From editor@telecom-digest.org Mon Nov 1 15:40:50 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p3/8.11.6) id iA1KeoV09966; Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:40:50 -0500 (EST) Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:40:50 -0500 (EST) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200411012040.iA1KeoV09966@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #523 TELECOM Digest Mon, 1 Nov 2004 15:39:00 EST Volume 23 : Issue 523 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson When Phones Go Bad (Marcus Didius Falco) How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans (Marcus Didius Falco) Printer Forensics | Band Aid | How to Beat (Marcus Didius Falco) Semiconductors | The End of Moore's Law? (Marcus Didius Falco) Another Black Eye For VoIP2 (Lisa Minter) Asterisk Recommended Hardware? (Joel) Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' (Joseph) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (Tim@Backhome.org) Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip (Kenneth P. Stox) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:44:31 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: When Phones Go Bad http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64538-2004Oct26.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64538-2004Oct26?language=3Dprinter Fancier Gadgets Mean More Acute Problems By Yuki Noguchi Washington Post Staff Writer Robert Burger recently paid $460 for a new Motorola cell phone with a wireless earpiece. It didn't work. "I can't get it to recognize the earpiece," said Burger, an administrator in a Washington law firm who says he spends thousands of minutes on his cell phone every month. "And the battery isn't holding a good charge." This year, 98.9 million cell phones will be distributed to customers in North America, according to research firm Instat/MDR. About 20 to 25 percent of them will run into problems within the first year, costing money and time for consumers like Burger, estimates Neil Strother, an Instat analyst. In a world of balky gadgets, cell phones occupy an uncertain middle ground between the costly, indispensable items we fix when they break (computers if they're recent models) and those we throw away to buy replacements (VHS players, answering machines). Many of today's cell phones come loaded with cameras, e-mail, schedulers, Web browsers, Bluetooth wireless capability, speakerphones, digital music players and video players. And all of those features mean there's more to go wrong. The average life cycle of a phone is down, to 19.4 months this year from 25 months three years ago, thanks not only to phones that fail but also to customers who change providers or upgrade to the latest models, according to the Yankee Group, a research firm in Boston. This year, replacement-phone sales are expected to reach 103 million -- costing consumers $4.8 billion -- or nearly double the 56.4 million sold three years ago, according to the research firm. Replacing a broken or lost cell phone can be a pricey proposition because most carriers won't provide their advertised discount s of $100 or more unless customers commit to extending their contracts for a year or two. Customers who are early into a contract may not qualify for a discount at all. Dionne Hamilton, a legal secretary in Silver Spring, is fed up with her LG 3100 phone, which she said is one of four in her family that drops calls or loses service altogether. She brought it in for a software upgrade three months ago, but it's acting up again, she said. "It's not under warranty," which means she would have to pay between $100 and $200 to replace it with a similar new phone. "But I don't want to." For most cell phone users, replacing a phone that's gone bad comes with an added cost in time and aggravation: pecking away at the keys of the new phone to reconstruct a mobile address book of often-used names and numbers. Verizon Wireless recently started offering a service to back up cellular address books for just such an emergency -- at a cost of $1.99 a month. Some advanced "smart phones," which sell for $400 to $600, can download schedules and address books directly from a computer. Warranties on new phones typically last for a year but don't cover loss or physical damage. Carriers often offer insurance policies, at a cost of about $4 a month plus a deductible, but only about 10 percent of cell phone users buy such plans, according to J.D. Power and Associates. The cost of fixing phones isn't just a nuisance for consumers; it's also a hassle for carriers, which typically spend hundreds of hours testing phones for durability in labs and field tests before releasing them to the public. "As products got more complicated and expensive, we find it harder to educate the technicians and to get them the right tools to repair those devices," said Michael Cost, executive director of supply-chain management for Cingular, which became the nation's largest cellular carrier when it completed its merger with AT&T Wireless last week. In 2002, the average store carried eight to 10 models of phones. Now, with all the added features, a store carries between 25 and 30 models, Cost said. Late last year, Cingular pulled technicians out of its 1,700 stores around the country and switched to an "exchange-by-mail" program. The company mails the customer a replacement phone that's been refurbished. The customer mails the broken one to Cingular, which repairs it and gives it to another customer needing an exchange. That approach saves time for customers and a "significant" amount of money for the company, which can fix the phones at a centralized site, Cost said. Rival Verizon Wireless, which has no mail-exchange program, is hiring more in-store technicians because customers like having technicians available, spokesman John Johnson said. Feature-packed smart phones, billed as pocket-size personal computers, are especially vulnerable to software bugs. "As mobile phones become PC-like, they also suffer some