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There is an AP story out about a Minnesota college student attempting to sell his vote on eBay. He is being charged with a felony under an 1893 law that makes it a crime to sell your vote in Minnesota.

Seems to me that if the teenager is going to be charged and prosecuted for selling his vote, then maybe there needs to be some investigation of the politicians while they are at it.  How many of them could be guilty of violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the same law?

Over the weekend I setup a Ubuntu 8.04 installation in my apartment.  The main purpose was to have a box to use to connect to my Tivo, but I am also going to use it to play with Java servlet and jsp development.

Of course none of this is any fun without Internet access.  So I started configuring my Linksys pci wireless adapter.  Turns out that the longstanding bug that affects the WPA2 passphrase store in Gnome Network Manager is still not fixed.

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Just like a car’s VIN number, a cell phone has a number or two that contain interesting information about the device.

There’s the IMEI number, the SIM card number and the phone number itself.  Ever wonder what pieces of information are related to those numbers?  If you go to the International Numbering Plans website you can enter those numbers in and see what you get.

After several weeks on hiatus, Music Video Friday has returned.

This week we have a trio of videos featuring Yo-Yo Ma. Yo-Yo Ma is an award winning cellist. Known for his considerable virtuosity and wide-ranging repertoire, he has delighted audiences around the world in live performances and in motion picture soundtracks.

The first video is from the dvd “The Music Garden.” This particular clip is of the prelude from Bach’s Suit No. 1 for Unaccompanied Cello. This dvd is the first of a six-part series that was filmed by Kevin McMahon and Francois Girard. This dvd was released in 2000 by Sony Classical.

The second video features the performances of several songs from motion picture scores Italian composer Ennio Morricone. The songs featured in the video are: “Gabriel’s Oboe” from The Mission, “Playing Love” from The Legend of 1900, and a suite of music from the movies of Sergio Leone. This album, Yo-Yo Ma Play Ennio Morricone, was released in 2004 on the Sony Classical label.

The third video is a live performance of the song “Slumber My Darling” by Stephen Foster. This song was featured on the studio album Appalachian Journey, featuring Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Edgar Meyer (bass), and Mark O’Connor (violin). This particular track guest starred vocalist Alison Krauss. This album was released in 2000 on the Sony Classical label.

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Lately there has been a lot of flack going on over the Early Termination Fee (ETF) system that the major cellular carriers use to encourage consumers to abide by the length of the contract that they have signed.

Apparently a lot of people are upset that the various cellular carriers are wanting to charge a fee to get out of the contract they signed. Now I can understand that they don’t like paying some extra fee to switch carriers, however, they signed the contract in the beginning stating that they would pay the extra fee if terminating the contract early.

I can understand that there may be instances where the ETF seems onerous due to a dissatisfaction with the services or a case where the ETF is conceivably improperly levied. In fact, I had to pay an AllTel ETF when my wife died solely because the cellphone was actually in my name and not hers. If the phone contract had been in her name then AllTel would have waived the fee and just canceled the contract.

What I don’t quite grasp is why the very consumers that signed the contract are so loathe to abide by the terms. If you have ever signed a lease on an apartment, house or car, I imagine that you have agreed to pay extra fees in order to break the lease. This is a common practice and everyone seems to accept that it is worthwhile, so why is it so bad to have the same clause in the contract on cellular service?

This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.

Background

My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.

I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:

• booting with Knoppix
• putting the drive in an external enclosure connected to a different machine
• putting the drive in the freezer overnight

Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.

Installation Problems

At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.

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The unsigned Manchester-based band, The Get Out Clause, gets props for a creative use of the CCTV surveillance cameras in the UK.

Since they lacked the funds for equipment and crews, they setup in front of a series of cameras in Manchester and then used the footage, requested via the Freedom of Information Act, to create a music video.

Get the whole story.

This is pretty nifty.  I especially liked the fact that they performed on an escalator and a public bus.

Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush won the ACM 2008 Song of the Year award for their song Stay.

For those of you who don’t know, Jennifer Nettles is a former Georgia 4-Her and a former member of the Georgia 4-H performing group, Clovers and Company.

Congratulations, Jennifer, from a fellow Clover.

Well for today’s music, we are featuring some nice work with bottles.

The first video is of a Chinese group that is playing the theme from Mario on partially filled glass bottles. However, they are playing is via an RC car.

The second video is of a trio playing the theme from Tetris using partially filled bottles. I like they way that they appear to have performed it fairly slowly and sped it up for the final video cut.

So, a friend of mine was setting up a Linksys WRE54G Range Extender on her wireless network to eliminate a dead spot in her house.

She had issues with the Windows-based setup utility because it hardcodes the TCP/IP settings on the computer due to the fact it assumes that your network won’t be setup to work with the device out of the box.  After that failed, and spending a while on the phone with a hapless Linksys tech support person, we finally got it configured via the web interface.

So everything is going fine until she notices that the MAC filter that was configured on the WRT54G was no longer effective.

It turns out that when you setup the WRE54G to work it invalidates the purpose of your MAC filtering.  All traffic sent through the range extender is automatically flagged as OK.

From a Linksys forum post:

As a result, Wireless MAC Filtering on the main wireless router or access point will have no effect on clients connecting through a WRE54G Range Expander.

You have to wonder who makes the decisions on options with stuff like this.  The Linksys tech I was chatting with online about this said that the best solution would be to enable WPA security, but their user guide for device specifically recommends doing MAC address filtering in addition to the encryption, except for the fact that you can’t.

Good game Linksys.