It must be election time...

...because I'm actually getting some phone calls. Of course, they're not from humans - they're calls from robots telling me to vote for John Kerry. Jokes on them, because my phone service gives me a copy of my voice message as a wav file. Listen for yourself:



I, like everyone else, hate unsolicited phone calls from telemarketers, especially when they are recordings. The politicians, being the clever devils they are, exempted themselves from the "do not call list" legislation and the federal Telemarketer Sales Rule regulations. New Jersey recently passed a law requiring these messages to contain a message stating who paid and approved of the message... It's unfortunate that you are forced to listen to (and possibly pay for) the message to find out who paid for it at the end. If they're going to be allowed to voice spam us, we should be able to not listen - or at least know who's spamming us.


They should also not be able to block or spoof the caller ID. The call came from 617 231-2006 - "wireless caller." Uh huh... this was a mobile voice spam robot? Right?


This is Ryan P. Kennedy, and I approved this message.

One more thing...

New iPods? Something cooler for iTunes? Who knows... but there will be something new we can buy within the hour. I'm hoping for a color photo iPod... and not just a stupid U2 edition. I think even a 4G iPod with a 60 GB drive will disappoint me... (though note... that would be as big as the hard drive in my f'n laptop - that's a LOT of music).

A Call for Photos

A Call for Photos
Originally uploaded by pdcryan.

Here is a sample x-mass card, to show what I'd like my family's cards to look like this year. This was made with only about 400 photos... I think we'd need at least twice as many for it to look right. Note that this is scaled down to 500 or so pixels wide, whereas it was originally over 10,000 pixels wide (so it'll look plenty nice at 300 dpi when we have them printed). The base image was just a 4 color little number I quickly made in PhotoShop (green tree profile on the left, and "noel" in red"). I used a nice program called MacOSaiX to stitch it together. You have to look close - but it really is made up of small pictures of my family. What do you think?

E-A-G-L-E-S EAGLES!

Dan's at the Eagles game today in Cleveland and just emailed me this picture. As I post - the Eagles are only up by 4... come on guys... you can do better.

Phoney McRing-Ring?

The stars all appear to be aligned. The perfect phone will be released tomorrow morning. I'm guessing that Verizon will not be carrying it until sometime after 2007, because of their "extensive testing." "Can you hear me leave? Good."





Here's the dirt - it's got bluetooth, a high rez 320 x 320 screen (the same size as Mary's Tungsten E), and a 1.3 MP camera. It's really the ultimate in mobile blogging (ultimate in Mobile everything... actually). If (when) I pick one up, expect my photoblogging to increase quite a bit. As Grampa once said: "I'm old... gimme gimme gimme."

Flu!

I'm down for the count. Hopefully I'll be better by tomorrow morning,
because I have an interview with another civil judge. And I almost went
to Atlantic City Yesterday... yikes!



The good news? Red Sox win game 1... and BC beat Notre Dame (AGAIN! 4 years in a row) in the last minute of the 4th quarter. Boston College is also #1 in the college hockey polls. The Eagles are poised to go 6-0 today against the Browns... if it weren't for all the mucus, it'd be a good weekend.

Now we play the waiting game...

Oh, the waiting game sucks. Let's play hungry-hungry hippos.

I'm waiting for this - the Motorola 6208 DVR cable box. It's not just any cable box - because it records live TV (alas only one tuner...) and thanks to the FCC (sometimes they don't suck) it has a working FireWire (IEEE 1394) port on it. That means I can play the video through to my PowerBook - record it, burn it to DVDs... anything I want. Oh, and I can watch a week's worth of Simpsons in a night...

Update on the Google front

Well... all of my whining must have worked - Ryan Kennedy.com has jumped to number 16 on Google's pagerank for "Ryan Kennedy". Will the real "Ryan Kennedy" please stand up?

In other news - I just realized that I was not allowing anonymous comments on the blog. It was never my intention to restrict anonymous postings, that's just blogger's default behavior. Welcome Publius! Welcome Mr. X! Comment away my anonymous and pseudonymous friends, replete with your 95 years of copyright protection!

Update: I'm now #1 on Google when you search for "Ryan Kennedy." Eat it, other people with the name Ryan Kennedy (like this guy, and this guy).

Allow me to muse on VoIP

I'm calling you out
internet telephony
phone ring of Gyges

I've switched my phone service to Vonage. The phone that isn't a phone (but is a phone).

Voice over IP is cheap, and it works. $15 a month for 500 minutes, or $25 for unlimited minutes. I get voicemail through the phone, a website and email (yes, actual email attachments as wav files that I can put on my iPod, or Garageband the hell out of). Voice without a POTS line. Basically, you plug your normal phone into an adapter, that in turn connects to your cable modem or other pipe.

Too good to be true? Chairman Powell is due to weigh in with some musings of his own. Some courts say VoIP (internet telephony) is an internet service, some say it is a phone service. Maybe it'll get taxed more. Maybe they'll play with E-911 some more. Maybe we'll have to pay into that crooked e-rate program.

Internet connections, email, voicemail and phone service are at a nexus. I'm writing a comment for Seton Hall's Circuit Review Journal on the subject. My question is: how do you "wiretap" packets? The First Circuit had an answer, but just unsent their email opinion. Much more to come...

I finally understand

Ed Wade, meet Timmy. Timmy, Ed Wade. But I'm sure you know each other quite well now, don't you?

Mmmmmmm... Toasty.

Today was my first trip to Quiznos... and it was tasty. To commemorate the occasion, Mary took this picture from her nerdphone. Our Quiznos is in the Ironbound - so it's pretty close, but not quite as close as the 40 Subways that seem to be popping up on every corner.

Google me this

I'm the "real" Ryan Kennedy, yet I'm all the way down at number 31 on Google. I've tried everything - including putting a link on my slashdot sig. C'mon Google, show me some love.