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… Read More »
Today WSJ Online had a half decent article on speech recognition. The writer provided reasonable coverage of the field, without being too negative. Microsoft continues to help out the whole field by drawing more attention to speech recognition. While Microsoft hasn’t invested quite as much into promoting speech recognition as I had hoped after the… Read More »
Ok, this is getting tedious. It looks like I need to investigate writing some code to automate writing the inital part of these earthquake posts. At 9:21 this morning we had a 3.5 magnitude earthquake at almost the exact same location as yesterday evening’s quake. I was still lying in bed when this one hit.… Read More »
Just two days after our 3.7 temblor, another earthquake just struck tonight at 10:50 pm. This one felt a little weaker at our house, but it had more of a rumbling, rolling character. It seemed to last just over one second, with one loud thump followed quickly by several thumps of diminishing amplitude. It was… Read More »
Not a huge quake, but it was pretty close to us. The preliminary USGS report says it was a 3.7 at 7:12 pm 2 miles ESE of Berkeley. The epicenter was very close to the Claremont hotel in Oakland. I felt a couple of thumps over about 2 seconds. There was one relatively strong thump… Read More »
Not a mad German, actually, but mad skills (I refuse to write skillz, damn it, I just did) demonstrated by a German woman from Universität Würzburg. She performs some amazing stunts while riding a fixie in a gymnasium. I’ve seen guys do some of this stuff on stunt bikes, but I think it’s a lot… Read More »
In response to the notification from Avaya that my personally identifiable information may have been compromised, I decided to try the automated phone systems used by Equifax, Experian and TransUnion for adding a fraud alert to my credit file. All three automated DTMF/voice applications were pretty bad. Equifax The app used two significantly different male… Read More »
I just received a letter from Avaya informing of the theft of an employee’s laptop that may contain my personally identifiable information (PII). The letter suggests that I contact one of Equifax, Experian or TransUnionCorp to have a fraud alert placed on my credit file. If you contact one, they will allegedly automatically contact the… Read More »
Microsoft supposedly spent 18 months working on the 45 built-in system sounds for Vista. This may seem like a long time (and I guess it is), but I have yet to use an OS where I enabled the system sounds for any significant amount of time. It may not seem like a difficult task to… Read More »
If your web browser (this happened for very recent versions of Firefox and Opera for me) hangs within seconds after launching on Fedora Core 6, check in the System Monitor to see if a process called acroread is consuming virtually all the CPU cycles. Killing the process isn’t sufficient. A new acroread process will be… Read More »