I need a cheap longdistance solution for calls within the US. The calling location is deep inside a building at Pomona College and cell coverage sucks.

Option A is prepaid cards. Genuine ATT cards are availabe on ebay for about 3.4 cents per minute. Or you can go even cheaper if you go to a site like CallingCardPlus -- rates down to .5 cents per minute. I am sure quality on some of these cheap plans is iffy.

The location does have 10mbit ethernet and so VOIP is an option – I wonder what will happen when every student starts using VOIP, I bet the campus net is not engineered for that case. Free World Dialup - by pulver.com is a way to start, seems pretty geeky tho, you have to be a NAT expert – OK for me but not sure this will work for the caller. I wonder if Vonage is any easier to use. I definitely want an option that uses a SIP phone or a regular phone, I don’t want to use a PC mic and headphones.

Great news for Pure Networks – Applications: Home Is Where The Network Is – as more and more homes get home networks, more and more people are going to need help with these networks – managing, securing, sharing, monitoring, etc.

hit-or-miss points to the Beloit College Mindset List – while maybe the list isn’t as good as in the past, it is fascinating to see the world thru the eyes of an 18 year old – Paul Newman makes salad dressing, not movies.

Hey phil, this one is for you – Gizmodo : Automatic inkjet cartridge refiller

NCAA College Football - Fanblogs.com: 2003 Week 4 Coaches Poll – desrvedly so, yesterday’s performance was so weak. I am surprised they didn’t slip lower.

#6 in the Sagarin (BCS) – I have no real beef with that.

ESPN.com - NCF - Recap - San Diego State at Ohio State - 09/06/2003 – a horrific showing. 12 penalties, i think 9 or 10 in the first half alone. Poor sportsmanship – a lot of unnecessary personal fouls, Tressel should have sat Will Smith the rest of the game for some of the fouls he committed. The line was pushed around aby SDSU. SDSU had a good game plan with delays and traps and draws, OSU looked confused and outhit. Krenzel was incredibly ineffective. Way off on passes, especially anything longer than 10 yards. The running game was weak.

The defense finally stood up and saved the day, forcing turnovers and bottling up SDSU. The offense never did show up – no one on offense should earn a leaf for their helments this week.

Were the buckeyes looked ahead to NC State? Not as much as NC State was looking ahead to the Buckeyes, as NC State dropped their game to Wake Forest.

Let’s hope Tressel and the team use this to motivate themselves for next week.

Absolutely American : Four Years at West Point by David Lipsky is a great look at life inside West Point. I knew little about the service academies before reading this book, it is a fascinating read. At times I was impressed with West Point; the values that they try to embed in their students are very admirable. At other moments I worried about the end product, as the students seem to be dehumanized and in some ways lose respect for the rest of citizens of their nation. But a great read, very enjoyable, very engaging as it follows the careers and choices of a set of students.

Various props and effects noticed this week: Air muscles – a unique pneumatic mechanism; EL wire – for some unique lighting effects; Fake stone walls – for your dungeon; Sunstar -- another source of skeletons; A guide to web spinners -- these are great – here’s some more

Broadcast Builder – let’s you build RSS feeds, might be fun.
Argali -- app for searching multiple YP sources at one
Rss in My Yahoo – I’ve seen several pointers to this, kind of cool
Auth based on typing patterns – cool tho I want it to work in reverse – by default let anyone onto my system but throw them out after a couple minutes if their pattern is unknown
SpamBayes – I wish there were more server-side solutions so that my bberry didn’t get so much spam
Spam Fights Back – but then maybe Bayesian filtering is going to fail when faced with polymorphic spam
Universal cutting CD prices – hallelujah
CMU building sense into cellphones – nice to see someone trying to make the phone a better phone, rather than adding all kinds of other useless features
Decompilation and copyrights – a nice primer
CSS sucks – time to replace my browser-safe colour palette with my browser-safe CSS palette
DVD burning software – good list – ridiculous that it takes 7 pieces of software to acceptably move taped content to a dvd
Blogstreet – the swiss army knife for blogs
Writings on warfare – thanks rich
File sharing utilities – more great links from rich
Blueberry tips – from rich – seems like some real problems here

Big 10 College Football - Fanblogs.com: Could OSU be stripped of the title? – something I’ve been wondering about as well. This has to keep Tressell and Geiger up at night, and is probably at least in part why they are whacking hard on Maurice. The NCAA gives some points for being very aggressive in these matters.

Just finished Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. I am on average a centrist with a slight tip to the right on economic issues, but I love this book. The far right creeps me out and I love to see Al whack them. This book is basically a hatchet job on the far right press, Fox Network and its ilk. Very funny. There is no real issue examination in the book, Al can be just as self-righteous as the far right, but he does a great job exposing their worst behaviours. Fox was stupid to sue Al, they just gave the book press and a huge sales impetus (It’s number one on Amazon right now), so even more people are going to see Fox reporters and newscasters exposed. Al is not the guy to do this – I’d love to see someone do a serious investigation of why Fox News and its ilk are so popular and successful right now. I just don’t watch it but obviously a lot of people do.

The-Ozone seems to have the most likely analysis of this: For the last several weeks there have been news reports citing unnamed sources regarding all sorts of details regarding the suspension. It is pretty safe to say that those “leaks” were not within the NCAA, and probably also safe to say that they are not within OSU. That leaves just one source, the Clarett family and the Clarett entourage. It is inconceivable that those leaks have endeared Clarett to either the NCAA or OSU.

The folks were on hand last night at Ohio Stadium for the opener. Their report: a beautiful night. Same weather and lighting as the Fiesta Bowl, felt like a continuation. The 900+ member band and alumni band was awesome. The entire game felt like a coronation, it was the first real public showing of the team since the Fiesta Bowl and the crowd was emotional. Maurice Clarett was very active in the first half, jumping up and down on the sideline right behind Tressell. He was more sedate in the second half, almost as if he was told to cool it.

I’ve had it on my shelf for years, I finally read The Inferno by Dante Alighieri. After reading Passage and disliking it, I needed to read some higher quality literature on the theme of death and the afterlife. Surprisingly approachable for a 700-year old text, I assume that is in part due to the translation. Very interesting to understand the hierarchy of sins in the mind of someone living in 1300 AD – I don’t think most people would have the same levels of classification today.