of the same problems," said Gene Wang, chairman and chief executive of Bitfone Corp., a company that has designed a way to send software fixes over the air to a cell phone. Despite all the new gadgetry, most cell phone breakage results from human error. "I've seen a few flip phones break in half," said Howard Rosenberg, manager of a Simply Wireless store on Capitol Hill, who keeps some replacement parts in stock but generally refers customers to their carriers or third-party repair centers that specialize in fixing gadgets. The antenna on an old model, the Motorola v60, broke frequently but was among the cheaper repairs, costing customers $35 if the device wasn't covered by a warranty, Rosenberg said. Often, liquid crystal screens go dead, or phones are dropped in water, like the customer's phone that shorted out after falling into the Potomac River. "Flushing it in the toilet -- I've heard that many times," Rosenberg said. And, he added, "they go after it." Not all complaints about broken phones turn out to be valid. Carriers say a quarter to a third of customers coming in with problems simply don't know how to use the phone or its features. Dwain Gourdine, store manager of the Verizon Wireless store on G Street in downtown Washington, said 30 to 40 customers come in on an average day complaining of a problem that's the result of incorrect usage. Some are trying to make calls in basements or other areas where there is no coverage; others can't figure out the phone. "They're not just phones anymore. They've got so many products and tools built into them, so [users] need lots of education." Many customers hate giving up their buggy or broken phones, even for a day. "You're more reliant on technology, and when it goes down, you're dead," said Burger, the law firm administrator, who finally got his phone fixed by spending a lunch hour waiting for a technician's help at a Verizon Wireless store. Asked what he would do without his phone, Burger widened his eyes and said: "Cry." =A9 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance Washington Post Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:45:15 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: How to Make The Right Call On Cell Plans http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64549-2004Oct26.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64549-2004Oct26?language=3Dprinter By Rob Pegoraro The Washington Post Wireless phone service is one of the great bargains of the modern age. When The Post began its annual comparison of cellular calling plans in 1998, $40 bought a lousy 100 minutes of talk time a month. Now that same bill will provide 600 peak minutes, plus unlimited night and weekend minutes -- about 24,000 in all, if you must know. No other telecom service has seen this sort of ballooning value -- not Internet access, not landline phones and certainly not cable or satellite TV. But most other telecom markets don't benefit from the intense competition of the wireless industry, with five strong, nationwide carriers (down from six since Cingular's purchase of AT&T Wireless) out to eat each other's lunch. But wireless phone service can't be purchased on price alone -- first, you need to decide which carrier to go with, since not all offer the same service. It helps to start with the right questions. How much time do you spend in rural areas? Any wireless carrier should be able to give you a sturdy signal in the mall or at a downtown intersection -- digital coverage has become almost ubiquitous in most metropolitan areas. But what about 30 miles out of town? What about a vacation house four hours' drive away? This is why the first thing you should look at on a carrier's Web site is its coverage map. While these generally can't tell you about the annoying dead zones that only last half a mile on the highway, they should indicate where a carrier just doesn't have service at all. How important is it that the phone work at all times? There's no common standard for wireless service, save the oldest technology of them all -- analog cellular. Analog is what gave cell phones a bad name: It kills a phone's battery life, sounds lousy and will run up massive roaming charges. But as the lowest common denominator, it may be available where digital service is not. Only Sprint PCS and Verizon still offer phones that are analog-capable -- although some of their latest models are digital-only. Do you ride Metro often? Verizon continues to be the only carrier to offer service in the underground portions of Metro. Sprint says its phones can roam on Verizon's signal, but other firms' customers are shut out -- their phones don't support analog and use a different digital technology than the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard that Sprint and Verizon share. Do you want to use your phone overseas? Since Cingular and T-Mobile rely on the Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard widely deployed in Europe and Asia, their customers can use their phones overseas. But if you're not planning to make calls back home, it will be far cheaper to buy prepaid wireless service overseas. Which carrier do your friends and family use? Many Cingular and Verizon plans include unlimited calling to other phones on the same network. Sprint sells that option for $5 a month, and Nextel's Direct Connect Walkie-Talkie service, thanks to the unlimited usage the carrier generally allows, offers a rough equivalent. In any of those cases, you can opt for a cheaper plan if the people you'll talk to most often will use the same network as you. Do you want the gadget-iest phone available? If you want a cell phone that doubles as a handheld organizer, that decision may dictate your choice of carrier. The two most aggressive marketers of smartphones are Sprint and T-Mobile, which have been first to sell such popular models as the Treo 600 (Sprint will be the first carrier to offner PalmOne's new Treo 650), the Sidekick and Sidekick II, and the new BlackBerry 7100t. Cingular is a little