I’d like to place a reminder on my weblog. It’s aimed more towards the news media, who tend to be making a big stink about rising gas prices. Contrary to popular American belief, driving is a privilege, not a right. There is no constitutional guarantee to driving a car or receiving cheap gasoline prices from vendors. Let’s face it people, demand is rising and supply is falling. Anyone who took a high school economics class can tell you that prices will rise. And there’s nothing anybody can really do about it. Wait—there is. Don’t drive your car. Or use a renewable fuel that doesn’t come from crude oil. If you want a point in the right direction, watch Fueling Change. But stop your whining. What and how people drive around here you’d think it was their God-given right. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t specifically mean driving a gas guzzling monstrosity down the road at 80mph while getting 10mpg. And if you’re one of those people who drives one of those cars and thinks, “oh, my fuel economy isn’t so bad,” you’re deluding yourself. I get 35mpg on average and I think that’s bad. And you know what, it just might be. 🙂

No, this is not a nod to my present state of unemployment. I just (finally) watched Rent. I have mixed feelings about the movie. The broadway musical I love. The movie I do not. It had its good moments, even some truly remarkable moments, considering how much I disliked parts of the film. One of my passions is musical theater and musicals. They have not fared well lately in film adaptations. The bit that really irks me is the numbers do not feel motivated at all: the energy isn’t heightened and there is no need for the characters to break into song, with a couple of notable exceptions— I thought “La Vie Boheme” and “Take Me or Leave Me” started off well. The rest of the time the transitions were flat. A couple of other minor things became major annoyances to me. Two technical things: The CGI breath was too much. It was annoying and I didn’t believe it. Yes, it’s supposed to be cold outside. Yes, sometimes it’s a pet peeve of mine when movies are shot in LA and it’s supposed to be cold enough to see your breath. But computer generated breath is NOT the answer. It really threw me out of it. Second, the auto-tune on the vocal tracks, especially noticable on Mimi, really blew it for me. Okay, so they want to be pitch-perfect. Get it in the performance, don’t use the “fix it in post” attitude. Heavy auto-tune that sounds like Brittney Spears really ticks me off, especially since I know most if not all of the actors in this movie are capable of doing it right (e.g. it wasn’t so noticible on Idina Menzel’s and Anthony Rapp’s vocals).

Last night at the annual Los Angeles County Disaster Communications Service general membership meeting April Moell, WA6OPS, spoke about the Hospital Disaster Communications service in Orange County. Her brief lecture was informative and spoke about the nature of hospital communications in an emergency situation. To my knowledge, DCS doesn’t do anything like this. But it is what I’d hoped to be doing when I joined DCS. Emergency communications. So far we have not had one single activation in which I have participated in the 3 years I have been with DCS. April pointed out that there are two basic structures: the RACES/DCS/ACS structure in which hams are tied to a particular government agency, and the ARES structure, in which ham groups form agreements with entities and are not tied to one specific served agency. I believe the latter has a greater chance for growth. The big difference is that the former requires some sort of administrative official to request activations, following which hams are sent to assignments, and the latter allows hams to self-deploy according to established protocols, thereby saving valuable time. It’s a top-down vs bottom-up approach. I think I will look for an organization that utilizes the latter, if merely for my own sanity: I cannot stand the bureaucratic nonesense that gets in the way of actually doing what we want to do: get communications back up in an emergency situation where minutes count.

Sunday was the 21st annual Los Angeles Marathon. The first one across the finish line won $100,000 + $25,000 + a new car. But this is a person who runs everywhere. Howabout 1,000 pairs of shoes instead?

There has only been one other time in the history of the L.A. Marathon when there was a fatailty. This year there were two. This year there was also the highest number of runners—over 26,000—so statistically it was bound to happen sooner or later.

I did not run the marathon but I was on my feet all day. (Note to self: find more comfortable shoes.) I was downtown at the start/finish area Command Post and vicinity shadowing the director of security for the marathon, Bob Taylor. This was a ham radio event. We didn’t do much all day except deal with the fatality situation and fix a couple of security issues. The folks at the marathon generally know what they’re doing thanks to the many years they’ve done it.

Knowledge should be shared, not stored, thereby alleviating the tiresome and absolutely annoying incumbrance of having to remember everything at once.

It’s about this cold, detached, online “connection” thing. Does it really bring people together or does it just make us think so? A friend of mine—yes, someone whom I know in real life—recently posted his addendum to one of those bulletin surveys making its way through myspace (which, by the way, is a messy, clunky, slow website, but I digress), and the bulletin asked people to semi-anonymously reveal how many of their “friends” they had actually met in real life. Only one of those people had actually met all of his friends. All 121 of them. Now I can’t say how close he is to these people but I can speculate on the fact that 79 of the 80 people on that bulletin had not actually ever been in the same room as a fair amount of the people on their lists. And I mean brick and mortar room, not chat room.

So Pope Benedict XVI unwinds listening to an iPod, huh? Okay Catholics, make my AAPL stock rise. 🙂

I received 33 e-mail spams yesterday. Three of them the mail filter missed, and the other 30 were automatically placed in the Junk Mail folder. My thought is, if you’re going to send me unsolicited buik e-mail, at least use something halfway resembling grammar. I don’t respond well to phrases like, “Me and Dre had sat with himsrqfkov kicked it and had a chat with him.” Also, if spellings like “0ffffer,” “0nlllline,” L000king,” and “clllickk,” are supposed to get past the mail filter and trick me into believing in your product, it ain’t working.