(Nothing But) Flowers

Recently I purchased The Best of the Talking Heads from iTunes. On it was the song (Nothing But) Flowers.

I like the song: the melody, the vocals, whatever it is that makes one like a Talking Heads song. I listened to it a couple times the last couple days and started noticing lyrics like "There was a factory, now there are mountains and rivers" and "There was a Pizza Hut, now it's all covered with Daisies." Pretty standard "return to Eden"-type sentiments.

Then I noticed "if this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower" and at the end "Don't leave me stranded here, I can't get used to this lifestyle." This added an interesting layer to the ideas presented by the song.

Let me tell you the three layers that I see in the order that I thought of them. First, the hippie, environmentalist, return-to-Eden view where things were better when they were simpler. Second is recognizing the fact that we might not enjoy things if we "went back". Recognizing that it would be hard to "get used to this lifestyle." My third interpretation is some kind of sophisticated hippie who thinks that while it would be hard to get used to living without Pizza Hut and 7 Eleven, it would still be better. This sophisticated Luddite makes fun of the whining portrayed in the song.

Unless we talk to the David Byrne, we can't know what he was thinking. Even if we did talk to him, he may not have an answer for us.

Why Would You Want a Police Scanner?

I recently purchased a new police scanner. (I say "police scanner" because most people think of (flat-bed) image scanners when I just say "scanner"… I guess I could say "scanning multi-band radio receiver"… anyway.) I had it delivered to the place where I work so I wouldn't have to stay home to sign for it or go pick it up at the shipping company when nobody was at my house to sign for it.

I explained to everyone before the package arrived that it was "a toy" and nothing business related. Of course, everyone asked what toy it was. I was surprised by how many of the geeks here at this high-tech company barely understood what a police scanner was, let alone why I would want one.

By way of explaining the fun of scanning and radio-hobbies in general, I offer part of my story.

Awe

When I was 15 (maybe I had just turned 16) my friend Kris's dad, Bob, managed the local office of Pac*Tel paging. They were moving offices and he had enlisted Kris and me to move some back-up batteries for the big "paging terminal". Kris and I had recently watched Weird Al's movie: UHF.

We were talking about how much fun it would be to run our own UHF TV station. Bob overheard us and mentioned that they broadcast UHF there at the pager company. I don't know how Kris felt but I was astonished. Bob then punched up their frequency on a scanner in the engineer's office. Bee-oww wooooooooong brchzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhzh shshsh chachachachack… He explained that the paging signal was basically data modulating an FM signal that the pager decoded. At that moment I learned that RF was RF. AM, FM, TV, two-way radios, pagers…

Scanner

After I got my first job selling pagers for this same outfit at the mall, I saved up the dough for a hand-held scanner from Radio Shack. After a few days of searching around and wondering what all these frequencies were I bought Police Call. This had information on FCC radio licenses in my area. I'd look up an agency in the book and program all of the frequencies listed in the guide for that agency. Then I'd scan around these frequencies to see what I could hear.

At least one evening I remember logging everything I heard. Scanner channel, frequency, and what was said. I quickly learned how to recognize dispatch channels, request channels, car-to-car channels etc. I noticed that the Salt Lake County Sheriff's Office had more than one channel that sounded like a dispatch channel. It turns out that the valley was divided into geographic areas and each had its own dispatch channel.

Given enough time my buddies and I could have figured out which channel was which area of the valley, but some intelligence was obtained (somehow) that described which channel was for which area. Combine that with some of the other geographically-defined agencies around the valley and we could tune in "areas" instead of just listening to… whatever.

If I was headed to work at, say, Valley Fair Mall I'd tune in the Sheriff's Office West Patrol, West Jordan PD, Salt Lake Community College, Valley Fair Mall. I'd listen to these agencies before I left the house and on the drive over. By the time I got there I already knew that the two police cars across the street from the mall was just one cop on a traffic stop and another one driving by offered assistance.

Which I think is cool.

Maybe next time I'll tell you about how this led to my exciting adventures in Ham Radio.

Forever!

It's been almost a year since I posted anything here!
Check out Schnivic.net, my project log and Flickr to see what I've been up to.

I've finished up school so now I'm a Bachelor of Science!

"Visual" Programming

I just remembered a feature from the Visual Basic world: the IDE would hide all of the code file except for the function with which you were currently working. You would pick a function in a little menu and only that function would appear.

I'm not sure if I like this or not. I know I like having access to functions. During my last round of Linux hacking I set Emacs bookmarks for most of the functions with which I was working. This allowed me to flip around without navigating the pile of code that had accreted.

In Visual Studio .NET 2003 the "Class View" feature allows you to browse your classes to find a particular function and then you can just double-click on the function name and it opens the file and puts the cursor at the function. This is identical to the Emacs bookmarks, but with Emacs you had to put the bookmarks in yourself.

There's a project that wouldn't be too hard: build a bookmarker for Emacs that would put a bookmark at the beginning of each function in a code file.

Maybe one day I'll get to it.

Dimentia, or not

Do you ever just stare at your screen for a few minutes trying to figure out what you're doing and then realize you're looking at the wrong file and it's no wonder it doesn't make sense?

Where have I been?

I guess I got busy with finals and things. Now it's Summer Semester and all I'm taking is Calculus III, "Multivariable Calculus".

Anger Management

One time, I got so mad that I jumped up and down, just like in the cartoons.