Two of my favorite topics … but only when both are going my way.

Opening act for reverend horton heat. Like Kansas meets Ac/Dc. Wild. Great Southern Hard Rock.

So Adam Reposa, heretofore known as “Bulletproof”, is criminal defense attorney in Austin. It just so happens he attended UT Law with Lorin. It just so happens Bulletproof has managed to get into a little stink with a Travis County Court judge when he made an obscene jester at the opposing prosecuting attorney. This “simulated masturbatory gesture” landed him a Contempt of Court charge as well as 90 days in jail.

Granted, if I ever find myself in a Travis County jailhouse after a heavy night of binge drinking and a few smashed up cars in my rearview mirror, I would probably give Bulletproof a ring.  It sounds like the prosecutor really pissed him off with some legal objection, so I’m sure it was a deserved response.  But still, I’m left wondering WTF?

 Here’s the original report from K-Eye News.  BP has since returned before the judge and “apologized” (with his middle finger, assuredly), but the judge followed through with a sentence of 90 days in jail.  Here are Bulletproof’s comments following the sentencing. My favorite quote:

“I’m not very good at looking contrite.  All I do is wake up in the morning and fight the government.”

The backlash is even more amusing, given his sudden prominence in a number of blogs, (including this one?) Please click on through at some awesome YouTube footage of his commercials.  What a guy.

You out there, if you’re listening, I need a friend in the Texas House of Representatives. In the next few months I’ll need to gain interviews with a few representatives in the Texas House, or even former members, former lobbyists, staffers, political insiders, or former speakers of the House. This has to do with my dissertation, so it’s purely academic research. I’m pretty certain I can grant any level of anonymity necessary to complete the interview.

It’s inherently political and therefore it’s something representatives would rather not go on the record about … hence the anonymity. I don’t want to go into details here, at least not yet, but if any of you have a friend of a friend in Austin who can lend me a hand in getting these interviews, I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve been at the University of Essex for a few days and I’ve got some free time in the mornings, so I’ve started running again … Thanks to Apple and Nike, here’s what I’ve done lately.

Here’s something fun. In case you get bored clicking away on the internets, hop on those series of tubes over to Google for some afternoon image delight. Do a google image search on douchebag. You’ll thank me for it. My new favorite website is hotchickswithdouchebags.com

From urbandictionary.com

douchebag: -noun

1. A person with a shitty personality. A douchebag usually assumes the form of a hair-gelling pretty-boy but can also be described as an overzealous, pompous, or vexatious asshole that most people wish were killed with a Mortal Kombat fatality.

Example:

Damn, i thought “Beverly Hills 90210″ won the permanent award for most douchebags casted in one weekly television show, but then someone had to go make that show, “Friends.”

The face of Sleestacks has changed and a lot more. The main website has moved to a new server (more detail later) and it’s built with WordPress. Woodworking photos and trip documentaries have moved as well. You will find them in the menu bar above.

So from previous posts you’ve heard about the problems with my “Internets” (a series of tubes). I have bitten the bullet and moved to Time Warner Business Services. With TWB, I get 6Mbps up, 1Mbps Down and 5 static ip addresses for $114. This is cheaper than what I had with DSL, for six times the bandwidth. So far reliability seems to be greatly improved.

I have made other behind-the-scenes changes as well. The server is now running off a Mac Mini (1.6Ghz, 512MB) with Mac OS X Server as the operating system. I’ve built a terabyte network-attached-storage (NAS) device out of the old server, and the Mac Mini gets access to this new storage via the iSCSI transport (ATTO Tech’s XtendSAN). Basically, iSCSI lets the Mac Mini see this networked storage on the device block level. No need for setting up AFP or SAMBA or NFS sharing … the Mac thinks it’s another hard drive attached directly to it, like via Firewire. But behind the scenes, it’s not just one drive it’s 4 drives put into a RAID 5 array controlled via a 3Ware hardware RAID controller. So we have redundancy in case a drive goes bad. We use Openfiler for the operating system on the NAS, so we get (moment-in-time) snapshots too. Yet the Mac Mini doesn’t care about any of this, as it thinks it sees just a simple, local hard drive.

