Oh boy, its my birthday. I think 27 sounds a lot older than 26. Next thing I know I’ll be 30. Time flies when you’re having fun I guess. I’m going out to a hibatchi dinner tonight with a few friend. Should be pretty fun…maybe some sake bombs!

City begins free wireless Internet

03:46 PM CST on Tuesday, November 29, 2005
Alan Sayre / Associated Press

To help boost its stalled economy, hurricane-ravaged New Orleans is offering the nation’s first free wireless Internet network owned and run by a major city.

Mayor Ray Nagin said Tuesday the system would benefit residents and small businesses who still can’t get their Internet service restored over the city’s washed out telephone network, while showing the nation “that we are building New Orleans back.”

The system started operation Tuesday in the central business district and French Quarter. It’s to be available throughout the city in about a year.

Hundreds of similar projects in other cities have met with stiff opposition from phone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at blocking competition from government agencies — including a state law in Louisiana that needed to be sidestepped for the New Orleans project.

The city had been working on a Wi-Fi network before Hurricane Katrina struck Aug. 29, and police already were using the wireless system to monitor street security cameras.

Nagin said Katrina, which knocked out communications throughout the region, frustrating coordination of relief efforts, showed the need for a more-advanced system.

In case of another storm, the network will be able to connect telephone calls via the Internet.

“What we learned is a network like this is important as a backup in case all other communications fail,” the mayor said.

The system uses hardware mounted on street lights. Most of the $1 million in equipment was donated by three companies: Intel Corp., Tropos Networks Inc. and Pronto Networks. The companies also plan to donate equipment for the citywide expansion.

The network uses “mesh” technology to pass the wireless signal from pole to pole rather than each Wi-Fi transmitter being plugged directly into a physical network cable. That way, laptop users will be able to connect even in areas where the wireline phone network will take time to restore.

The system will provide download speeds of 512 kilobits per second as long as the city remains under a state of emergency. But the bandwidth will be slowed to 128 kbps in accordance with a limit set by Louisiana’s law once the city’s state of emergency is lifted at an unknown future date.

The service will remain free for residents and businesses after the state of emergency ends.

Phone and cable TV companies have fiercely opposed attempts at creating new taxpayer-owned utilities. The companies contend competition from government-run Internet service stymies their incentive to invest in upgrading their networks and services.

Critics have said commercial networks are often too expensive for the lower-income residents being targeted by the free or low-cost services now being considered by hundreds of municipalities around the country.

But David Grabert, a spokesman for Cox Communications, a major cable TV and high-speed Internet provider in the New Orleans area, said the Atlanta-based company welcomes the competition.

“This is a relatively slow-speed service, and we don’t look at it, at this point, as major competition for our high-speed service,” Grabert said. “We’re ready to compete with all comers.”

Many cities have partnered with private companies to build and operate their networks. Philadelphia, for example, is developing a citywide system that will be run by Earthlink Inc., unlike the New Orleans owned-and-operated system.

Nagin, who was Cox’s top executive in New Orleans before his election in 2002, said the city system would be “just one of several options” residents would have to get Internet service.

At 512 kbps, the New Orleans network is about seven times the speed of dial-up service, but slower than high-speed services provided by telephone and cable TV companies. Users will have to sign up with the city for an account.

Greg Meffert, the city’s technology director, conceded that private providers might have problems with the system.

“In the end, my job is to work for the city and what the city needs,” he said. “I’ll stand behind that.”

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

From WWLTV.com

I was just doing some random searches in Google to see what kind of stuff I could find and I came across this. The advertisments on the right are paid advertising. What I noticed is that when you search for some racial keywords, it brings up an ad for Ebay.

Nigga
Niggas
Mexicans
Ching

In case they take them down or change them, I took screencaps of each one.
Nigga, Niggas, Mexicans, Ching.

So I just though it was interesting that these came up because someone had to have specified these exact keywords in the ebay adwords account.

By BISHR EL-TOUNI
Associated Press

MAHE, Seychelles — A cruise liner that was attacked by pirates over the weekend docked safely on this Indian Ocean archipelago today after changing its course to escape.

Passengers described their horror as pirates in speedboats chased their luxury cruise liner at sea, firing rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles — with smiles visible on faces otherwise hidden by ski masks.

Click here for more.

I spend some time Saturday and Sunday detailing my new Elantra. I washed it, used a clay bar on the entire car, and waxed it. Also detailed the interior. I think it turned out great.

Click the image for step by step pics and see how it turned out.

GREENSBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) — A Pennsylvanian man sued his ex-girlfriend for more than $30,000 for gluing his genitals to his abdomen five years ago.

Kenneth Slaby of Pittsburgh is suing Gail O’Toole, with whom he broke up in 1999, after dating for 10 months. Slaby then began dating someone else but, according to the lawsuit, O’Toole invited him over to her home on May 7, 2000, where he fell asleep.

When he woke up, Slaby found that O’Toole had used Super Glue to stick his genitals to his abdomen, glued his buttocks together and spelled out a profanity on his back in nail polish.

O’Toole allegedly told him it was payback for their breakup, and he had to walk a mile (1.6 kilometer) to a gas station to call for help.

“This was not just some petty domestic squabble,” Slaby’s attorney Grey Pratt said Wednesday.

O’Toole had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault and served six months’ probation, but her ex-boyfriend is now suing for damages.

O’Toole’s attorney, Chuck Evans, said it was a consensual act and Slaby wasn’t permanently damaged.

“This is a case that should have been left in the bedroom,” he said.

From CNN

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — A 20-year-old man accused of using thousands of hijacked computers, or “bot nets,” to damage systems and send massive amounts of spam across the Internet was arrested on Thursday in what authorities called the first such prosecution of its kind.

Jeanson James Ancheta, who prosecutors say was a well-known member of the “Botmaster Underground” — or the secret network of computer hackers skilled at bot attacks — was taken into custody after being lured to FBI offices in Los Angeles, said U.S. Attorney’s spokesman Thom Mrozek.

A bot is a program that surreptitiously installs itself on a computer and allows the hacker to control the computer. A bot net is a network of such robot computers, which can harness their collective power to do considerable damage or send out huge quantities of spam.

Mrozek said the prosecution was unique because, unlike in previous cases, Ancheta was accused of profiting from his attacks — by selling access to his “bot nets” to other hackers and planting adware — software that causes ads to pop up — into infected computers.

“Normally what we see in these cases, where people set up these bot systems to do, say, denial of service attacks, they are not doing it for profit, they are doing it for bragging rights,” he said. “This is the first case in the nation that we’re aware of where the guy was using various bot nets in order to make money for himself.”

Ancheta has been indicted on a 17-count federal indictment that charges him with conspiracy, attempted transmission of code to a protected computer, transmission of code to a government computer, accessing a protected computer to commit fraud and money laundering.

Ancheta, who was expected to make an initial court appearance late on Thursday or Friday, faces a maximum term of 50 years in prison if convicted on all counts, though federal sentencing guidelines typically call for lesser penalties.

Prosecutors did not name the companies that they said paid Ancheta and said the firms did not know any laws were broken.

Mrozek said Ancheta, who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Downey, was thought to have made nearly $60,000 from the planted adware, using the money to pay for servers to carry out additional attacks, computer equipment and a BMW.

He said Ancheta was taken into custody after FBI agents called him into their offices to pick up computer equipment that had been seized in an earlier raid.

Among the computers he attacked, Mrozek said, were some at the Weapons Division of the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California and at the U.S. Department of Defense.

From CNN.com

BENTONVILLE, Ark. – For 40 exhausting minutes, Wayne Goldsberry battled a buck with his bare hands in his daughter’s bedroom.

Goldsberry finally subdued the five-point whitetail deer that crashed through a bedroom window at his daughter’s home Friday. When it was over, blood splattered the walls and the deer lay dead on the bedroom floor, its neck broken.

Goldsberry was at his daughter’s home when he heard glass breaking. He went back to check on the noise and found the deer.

“I was standing about like this peeking around the corner when the deer came out of the bedroom,” said Goldsberry. The deer ran down the hall and into the master bedroom — “jumping back and forth across the bed.”

Goldsberry entered the bedroom to confront the deer and, after a brief struggle, emerged to tell his wife to call police. After returning to the bedroom, the fight continued. Goldsberry finally was able to grip the animal and twist its neck, killing it.

Goldsberry, sore from the struggle, dragged the dead animal out of the house.

“He got kicked several times. He was walking bowlegged for a while,” Deputy Doug Gay said.

From Yahoo.

“The US government has a new website, http://www.ready.gov. displaying public service symbols for terrorism readiness, in the tradition of the old “duck and cover” campaigns after WWII.

The fun thing is that these pictures are so ambiguous they could mean anything!”

Click here for the PDF

My old site was a bit much and I wanted something simpler. So I found Word Press and installed it and seems to be working out perfectly.