300 BPS N81

In the early nineties, the music group "Information Society" produced an obscure song on their album Peace & Love, Inc. called "300 BPS N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode Or Ascii Download)". If you listen to it, I'm sure you won't be impressed by its musical quality. But supposedly if you feed the song to your modem, it will establish a 300 bps connection with it and send a message in ASCII text. Because modems modulate/demodulate sound to/from data for transmission over the phone lines, your modem will basically interpret the noise as another modem attempting to connect and send data. Apparently this is lost on some folks, as evidenced by one of the reviewers at amazon.com:

The majority of songs on here are like this: airy and synth-heavy, except for filler tracks like #3: "To the City" (which I liked) and #12: "300bps N, 8, 1 (Terminal Mode or ASCII Download)" (which just gave me a headache; it's three minutes of high-pitched computer screaming).

If you're curious as to the contents of the ASCII message that the song produces, look at it here:

SO WE'RE SUPPOSED TO PLAY IN CURITIBA IN 18 HOURS, BUT OUR BUS IS BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY THE LOCAL PROMOTERS. THEY'VE FORMED SOME UNHOLY ALLIANCE WITH THE BRAZILIAN COUNTERPART OF ASCAP; THE PRS. APPARANTLY THE PRS HAS THE LEGAL POWER TO ARREST PEOPLE, AND THEY WANT A PIECE OF THE NATIONAL TOUR PROMOTER'S MONEY. THE LOCAL SECURITY FORCE, "GANG MEXICANA", HAS BEEN BOUGHT OUT FOR 1800 CRUZADOS AND A CARTON OF MARLBOROS EACH. THE ONLY FACTION STILL OPERATING IN OUR DEFENSE IN "BIG JOHN", OUR PERSONAL SECURITY MAN, AND HE'S HIDING IN HIS ROOM BECAUSE A LOCAL GANG IS OUT FOR HIS BLOOD BECAUSE OF A 1982 KNIFING INCIDENT IN WHICH HE WAS INVOLVED...

Make of it what you will! ;)

Back to Linux

Well, yesterday I said goodbye to the wickedness and snares of Windows XP and installed Fedora Core 4 Linux on my laptop; also added 1GB of memory. It's super smooth... Initially, my conversion was rather lukewarm; I had intended on keeping an NTFS partition up with XP, but after struggling a bit with the partition manager (and not wanting to divide my system against itself), I decided to just go head on. Sometimes bold change is good. It's taking me a while to get everything working. I'm using the wired ethernet right now - struggling to get this silly wireless card to work! Anyway, it feels good to have a dedicated Linux machine again.

UPDATE: Wireless card works now - watch out if you have a Netgear WG511. The firmware isn't easily available.

Big News

The Paulist Fathers are withdrawing pastoral leadership from St. Mark's in Isla Vista.

Last week, in an extraordinary painful decision, our General Council determined that to continue to utilize effectively our limited Paulist resources to accomplish our ongoing objectives, the Paulist Fathers will be required to reduce some commitments and withdraw from others. With great regret, the Paulist ministries at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Saint Mark's are among those from which we must withdraw.

New leadership will be forthcoming from the archdiocese. I was a parishioner at St. Mark's for about seven years. It will be interesting to see what this brings.

UPDATE: This article from the UCSB Daily Nexus provides more information.

FDA labels for condoms

The FDA is finally recommending some important warnings for condom labels:

The FDA wants condom packages to warn that condoms are less effective at stopping some sexually transmitted diseases, such as herpes and human papilloma virus, than others... Under the proposed rules, condom packages would say that they are thought to be less effective against certain STDs, including herpes and human papilloma virus, because those diseases can be transmitted through skin-to-skin contact in places not covered by a condom.

Now, you knew that condoms wouldn't protect you from some of the most common (and most detrimental) sexually transmitted diseases, right? Herpes is spreading at an alarming rate, and the human papilloma virus (HPV), which is one of the leading causes of cervical cancer in women, is even more common than herpes.