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My friends in Florida are getting married and they asked me to participate- as the officiant. Since I’m neither religious nor spiritually-minded they figured I’d be a safe choice for the job. I could be counted on to take it seriously, keep it short and not annoy everyone. Okay, except I need to be a Florida notary public, a minister or a Quaker friend. I took Option #2.

I joined the Universal Life Church. Maybe “joined” is a little much. It took me five minutes on-line to get myself ordained and another five minutes, and $15, to get my ordination certificate and some nicely printed marriage certificates. For another $10 I can take an additional title, I’m partial to “Spiritual Warrior” though “Free Thinker” and “Rabbi” are more appropriate. “Guru” and “Druid” sound pretty good, too. I find it a little ridiculous but the ordination is legal. I’m bound to promote freedom of religion and to do that which is right. Sounds easy enough.

I wrote a ceremony and vows. I tried to hit some high points with the subreferences: Donne, Burns, Auden, Poe… Barry White. My friends reviewed it and think it will be just the thing.

Sunday is the day. Coincidentally, Halloween. I’m not planning on dressing up but if anyone asks they can just call me The Reverend.

Texas Instruments makes a wireless chipset, the ACX100. This chipset is used by a number of manufacturers- Samsung, DLink, SMC, USR to name a few- but they have not released specifications for it and their Linux drivers are distributed in binary form only. Complicating things, the chipset lacks a flash PROM for the firmware. The driver must load the firmware on initialization. This firmware, too, is distributed only as a binary blob under a restrictive license. Though poorly thought out, this practice is not uncommon and many vendors consider the operation of their hardware and its firmware a trade secret. No one is asking them to give up their trade secrets, only to permit redistribution of the binary.

Members of the OpenBSD Project have tried to contact Texas Instruments but have had no success. They cannot even determine who to ask about distributing the firmware blob and if it can be made available unaltered but under a less restrictive license. Doing so would give Ti’s chipset the same support as those from Realtek, RaLink, Lucent, Prism and Symbol but Ti appears uninterested. Even Intel and Cisco, two companies notorious for their poor support of BSD licensing, have made some steps toward documenting their chipsets.

Efforts are underway to develop an unencumbered driver that may make all this irrelevant but that work will take time and may prove unsuccessful. Meanwhile there are but three things to do: * Contact Texas Instruments and ask them to discuss the matter with the OpenBSD developers. The BSD-licensed driver and firmware image can be applied to other Open Source operating systems such as Linux. * Do not buy products based on the Texas Instruments ACX100 chipset. * Tell other people not to buy products based on the Ti ACX100 chipset.

Hopefully, if enough people let Ti know and the company sees the potential for lost sales and the bad publicity they will reconsider their position of stone-walling these developers.

I recently saw on an email a tagline that caught my attention.

It read:

There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo.
Use in that order. Starting now.

attributed to the science-fiction author Ed Howdershelt.

Since buying the GS/PD, I’ve felt I needed a skills refresher. The BMW feels a bit top-heavy at low speed (over 8″ of front travel and nine gallons of fuel have something to do with it) and I’ve taken a few minutes here and there to do figure-eights, u-turns and circles but needed a more formal practice. I got it today.

The SBONYC email list members got together today for a practice day. We met at 9am at Orchard Beach in Pelham Park. Patrick brought cut tennis balls and string for markers and Dan brought Lee Park’s Total Control. No one remembered to bring chalk but it didn’t matter. We spent the next three and half hours doing drills: circles, figure-eights, slaloms, entrance and turning and then braking. We started slow and each of us ratcheted up the speed as we completed the drill successfully.

No one crashed, fortunately.

Circles, turns and figure-eights left and right are no problem and I can do those without touching clutch or brake but I need more practice on the tight slalom. It took me five tries to complete the second forty feet of it (turn in left 180, slalom four marks, then turn out) without missing or running over the marks. Out of eight runs I only completed it without faults twice. My arms felt like I had rowed a couple of miles when I was done.

Vince with his VFR managed short, hopping, smoking stops but I managed to post among the shorter stops. My next to last run was my best: I dropped anchor from 50 mph on my speedo at the gate marks, so probably more like 45, and hauled it down inside the third mark- about 38 feet. Evan and Vince hooted and clapped. They said the fork compressed, the front tire looked totally flattened to the rim and the rear drifted a little but I didn’t lock up and got my foot down for a full stop. Dan asked if my model of bike has ABS. Nope, it was just a perfect run. It must have been- 1g of deceleration is 32 feet/second/second so even with all the slop and error it’s possible that I beat that (45mph is 66 fps). Not quite the same as on the street- you don’t get second tries and you don’t know when you’re going to brake- but I’m pleased.

The impulse to do something, anything when faced with bad news and bolster their personal position come election time seems to make the members of both houses of Congress take leave of their senses. Read for yourself if House Bill 10 in PDF or in HTML has anything to scare you in Title II. Sponsored by Rep Hastert, J. Dennis [IL] and cosponsored by 26 others, the huge “9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act” committee document was issued October 4th. The Senate bill S.2845, titled “National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004″ is not much better.

If you’re short on attention span read News.com’s editorial by Declan McCullagh.