further behind, followed by Verizon. Nextel is dead last; it waited until a few weeks ago to offer its first camera phone, a good two years after the competition. Do you plan to use your phone to go online? Wireless Web access is no longer a joke, thanks to improvements in data technology and cellphone screens. The fastest connections around are the "1X RTT" services offered by Sprint and Verizon, which top out at almost three times the speed of a landline modem. Cingular and T-Mobile's "EDGE" and "GPRS" offerings are a tad slower. How much do you plan on calling? Offers of unlimited or might-as-well-be-unlimited night and weekend minutes mean you only need think about calls between 6 or 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. on weekdays. If in doubt, get a cheaper plan; you can always switch to a plan with more minutes, although that may require extending your contract. Cingular and Sprint have come up with two smart twists on standard pricing. Cingular lets you carry over unused minutes into the next month, while Sprint's customers can be automatically bumped to a higher calling plan if they exceed their included minutes. In one area, however, the competitive juices of the wireless market aren't flowing properly: Under-$30 plans, once a commonplace offering by carriers, have all but died out. If you need a phone only on rare occasions, look into prepaid service. This is the equivalent of getting a calling card for your long-distance use: You buy an allotment of minutes and don't have to pay again until either the minutes are gone or a certain time has elapsed, often 90 days. The major carriers, save Sprint, sell prepaid service, as do such third-party firms as TracFone and Virgin Mobile (which itself resells Sprint service). What if you realize you made the wrong call? Whether you wait out your contract or eat the early-termination fee, you can still leave and take your number with you, thanks to the "wireless number portability" policy enacted by the Federal Communications Commission last year. That's one of the best moves the government has done for customers lately, giving them yet another way to keep these competitors honest. Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com. Copyright 2004 The Washington Post Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Washington Post Company. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 21:28:21 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Economist.com | Printer Forensics | Band Aid | How to Beat http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3329120 http://economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3D3329120 Printer forensics Band aid From The Economist print edition How to beat digital forgers Corbis A paper trail NO DOCUMENT is safe any more. Counterfeiting, once the domain of skilled crooks who used expensive engraving and printing equipment, has gone mainstream since the price of desktop-publishing systems has dropped. Virtually any kind of paper can be forged, including cheques, banknotes, stock and bond certificates, passports and security cards. For currency alone, millions of dollars in counterfeit banknotes make their way into circulation each year, and 40% of the counterfeits seized this year were digitally produced, compared with 1% a decade ago. In ancient times, counterfeiting was a hanging offence. In Dante's Inferno, forgers were placed in one of the lowest circles of hell. Today, desktop counterfeiters have little reason to worry about prison, at any rate, because the systems they use are ubiquitous and there is no means of tracing forged documents to the machine that produced them. This, however, may soon change thanks to technology developed by George Chiu, Jan Allebach and Edward Delp, three anti-counterfeiting engineers based at Purdue University in Indiana. The results of their research will be unveiled formally on November 5th at the International Conference on Digital Printing Technologies in Salt Lake City. Though the approaches of the three researchers differ slightly, all are based on detecting imperfections in the print quality of documents. Old-school forensic scientists were at least so the movies would have you believe able to trace documents to particular typewriters based on quirks of the individual keys. The researchers from Purdue employ a similar approach, exploiting the fact that the rotating drums and mirrors inside a printer are imperfect pieces of engineering which leave unique patterns of banding in their products. Although these patterns are invisible to the naked eye, they can be detected and analysed by computer programs, and it is these that the three researchers have spent the past year devising. So far, they cannot trace individual printers, but they can tell pretty reliably which make and model of printer was used to create a document. That, however, is only the beginning. While it remains to be seen whether it will be possible to trace a counterfeit document back to its guilty creator on the basis of manufacturing imperfections, Dr Chiu is now working out ways to make those imperfections deliberate. He wants to modify the printing process so that unique, invisible signatures can be incorporated into each machine produced. That would make any document traceable. Ironically, it was after years of collaborating with printing companies to reduce banding and thus increase the quality of prints, that he came up with the idea of introducing artificial bandings that could encode identification information, such as a printer's serial number and the date of printing, into a document. Many factors can affect banding patterns. These include the intensity, timing and width of the pulses of laser light that control the printing process, and the efficiency of the motor controls that steer the laser beam, turn the drum and move the mirrors. All of these could be exploited to produce unique signatures, but Dr Chiu found that the one which works best without compromising print quality is to fiddle with