September 29, 2005 by Joel.

Took a vacation day on Wednesday 9/28, and drove up to the Virginia mountains with my fishing buddy Sam. We’d been trying to get a chance to get out out of town, and finally our schedules intersected. Got a late start, as I had to drive my son to school (early period marching band, before the buses run), so we didn’t leave Chapel Hill until about 8AM. A couple of stops for coffee, and we got to our destination in the hills near the conflux of the James & Maury rivers around 11:30. I first tried a size 14 caddis that had worked for me in the summer when I first fished this stream, and that was too big. I was not getting the rises, but Sam was having good success on a size 16 parachute adams, with a zelon tail. I scored a couple of flies from him, and we were both catching fish. Nice brookies in the plunge pools, beautiful colors, with the fish mostly in the 7″-9″ range, which is quite a lot of fun on the light rods we were using. I was using a 00-wt Sage TXL, and Sam had his 1-wt Scott. We fished upstream until about 3PM, each of us catching about 20 trout. Wonderful weather, wonderful fishing. Then, we headed back to my truck, and drove over to the Maury River, and got our 7 wt rods to try for some smallmouth bass. The Maury was low and as clear as a trout stream, and we were optimistic. However, the fish were hard to find. We each finally picked up a couple of smallies each, ~10″, both using Shenks white streamers. A great steak in Lynchburg on the way back was a great way to finish the day.

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September 24, 2005 by Joel.

On Friday, 9/23/05, the Chapel Hill High School Marching Band opened its fall season with a trip to the CHHS-East CHHS football game (wich the CHHS Tigers won, 14-0). Along with Scouts, this is where I spend the rest of my free time. My oldest son spent 4 years with the band, and now my youngest son is a sophomore there. I’m in the Pit Crew, and I usually drive the equipment trailer.

The band was ready to go!

Halftime!

If you want the whole experience, here’s a low-res video of the first number of the performance from my hand-held still camera…sorry about that background noise, but the Pit Crew was standing by the East bleachers…

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September 24, 2005 by Joel.

How ’bout those Tarheels today? Beat the “Whuffpack” of NCSU, 31-24. Plus, now that my son is attending Virginia Tech, I’m a Hokie fan, too…the Hokies plastered GA Tech, 51-7.

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September 21, 2005 by Joel.

I’m listening to a presentation on “Hot Topics in Video Conferencing” at the Internet2 meeting. Most discussions have been relatively predictable conversations, but just heard a fascinating discussion about the practicality of videoconferencing on a 3G cell phone. Due to the small screen, effective conferencing works at 64Kbps. I had not realized how near-term this technology is. An example of one possible application was the potential of showing insurance claim information to the home office. Of course, the same issues we have today with firewalls, etc. in today’s environment are still to be dealt with, hopefully through emerging standards.

This is a huge market — one panelist said that the market for 3G phones is growing at 40% per quarter! Already, more 3G phones have been sold than the installed base of H.323 videoconferencing units.

This is something I’ll be tracking with interest…

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September 20, 2005 by Joel.

Saw this on slashdot today:

http://wifi.google.com/faq.html

Might not be up anymore, but I copied the text here…
Read the rest of this entry »

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September 20, 2005 by Joel.

Sat in on a very good and thorough session this morning on lambda-based networking. Joe St. Sauver of the University of Oregon gave a talk that was a good overview of applications and advanced networking and the things that led to creation of NLR. He talked about the place of lambda networks in supporting production and research, and speculated on the relationship of Abilene and NLR.

The slides of this talk are very detailed; Joe said that he intentionally made them this way to support the webcast or for folks that would read the slides in a standalone fashion. Therefore, this is a great overview/status report for anyone who is interested in getting better up to speed in optical networking.

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September 19, 2005 by Joel.

Just sat in on a good session about SIP.edu. In particular, there was good discussion about numbering plans (i.e. how do we identify and dial) especially considering the “legacy” devices with 12-key interfaces that are difficult to use with the email address paradigm that’s what SIP.edu 1.0 focused on. A popular proposal seems to be to use what’s called the ISN (ITAD Subscriber Number, where ITAD = Internet Telephony Administrative Domain). Basically, there is an RFC that is was not widely used that set up a number (ranging from 256 up to 10^32 - 1) that would be used sort of like a domain name in conjunction with a locally defined number. There is the character ‘*’ used as the separator between the ITAD and the local number (local number comes first) so that if an organization had ITAD 256, then “phone” 12345 in that organization (not location!) would be 12345*256. This would use a bit of DNS configuration through an NAPTR record to rewrite to a SIP extenstion at a given gateway. Seems like a quite workable scheme…

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September 19, 2005 by Joel.

Just a brief note to follow on my podcasting thoughts on 9/16…Duke is holding a podcasting symposium. Sounds interesting!

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September 19, 2005 by Joel.

I’m off to the Internet2 meeting in Philadelphia in just a bit. I’ll try to post a few things from that venue.

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September 16, 2005 by Joel.

Wow, a wireless broadband rollout covering 2/3 of the population of Canada. I hear that Clearwire is moving forward with putting up transmitters for WiMax wireless broadband here in Chapel Hill. It would be exciting to get further competition to the DSL and Cable companies. Looking forward to developments!

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