At Sacred Heart, a device at the entrance to the church and another by the altar are turned on right before every Mass. Still, priests remind parishioners to turn off their phones before beginning the services, hoping good cell phone etiquette will eventually catch on. The other Monterrey churches with the devicesThe Rosario, San Juan Bosco and Our Lady Queen of the Angelsare also frequented by wealthier parishioners, Martinez said. “For a lot of them, the cell phone is a necessity. But that shouldn’t prevent them from having good manners and remembering that one must respect sacred places,” Martinez said. Margarita Escobedo, a Catholic who goes to church at least twice a week and volunteers at the San Genaro church, says she would welcome the jammers in her parish, where cell phones are becoming a nuisance. “Those who bring cell phones to church are not committed to God,” Escobedo said. “It’s very distracting to be praying and suddenly hear birds chirping or techno music.”I find this particularly interesting, since I am often times annoyed by obnoxiously loud cell phone ringtones, or loud cell phone talkers. I understand that we all want to keep lines of communication open to our friends, family, and business associates. But seriously, do you really need to announce to a crowded theater that you’re talking to your buddy John to tell him what movie you’re watching? I understand doctors and their need for pagers or cell phones in the case of an emergency with a patient. I understand lawyers and their similar needs for communications. Is it too much to ask to at least set your phone to vibrate? That way you can be alerted to an incoming call, but I don’t have to be while I’m trying to enjoy a movie. Well, I guess that’s my rant for this hour.
Monthly Archive for October, 2004
This eWeek article by Olga R. Rodriguez, and Associated Press writer, tells of the use of cell phone jamming technology in places such as churches in Mexico, India’s parliament, and Tokyo theaters. In Mexico:
Chris and I have been talking about saving some money and taking another cruise next summer or the summer after that. I just ran across Geek Cruises while reading some Cringeley’s column in my e-mail. While the idea of selling a cruise as a tech conference is appealing, the knowledge that I’d be vacationing with a bunch of tech nerds is much less so. Part of what was so nice about our honeymoon cruise (besides it being our honeymoon), was being around normal people. I guess I’ll just have to find another cruise I’d rather take, and do my learning elsewhere.
So, the turnaround time for the repair/replacement of my Timex Turn & Pull watch with Indiglo just around a month. I have a watch once again! Either the Hotline Watch Service replaced my watch with a refurbished watch, they did a fantabulous job cleaning and re-plating my watch, or a little bit of both. My watch is in great condition now with a minor surface scratch on the glass protecting the watch face, and some other minor nicks on the back of the watch. Otherwise, I’ve got full functionality of both dials on the side of the watch, and the time was even set correctly! Now, all I have to figure out is how to get my engraved clasp back onto the watch.
I got Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow on PS2 in the mail earlier this week. I bought it on eBay for $30. Because I was studying for the Novell CNA, I didn’t play it at all until today. The first mission was similar to the first mission in the PC version, with just a few changes to the map.
Scott and I are into the third or fourth mission now, and it’s just as enjoyable and frustrating as the first Splinter Cell was. Right now we’re on a mission where we’re supposed to find some guy on a train. Since we’re on a train in close quarters, we have to use non-lethal tactics. Also, there’s only one alarm level, so once we alert someone, that’s it. It’s a bit frustrating because we can’t seem to get past the part just after the first checkpoint.
We called it a day because we all have to work tomorrow. Maybe I’ll pick it up during the week, maybe I won’t. We’ll see.
According to my Desktop Sidebar’s DSSystemUpTime plugin, my computer has been up and running for more than 25 days, 6 hours, and 35 minutes. And now, because of a few Microsoft updates I just installed (but not XP SP2), I have to restart my computer 
I guess it’s time to start my uptime count over again. Let’s see if I can beat 30 days in the next go around.
I guess it’s time to start my uptime count over again. Let’s see if I can beat 30 days in the next go around.
A blogger who goes by jweston on Weblogs.ASP.NET posted an article where he asks, "Does anyone have experience with those ‘flat batteries’ that are thin and the size of a laptop"? If his blog doesn’t allow trackback pings, I’ll post a comment there, but for now my reply to his question will be here at my own blog.
Palatine High School used "flat batteries" from ElectroVaya a few years back to power laptops in portable carts used in classrooms. For a little while they worked out great for extending the battery life of the laptops between charges. Then, the batteries started puffing up and they did stopped holding their charge.
There was an apparent engineering flaw in the batteries, which the company acknowledged to us when we asked their technical support people about our problem. Despite it being a flaw in their design, they refused to replace our batteries, wanting instead to charge us to exchange our faulty batteries with new batteries that should not give us the same experience. As a school district, we declined their "offer" because of the astronomical costs involved in replacing these batteries for five schools.
To prevent this problem in the future, our new laptops are purchased with secondary batteries or extended life batteries. Our warrantee coverage on new laptop purchases should also cover the replacement of batteries that do not last as long as their expected lifetime. So, my suggestion would be to purchase a laptop with a spare battery, secondary battery, or extended life battery, rather than purchase a "flat battery." Of course I can’t speak for everyone’s experience with such batteries, but ours was terrible enough to mention.
For the past two or three weeks, I have been working on trying to figure out how to quickly migrate a FrontPage extended website with many extended subwebs from a server running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, IIS 5, and FrontPage Server Extensions 2000, to a server running Windows Server 2003 Standard, IIS 6, and FrontPage Server Extensions 2002. This has been a real test of my patience, not to mention my skills.
I have tried using the IIS Migration Tool, but I have yet to get 100% success with it. I am able to migrate the data in the web, rebind the web to a temporary server’s IP address, and even re-extend the web. However, when I try to view the web in its temporary home, I cannot pull up the site!
Several problems have shown themselves when I try to pull up the site. In one instance, I can open up static HTML pages, but not dynamic ASP pages. All of the databases have been copied over and their associated DSNs created, but still no ASP pages. Another time, I was not able to pull up any pages, static or dynamic. Today, I was finally able to serve both static and dynamic pages, but I am left with a site that needs to be re-themed and have its shared borders recreated. I am currently "publishing" the site from the live server to the temporary server, hoping that the permissions, themes, shared borders, and subwebs all migrate over as they are on the live server.
I don’t have good enough notes on what has been done at this point, so I may start over and re-install Windows Server 2003 on my temporary server, noting every step along the way to getting a duplicate of our production server. It may be worth it to suggest having a backup site published every week on a duplicate server. I’ll see how this latest attempt at migrating works before I suggest that, though. Wish me luck.
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