the intensity of the laser. Using a computer model of the human visual system, he has designed a method of banding that is invisible to the eye while remaining all too visible to an expert with the right machine. The current techniques used to secure documents are either digital (and therefore easy to fake with desktop publishing systems) or too costly for widespread applications (paper watermarks, fibres and special inks). Using the banding patterns of printers to secure documents would be both cheap to implement and hard, if not impossible, for those without specialist knowledge and hardware to evade. Not surprisingly, the American Secret Service is monitoring the progress of this research very closely, and is providing guidelines to help the researchers to travel in what the service thinks is the right direction. Which is fine for catching criminals. But how the legitimate users of printers will react to Big Brother being able to track any document back to its source remains to be seen. Copyright 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance the Economist Group. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 31 Oct 2004 23:43:28 -0500 From: Marcus Didius Falco Subject: Semiconductors | The end of Moore's law? | http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3D3321802 http://economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=3D3321802 Semiconductors What Intel's latest stumble means for the chip industry's rule of thumb. I'm so sorry, says Barrett IT IS not often that the chief executive of one of the world's biggest companies gets down on one knee and begs for forgiveness. Yet that is what Craig Barrett of Intel, the world's largest chipmaker, did this week at an industry conference in Florida. He was only joking, of course. But his apology for Intel's decision to cancel the next version of its flagship Pentium 4 chip highlights the latest in a series of stumbles by the company, which has once again been forced to follow the lead of its much smaller but increasingly feisty competitor, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). At issue is the best approach to making faster chips. For years, Intel has steadily increased the clock speed of its processors, the fastest of which now run at 3.4GHz, or 3.4 billion ticks per second. But it has now fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Although boosting the clock speed increases performance, it also increases the power consumption of the chip and the need for cooling. (Some of the very high-speed PCs used by serious gamers are even water-cooled.) So, rather than concentrating on clock speed, Intel has decided to boost the performance of future chips in other ways, such as increasing the amount of on-board cache memory and, in the coming years, switching its chips to a multi-core design. This means putting multiple cores in effect, complete processors into a single chip. These cores can run more slowly, consume less power and generate less heat, while collectively providing more processing power than a single core. Multi-core is a way to achieve additional performance without turning up clock rates, says Dean McCarron, an industry analyst at Mercury Research. This idea is not new: IBM, Sun and Hewlett-Packard already sell high-end computers powered by their own multi-core chips. But it is only recently that PC software has been able to exploit multiple processors. Intel's decision to de-emphasise clock speeds is just the latest example of how the company has reluctantly ended up following where AMD has previously= led. (Earlier this year, AMD forced Intel to make a U-turn in its=20 64-bit-chip strategy.) AMD has long argued that there is more to=20 performance than clock speed, and gives its chips model numbers giving some= idea of their power. Its new Athlon 64 4000+ chip, for example, announced=20 this week, runs at 2.4GHz, but its name implies rough equivalence with a w4GHz Intel chip. Intel is now adopting similar model numbers. Having abandoned its obsession with raw speed, Intel is embracing the multi-core approach with great enthusiasm. Paul Otellini, Intel's number two, who is expected to take over from Mr Barrett next May, said last month that he expects 40% of desktop chips sold, and 80% of server chips, to be multi-core by the end of 2006. The switch to multi-core is, he says, a sea change in computing and a key inflection point for the industry . What does all this mean for Moore's law, the rule of thumb coined by Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, which states that the amount of computing power available at a given price doubles every 18 months? For most people, Moore's law manifests itself as a steady increase in clock speed from one year to the next. The cancellation of the 4GHz version of the Pentium is Intel's clearest admission yet that clock speed is no longer the best gauge of processor performance: henceforth, it will increasingly take a back seat to other metrics. But the law itself, the death of which has been announced many times, will live on. Mr Barrett insisted this week that it would continue to apply for at least another 10-15 years. That is because multi-core designs mean chips' performance can continue to increase even if the formerly much-trumpeted clock speed does not. Copyright 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved. *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner, in this instance, Economist Newspapers. