DTV delay: Revenge of the Luddites

TVWeek has a decent overview of the reasoning behind the delay of the DTV transition.

DTV coupon imageWhat I would like to know is how much of the $1.5B USD that was allocated to the coupon program was wasted on ‘administration’ of the program?  The coupon itself isn’t a coupon at all, it is in the form of an embossed plastic card complete with magnetic strip and hologram.  A hologram?  WTF!

A better approach would be to send just the number on a plasticized paper insert.  I don’t even want to think about how many tons of plastic are headed for the landfill because of this poorly executed program.

[image courtesy Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:FCC_DTV_Coupon_Card.png]

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Changes, they are a comin’

These days 'Change' is all the buzz and Dreamland Blues is no exception. Over the next few days I'll be making some significant changes to the station; I hope you'll all approve.

- Increase the bitrate to 128kbps. This will result in a dramatic increase in the sound quality of the station at the cost of increased internet bandwidth. The majority of you that have 'broadband' (cable modems, FiOS, etc.) connections should have nothing to worry about. If this renders the stream unlistenable for you please let me know.

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Dreamland Blues Radio – All the Blues you can use! 2009-02-06 13:39:40

These days 'Change' is all the buzz and Dreamland Blues is no exception. Over the next few days I'll be making some significant changes to the station; I hope you'll all approve.

- Increase the bitrate to 128kbps. This will result in a dramatic increase in the sound quality of the station at the cost of increased internet bandwidth. The majority of you that have 'broadband' (cable modems, FiOS, etc.) connections should have nothing to worry about. If this renders the stream unlistenable for you please let me know.

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Never say “It could be worse…” because sometimes it is.

A few weeks back I received a letter from our local electric utility informing me of scheduled overnight outages due to service work in my neighborhood.  The day came, and past, without the announced outage.  This is not unusual, it has happened before so I didn’t think much of it.

A few days later I received an early morning call that our office email and Internet access were down.  I had not received any NAGIOS alerts overnight but I thought that the utility had finally gotten around to doing the scheduled work and that the power had failed overnight and exhausted the UPSes.

I walked the caller through the UPS restart process and found that they were already running fine.  However, all the equipment in our mail server rack was powered off.  This includes our firewall (which explains the Internet outage ) as well as the NAGIOS monitoring machine (which explains why I did not receive any alerts) and the mail server.  Hmm…  the plot thickens.

Continue reading Never say “It could be worse…” because sometimes it is.