Davidson Design

Here's something that honestly irks me: A while back, my city councilman (who's campaign materials I designed & created, and I voted for) made a political move on the council to push through a raise for the city police. Here's the catch - he knew full well the money for that raise wasn't in the budget for the city, but pushed it through the council anyway.

Why, you ask? My councilman knows that his base of voters would be in favor of such a raise - I mean, who doesn't think our public service officers aren't paid enough - and that his voters aren't exactly seeing eye to eye with the current Mayor.

Cue the Mayor: there isn't enough money in the budget - we'd love to give them a raise too, but the money simply isn't there. He then vetoes the proposal, keeping the city within budget, but now appearing to those uneducated on the matter as against giving fair pay to the public service officers.

So my councilman comes off looking like a hero, and has positioned himself for a mayoral bid in the future. This has been the plan all along - to further his own political career and play the political system to its fullest by manipulating public view on items so they put a favorable light on him.

I hate politics. All politics. I especially hate politics when it's really obvious to see it as a game being played by the people in it.

Dives were Thursday, July 27, 2006

USS Strength -  78' deep, vis of 45-50'
Directly off the starboard side of the boat for the giant stride was a large dolphin, looking at us curiously as we each jumped in. By the ship we saw lots of large silver angelfish with blue and yellow fintips. We had a decent number of jewfish and sea cucumbers around the wreck. I was amazed by the number of seashells and sand dollars on the floor - I never expected so many, especially since the PCB & Destin beaches have few shells at all on them. I brought back a number of sand dollars, and am particularly proud of a leopard crab shell that I found. My dive buddy was a single woman familiar with the wreck, so I had a leisurely follow-along dive through inner parts of the wreck and around the hull. It was fantastic.
 
I participated in a "flip fest" with the folks on the boat during our surface interval, with some of the guys doing triple flips before entering the water. One guy did a belly-flop after the triple, which brought a rather abrupt end to his flipping. :) And no, it wasn't me.
 
Bridge Span #1 - 73' deep, vis of 50'
About half way down was a roughly 5' barracuda who was swimming in a holding pattern around the span. There were lots of jewfish and angels swimming around, along with schools of baitfish. We found lots of cleaner shrimp and crabs on the bottom, along with a huge number of really large sand dollars. The structure itself was crusted with anemonies and cucumbers, and the metal had degraded down into a rainbow of colors of rust and decay. I was really glad I brought along some dive lights to see better - sunlight was great, but I wouldn't have seen the colors otherwise. One of the more weird things we saw was a toadfish (?) nested underneath the superstructure, which looked as though it was just waiting for someone to stick a finger in his mouth so he could chomp it off. At the end of the dive was my only "whoops" of the day - I didn't have a compass on the rental gear, which meant that me and my buddy went to the wrong end of the span to find the ascent rope, leaving me with a little less air than expected. After the safety stop, I returned to the boat with 400 psi - ok, but pushing it.
 
The folks on the boat couldn't have been friendlier, the boat itself was large, comfortable and mostly shaded, and the dive staff at PCDC were as helpful as I could have ever asked for.

So I've got a new hobby - SCUBA diving. I've just completed all the necessary steps, tests, skill sets, etc. for my level 2 dive certification through SSI. I've now got 14 logged dives, including 2 dives over 65 feet and one at 105 feet deep. It's cold down there, kids. But it doesn't stop there - I've also done one of 2 required night certification dives, and have my navigation, computer, advanced computer and deep water specialties done. That's lots of little tags on my C card. :)

We're heading to Florida on the 22nd of July for a little R&R with the whole famn damily where I'm ditching everyone for a day and hitting the deep blue sea. I honestly can't wait.

For some unknown reason I really thought that I wasn't going to have any more problems with my cable modem for a while. But... as of this morning, I'm offline again. I'm thinking about getting a DSL line as a backup for when the cable goes down. Just something simple - whatever the cheapest option is, just so I can limp along between TWC service calls, which seem to be about once a month now.