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml ------------------------------ From: Lisa Minter Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 14:05:12 -0500 Subject: Another Black Eye For VoIP2 Jack Decker comment: Anyone who is even thinking about doing business with VoIP2 really should first read the numerous comments about them in the BroadbandReports.com VoIP forum. http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/56260 Read Your Fine Print Marketing Lingo in the modern age. One user in our VoIP forum claims they were slammed with a five-hundred dollar cancellation fee by upstart provider VoIP2 after taking their "Money Back Guarantee" a little too literally. Their terms of service stipulate if you cancel in writing within the allotted time frame you'll get your money back, sans "the charges for completed calls at $0.03 per minute for United States calls related to an Unlimited plan and the actual billed charge for International calls" (of which we're guessing he made a few). This is 2004: unlimited means limited and "Money Back Guarantees" mean "Some of your money back, maybe." Full article plus reader comments at http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/56260 Another related thread at: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,11640174~mode=flat ------------------------------ From: Joel Subject: Asterisk Recommended Hardware? Organization: SBC http://yahoo.sbc.com Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 19:21:08 GMT I'm looking in to implementing Asterisk in our small office to achieve the following goals: * Provide extensions/voicemail and SIP speakerphones for all employees * Make sure all employees can transfer calls to each other * Provide 'remote' extensions so employees can use softphones when they are off-site (using IAX2 and DIAX) * Utilize existing Siemens 2400 base station/speakerphone with wireless handsets (using ATA) Is this type of thing a pretty standard setup for Asterisk? I'm a little worried because of all the vendors providing SIP phones and ATAs that I've never heard of. Are there some 'standard', trusted brands that, if I go with them, everything should just work? The Asterisk wiki didn't seem to answer these questions -- it seems like every phone will require its own workarounds. Thanks, -- Joel ------------------------------ From: Joseph Subject: Re: New Electronic Check Law Sinks 'Float' Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 10:42:33 -0800 Reply-To: JoeOfSeattle@yahoo.com On Sun, 31 Oct 2004 12:43:57 -0700, DevilsPGD wrote: > Rick Merrill wrote: >> IF these images were accessed it would give criminals access to an >> image of the customer's signature. Said criminal could then use a >> laser printer with 640 dpi resolution to print checks that would be >> indistinguishable from the photo check after a 240 dpi Scan!? > I'm curious, is there a requirement that the bank which accepted the > cheque store it for any period of time? I don't believe with the new check 21 law that they can destroy checks as soon as they're processed. I believe however that they have to store images of the processed checks. Whether your bank will also give you copies of those images probably differs from bank to bank. ------------------------------ From: Tim@Backhome.org Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 07:02:43 -0800 Organization: Cox Communications Patrick Townson wrote: > Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends > through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. Great camera work. You must have a huge film crew. Really nice hills, too. What part of Kansas is that? > I thought you might like to see it, and just in time for Halloween and > last night's blood red full moon eclipse. Be sure and have your > speakers turned up when you play the movie, you don't want to miss > any of it. > Watch it and about halfway through, as the car emerges from the clump > of trees, look and you will see something interesting, Be sure to have > your sound turned up, since the people are speaking sort of quietly. > Here is the link to the movie: Just click it and it should open up. > It's about 4M so it's not huge, but might take a few seconds on a > really slow dial up connection. When it starts, watch it and listen > very closely. > http://63.78.183.81/temp/j/Classic_Auto_1.mpeg > Oh, and happy Halloween to all of you. I assume you *did* get your > clocks set back an hour sometime last night or today. > PAT [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Me thinks maybe you missed the point of the exercise. It was Halloween, after all. I don't honestly know where the .mpeg clip came from; it was e-mailed to me a couple days earlier as a joke by Lisa Minter. She identified it as 'a new guy who I met when I was traveling to my grandparent's house last week.' Identify it however you like, but be sure to tell the prospective viewer to have their sound up loud and be watching closely when the car comes out of the bushes. Can anyone read the language on that notice on the screen at the very end? PAT] ------------------------------ From: Kenneth P. Stox Organization: Imaginary Landscape, LLC. Subject: Re: Last Laugh! Our Weekend Auto Trip Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 01:06:45 GMT Patrick Townson wrote: > Over this Halloweeen holiday weekend, I took a ride with some friends > through the countryside, and made a little movie for you to see. > I thought you might like to see it, and just in time for Halloween and > last night's blood red full moon eclipse. Be sure and have your > speakers turned up when you play the movie, you don't want to miss > any of it. > Watch it and about halfway through, as the car emerges from the clump > of trees, look and you will see something interesting, Be sure to have > your sound turned up, since the people are speaking sort of quietly. Wiseguy! I see you haven't lost your sense of humor. [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Thanks ... give it out wherever you like: justify it however you wish, i.e. 'weekend auto trip', or 'I meet a new friend' or better still, 'a new friend meets me for the first time. Not being prepared for it, later I said to Lisa, "if you were trying to cause me to have another heart attack, you did a damn good job." Maybe you could justify it as 'my reaction after I finished reading the ICANN charter for registrars.' (But find some excuse for the bucolic scenery and the car on the road.) PAT] ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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