All of this sounds very exciting and complicated, but in reality it is simply moving my local network and servers out of the 1990’s and into the modern era of server technology.

I’m getting fed up with DSL. I love my provider (Speakeasy) as they’re pretty friendly to techies. But the house is just so far from the CO that speeds and reliability are an issue. Additionally it seems like it’s been getting worse in the past year. Not sure if this is due to more people using high speed internet over DSL in such a run down neighborhood with an ill equipped CO or what.

AT&T has been talking about bringing fiber to the neighborhood for some time now, with their U-Verse product, but if that happens in a year or four who knows. What’s clear is that no one is interested in bringing fiber to the house in older hoods.

I’ve attempted to contact a number of companies to see just how much it would be to bring fiber to the house on my own dime … then I could even be my own ISP for my neighbors if they wanted it. Unfortunately once these companies hear that I’m in a residential area, no one returns my calls.

Wimax (microwave) is a viable option. There are wimax ISP’s in Dallas that are offering speeds comparable to a T1 for $60/month. They will even offer up to 100Mbs down if I felt like putting out the money (I don’t) since microwave gets so much throughput. Unfortunately the WISPs in Dallas that offer such services don’t have any antennas pointed in my direction. The WISPs that do have antennas pointed here aren’t interested in anything less than 3Mbs @ $400/mo.

What does that leave me? The beast, that’s what. I left the great Satan’s service behind some years ago and have never looked back. Unfortunately, his is the only viable option at a fair price. Time Warner is offering 6Mbs/down 768Kbs/up for the low, low price of $99/mo. Plus, since I’m going through their business division, rather than residential, they won’t make me switch to cable for my TV (I *heart* DirecTV’s HD-DVR), and they’re giving me static IP’s (a deal-breaker). Sounds a little too good to be true if you ask me. Surely they’ll want my soul on installation day. Oh well, I’ve sold it so many times already, once more can’t hurt.

That being said, next week (starting Thursday the 18th) emails will bounce for a few hours while the domain names are updated to the new static IP addresses. But there’ll be fewer outages and better throughput when it’s all said and done.

So it turns out Apple’s iPhone is beyond every bit of cool that we imagined it to be. It’s so fantastically cool that I would literally stab someone to get one right now. Maybe not kill them, but wound them in a hurtful fashion. Totally.

Full 160dpi touchscreen (only one hard button) Automatically detects orientation for landscape/portrate viewing Wi-Fi access Cingular Edge/GSM phone service (faster than standard GSM) Runs Mac OS X (including the full web browser, Safari) Built-in iPod

I can’t say enough about this phone, except that I hope you aren’t standing in line in front of me when the Apple Store runs out of stock.

So my current phone, a Sony Ericsson P910a, got it’s touchscreen smashed by a passing bed’s footboard. Not a long story, but not very interesting either so we’ll leave it at that. I’ve since ordered a new touchscreen on eBay to replace the busted one, but it’s stuck in customs at the Canadian border for three weeks. Homeland Security? How about Homeland-pissing-me-off-yet-again.

Anyhoo. Let’s say for the sake of argument that I’ve really mucked up my current phone. And the new touchscreen comes in and I replace it, unsuccessfully. Alternatives are few. I could replace my current phone with an identical P910a, since it works so well with iSync (photos in your address book, and everything!) But the cost of doing this twice in two years is prohibitive. As far as other phones go, there’s only a handful that I like, and even fewer still of those that work well with iSync (my main criteria). Perhaps at the top of the list is the Nokia 8800. It’s the European version of the feature limited 8801. The cost is pretty far up there, but I really love the styling, the iSyncing, and it’s hefty compactness.

But there remains some hope that there’s something better available, and for a more economical price. Apple has been dropping hints that they’ll be releasing an iPhone tomorrow at MacWorld Expo San Francisco. Naturally this would support iSync as well as iTunes music. But everything else is up for speculation. There are plenty of mockups out there from Apple fans that look promising. Here’s a few of my favorites. Maybe the real thing will live up to the hype?