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May 01, 2003
UVCN: Keeping Local Traffic Local Since 2003
Yesterday, Governor Leavitt inaugurated the Utah Valley Community Network. There has been a lot of work behind the scenes to get so many cities cooperating with the county and UVSC. The result is a network that not only provides fiber transport across much of the county, but also serves as a local exchange point for a number of networks including those of BYU and Novell. The result is that a broadband user in Provo who connects to Utah.gov or the UVSC network does so without being routed through Denver. I am convinced that local and regional exchange points are necessary for broadband to deliver on its promise. This is a good role for Government because its sometimes difficult to get private entities to cooperate in the public good without incentives. UVCN is a great example of some good public officials cooperating to accomplish something that none of them could have done alone. UVCN is something that I'm proud to have played a role in.
10:28 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Course Calendar Available via RSS
There is an RSS feed of the syllabus for the programming language course I'm teaching. You can subscribe to it in your news aggregator and get a daily reminder of that day's lecture and what homework is due. There are also weekly and monthly feeds if you need a longer time horizon. This is all being driven from iCal on my desktop. This is of interest to students in the class, of course. I was mostly interested to see if I could use this to drive event notifications in an RSS feed from the tool that I use to manage events, iCal. The answer is "yes."
06:09 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Noise Reduction Headsets
About a year ago, I took a trip to San Jose with the Governor and Chris Johnson from the University of Utah. The Governor flies in a KingAir B200 and it can be a little noisy. Chris pulled out a set of Aiwa noise reduction headphones and popped them on. Pilots have enjoyed noise reduction headsets for some time. I use an expensive model in my own plane, but this was the first time I'd seen a consumer version (without a boom mic). We passed them around and it was amazing how much more clearly you could hear conversation on the plane when you had them on. I bought a pair after I got home and use them whenever I fly commercial. Here's the rundown on the AIWA headset:
- They're inexpensive. I saw a pair at Radio Shack the other day for about $40.
- The really great news is you can listen to music or the movie at a reduced volume. For example, when I'm using them and turn noise cancellation off, I can't hear the music anymore because the cabin noise drowns it out. I think you arrive more relaxed because you haven't been in a noisy environment for 2-5 hours.
- The bad news is that they are not really very comfortable after about an hour.
Now Bose has come out with a set that look like a real step-up. Bose always makes good gear and the engineering is excellent, so I'm anxious to try a pair. The biggest down side is that like anything from Bose, they're expensive: $249. Ouch! Even so, I think they'll make the perfect companion to the new iPod I plan to buy.