Funk Babblings

The good news:
You've heard of Wikipedia, right? Well, now there's WikiTravel!

The bad news:
Sky Marshals Place Innocent People On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota
(Noted by both Bruce Schneier and Pam at Pandagon, both pointing to the same source.)

Those of us in the Great Lakes states can easily forget that we're actually living in border states -- Canada is just across the lake.

With that in mind, I was interested to learn that not only will passports be required (rather than just drivers license and birth certificate) to cross the Canada border by air starting in 2007, and by land starting in 2008, but that the passport requirement is not planned to apply to crossing by ferry or private boat. There are a LOT of private boats crossing between the US and Canada on the lakes every day.

If I were the type of person to be paranoid about terrorist attacks, I might start worrying about attacks on Cleveland -- or the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant. Instead I'm more interested in the quickest and easiest way to flee the country if and when necessary. Well, I'd also just like to go see Toronto sometime.

Still gotta find my birth certificate though. And I've been intending to get a new passport anyway for a year now; the one I got when I was 17 is long-expired, and I'm hoping to avoid a passport with an RFID chip.

Two weeks ago I started writing about a busy weekend, and got about halfway through it before putting it down. When I thought about continuing, I realized that my writeup was way too long and boring. Meanwhile, I had another (much quieter) weekend, and then a weekend together with my wife. But I still felt like I had unfinished business.

So, trashing the long writeup I attempted before, here's a quick rundown of the past three weekends....


( Busy )

( Quiet )

( Together )

Ah, now I feel better.... all is right in this part of the world again. :-)

OK, I think I'm giving in the the idea that it just might be too dangerous to drive 140 miles across Ohio tonight. And since I feel safer driving on the freeway than around the malls in this weather, finishing my shopping is going to get interesting.

The snow today was nice though, until it turned into freezing rain during our walk to the corner store.

And what's up with this storm coming from the south? Mississippi has something to answer for here, I think.


In other news, yesterday I got my zip code locator program done (basically), so that someone can type their zip code and find the nearest addresses in the database. Of course, there's a level of inaccuracy due to the size of zip codes, another level of inaccuracy due to using the Census Bureau's free-but-not-quite-ZIP ZCTA database, and yet another level of inaccuracy due to the program's assumption that longitude and latitude are flat-earth coordinates. I found a useful explanation of how to find accurate distances on the globe, but ended up deciding that within the limits of the continental U.S., a form-imposed 200-mile limit for "nearest" locations, and the already-vague locations given by the ZCTA database, the flat earth assumption wouldn't further distort things too badly.

Here's a place to add to the itinerary whenever I make it to the upper midwest. This former bassist is in the restaurant business now.

Whenever I travel I start looking for good net access. Connecting at around 9600bps (via the cell phone) doesn't have quite the allure it had a decade ago, when I had only recently upgraded from 2400bps. Sure, I could get a non-cellular dialup account somewhere, but that only takes me up to 54kbps max, and also requires me to mess with binary drivers for my laptop's winmodem.

But this time I discovered GeekTels, a part of the GeekTools site. It has a surprisingly comprehensive database of hotels with high speed access of one sort or another (wired or wireless). So this weekend in Columbus I'll be at an OSU-area hotel with wireless access.

GeekTools also has a wireless hotspot database, but it's pretty sparse so far.

Update: OK, I'm there, and I'm connected, but I'm annoyed that they don't mention ahead of time that it costs ten bucks per 24 hours for access. Even the "easy three-step instructions" in the room don't mention calling the front desk to authorize payment and get an access code. Grr.
(I attempted to update the GeekTels site with the info.)

OK, it's almost another weekend, so I'd better write about last weekend before I forget....

I ended up spending most of my Marcon time in panel discussions, probably half of which were fan discussions about TV shows (lots of Firefly and Buffy fans) and movies, and the rest were about either old Sci Fi books or some issues raised in some Sci Fi. Actually the best part there was starting to get to know some of the people that went to so many of the same panels as I did.

But the highlights of my weekend were walking up High street for some music.

( Friday - NSA and some trauma )

( Saturday - Scrawl Rocks! )

This is cute. A traceroute from my home in North Canton, OH, to the funknet.net server somewhere in the vicinity of Columbus, OH, appears to take the following route geographically:
North Canton -> Cincinnati -> New York -> Chicago -> Columbus
The total is 16 hops.

But hey, that's better than the route to a friend's server in nearby Akron; that one goes through Cinci, Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, and back to Chicago before heading back to the vicinity of Cleveland. 22 hops.

Lesson: Real geography has very little to do with net-nearness.


Speaking of geography and the net, I have to admit that after moving to NE Ohio it took quite a while before I could see signs for Ohio Route 21 without thinking of FTP (possibly because I was doing firewall work when I moved up here). And I still can't see the signs for North Royalton without thinking of all the traceroutes I've seen go through there; I'm not yet convinced that anything exists in North Royalton besides a backbone router.