I replaced the fuser roller in my HPLJet yesterday. Fifteen years or so and still going strong. About six of those years have been with me. It has a JetDirect 10BT network card and, if I recall correctly, 48MB of RAM.
Fon
I’d read about Fon some time ago. I’m not sure where. I was very interested. It works like this: You buy a wireless router for $50. You use it to share your wireless internet with other Fon users. Those users either pay Fon for the privilege or they have their own routers and they let people use it for free, in which case they can use any Fon routers for free themselves. Or they can get some money from Fon but then they have to pay (half off, I think) to use other Fon routers.
For me, they’re throwing in a wifi area extender antenna which is usually $20 for $2 when I buy the Fonera+ router at the same time. So for me, heck, if this just extends my home wifi signal, that has some value to me. But it’s really about sharing. What I’d really like to see is a countrywide (reasonable coverage, anyway) wireless mesh network connecting people to the internet for a small cost.
Fon is a step in the right direction.
[Not] Fingerprinted at Disney World
We went to Disney World in Orlando yesterday, Sunday, 30 September 2007. It was a nice day.
What surprised and dismayed me was the fingerprint scanner at the entrance. Just slide your card (ticket) in here, then put your finger (thumb, I guess) here on top. Uh… no, thanks, I’ll pass. And pass, I did. I tried putting the top of my bent finger on there (no print up top) a few times but it just spit out my ticket each time. So some guy came over and told me to put my finger on there. I told him, simply, “No.” He asked me at least one more time and I did not vary my response.
Eventually, he asked me if I have ID. Sure, I have ID. He asked me for my ID and to sign my Disney World ticket. Okay. I signed my ticket then handed it to him with my driver’s license and he inspected both in parallel, apparently confirming that the signatures matched.
Then he put the ticket back through the machine and keyed in something on a keypad on his side of the entrance-blocking, person-counting, ticket-confirming, fingerprint-taking machine. It didn’t work and the machine spit the ticket back out. He repeated this, reaching over and reinserting the ticket easily ten times or more. He surely tried every ticket orientation as he fed it into the machine — though, at my questioning, he told me he should be able to put the ticket in at any orientation.
Sometimes the machine held on to the ticket for a bit, probably expecing a fingerprint despite whatever he was keying in on his side. Sometimes it spit the ticket right out after it was inserted.
The guy then told me I needed a new ticket. So he brought me a new ticket and had me sign that new one then put it through the machine.
After we got in, a good friend we were there with remarked, “I’m already in the system.” And a few minutes later, my mother-in-law came up beside me and told me, “I didn’t know being fingerprinted was optional.” I replied, “Neither did I.”
I won’t be fingerprinted to attend an amusement park.
A quick google search of “disney fingerprinting” returned some interesting articles:
Google
Boing Boing
Engadget
http://newsinitiative.org/story/2006/09/01/walt_disney_world_the_governments