2009
I recently bought my first netbook, the Toshiba NB205. I saw it at the Buy More on display for $399, so as I always do with netbooks on display, I tested my typing on the keyboard. Contrary to most netbooks, I could actually type on this one relatively easily. So I did some research to see if there were any problems getting Linux to run on it. I found nothing, presumably because this was Toshiba’s first netbook in the US, and it had just been released. So I looked at the specs, saw mostly Intel chipsets, which usually work well in Linux, and decided to buy it.
My first task was to image the drive onto my external HD so I could put it back to the way I bought it if the need ever arose. I didn’t intend to use the Windows XP that was on it, but I wanted to have an image “just in case”. This turned out to be a good move, which I’ll explain later.
I went with Ubuntu Netbook Remix for the laptop, because Ubuntu usually works well for me and it seemed like the logical option. Upon loading the image onto my thumb drive, I noticed the wireless didn’t work. lspci revealed to me that it had an Atheros AR9285 wifi chipset, not Intel as I had expected. Luckily Atheros decided to release an open source driver for this chip, but it was in the 2.6.29 kernel, not the 2.6.28 which was on the live image. I found that I would need to install linux-backports-modules-jaunty after install to get it working - no problem.
So I installed Ubuntu on the laptop, wiping XP. I ran apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty, rebooted, and presto, it detected my wireless card. All was well, or so I thought. sudo iwlist wlan0 scan revealed no scan results, but I was 2 feet from my router (not to mention the 20 other networks I usually pick up in my neighboorhood). I noticed the wifi light on the front of the machine was not lit. The card must not be enabled. After scouring the internet for several hours and looking thoroughly through the bios, I found no way to enable the wireless card. I remembered a friend of mine once had a similar issue with a laptop - no way to enable the card in Linux if it had been turned off in Windows.
So I reconnected my external HD to the laptop and booted from the live usb image of Ubuntu and proceeded to write the drive image back onto the internal hard drive and left it for the night (It took a while over USB, the netbook didn’t have any eSATA or firewire ports).
The next morning I found the image had been written back to the drive, so I rebooted and proceeded to boot Windows once to try to enable the wireless card. I tried pressing Fn+F8 on the setup screen, but nothing happened, so I continued with the initial setup. After Windows booted fully, I pressed it again and finally, the wifi light lit up. I shut down Windows and booted from the thumb drive again.
When it booted up, I noticed that the wifi light was still on. Good. This time I opted to leave Windows XP, with as little space as was practical, and set up dual boot, just in case I needed it again. After installing Linux again and installing the backports, I tried a scan again and my network showed up. The Gnome network manager worked well with my wpa encryption and all was well for the moment.
After using the laptop for about a day I noticed I hadn’t heard any sounds, so I tried to play an mp3 file. Sure enough , nothing. I checked all the mixer settings and played with them a bit, but nothing seemed to work. So again here I go scouring the internet for solutions. After a few hours of searching I finally came across the alsa-project bug tracker and found bug #4575, which seemed to be the same problem I have. Same sound chip (Intel 82801G with Realtek ALC272) and no sound, so I’m assuming this is an alsa bug. For now I guess I’ll do without sound, but I hope it’s fixed soon.
Overall this netbook is really nice. The keyboard still feels really good and is easy to type on. It also has great battery life, about 6-7 hours with wifi on. UNR runs very well on it and I haven’t had any problems with suspend- resume yet, which is crucial for a netbook. It’s more than I can say with my Dell Latitude with Kubuntu, where resuming is about a 50/50 proposition. I beleive I’ll be very happy with this netbook once the sound is working, but for now I’m satisfied with my purchase.