Regardless of the hassle of being periodically offline, remember what we had to do before the internet? FedEx charges, film output charges, driving disks across town, etc. I'll take the occasional irritation if it means I don't have to make 4 trips to Sistematik a day to meet deadlines.

So I guess it's officially open - I managed to grab ahold of the domain for iShreveport.com, so I've set up a simple phpBB forum for all kinds of local information. Currently the plan is for it to host the forums for SMUG and the SB Photoshop SIG, as well as any other content that needs a place to live. Got a site and want some forums for discussion? Give me a shout and I'll help you through the (relatively easy) setup. Want to have your forums as part of iShreveport.com? Lemme know - I'm game for most anything.

My third technician has been here now, and found a loose connection on the main line just upstream bitwise from my house. He's torqued it down, and now I'm back to running at the full 4.5Mbps that I should be.

for now.

This is beyond ridiculous - I'm back to creeping along with my lame cable service. After calling last night and talking with a tech for nearly 45 minutes trying all of thier bug fixes, I was told it was too late to schedule a service call. Now that I've called back this morning, I'm now being told I can't get another service tech to come and look at the problem until October 11. I'm only trying to work here... nothing important. :\

If anyone has recommendations for service that will offer me a comparable 4Mbps down and 384kbps upstream for no more than $45/month and it's available in Shreveport, I'm all ears.

As you can imagine, living in a coastal state is not only hot, but you get these ridiculous storms every year. I'm ready to move. If you read this, and live in a blue state, and know of a AMS-certified Montessori School that's looking for a teacher for my wife to be employed by, and there's some graphic design work in that area that needs something done about it, give me a shout. I'm ready to go.

so the cable co. came the other night and fixed my internet ills. There was a physical problem on the main line leading to the house, so they replaced all the little pieces and parts and we're back to running like a top. For now. Until the hurricane knocks us out again.

I hate Louisiana.

My cable internet service still sucks. I'll put it this way - I'll be lucky if I can even update this page again until next wednesday.

$40/month for 74kbps download speed isn't acceptable. And that's only when we're connected at all.

Get FIOS if you can. I will when it's here.

Apparently there was some kind of thing that made the stuff not work right. And now, apparently the thing that didn't work right is working right, because I'm now going close to as fast as I was before switching modems. Not that anyone other than me cares, but I'm happier now.

Not quite sure what's going on now - I've heard random reports that there's sunspots or something, but really... Intermittently over the last 2 months, my cable modem has decided to completely lose signal with "the mothership" at Time Warner. As you can imagine, that sucks. I've had the repair "dude" come out twice to see if there's a problem with the line, and both attempts have yielded craptacular results. On the last visit, the "dude" suggested that if it happened again to physically return the modem to TW and request a replacement.

So I did that.

After driving clear across town into the middle of nowhere, I was given the "opportunity" to stand in line to replace the modem. Finally, I was given a new box, new power chord, and sent on my merry way.

Once hooked up at the ranch, I decide to run a speed test on the new box, since it seemed to be running slower than my old one. I was, no lie, getting around 4 mbps down and 348 kbps up on the old box. The new box gives me... wait for it... 348 kbps down and 300 kbps up. Lucky me.

I called tech support at TW (RoadRunner) who let me navigate their complex maze of pre-recorded mumbo-jumbo to finally talk with someone who suggested power-cycling the modem. Yeah - didn't think of that one. :\ So I humored her. Of course, it did no good. Then they did their little packet-shove thing they do when unplugged again, to no avail.

While typing this in (offline), I'm running another test, just for active numbers right now. Currently (this is time-stamped) I'm registering 158 kbps DOWN!?! and 166 kbps UP. I could put the data on floppies and walk it across town faster than I'm getting through my cable modem right now.

Anyone with clues? This actively sucks.
change me