Expired phone numbers on the National Do Not Call registry?

I was cleaning up my computer files (something I try to do every once in a while, but almost never fully succeed at) and came across the saved notice from 8/4/2003 where I registered my home phone with the National Do Not Call registry. In the notice, it clearly says that my registration will expire in 8/5/2008, and it identifies my home phone number.

So I went to National Do Not Call registry site, and there is a blurb at the top of the page that says due to a 2007 law that went into effect in February 2008, registrations won't expire.

Your registration will not expire.
Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008. Read more about it at
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/04/dncfyi.shtm.

So I thought to double-check and Verify my registration with the link on the left side. However, the verification confirmed that my phone number was actually not registered.

Is there some problem with the database? Or perhaps only phone numbers registered after the law went into effect will be permanent?

Finally got my wife to use a blog

So my wife likes to write. She has a dream of teaching and helping people on their spiritual journey. She's been wanting to create a web site for some time. She finally started generating some content, so I helped her get started with a blog using WordPress. Check out what she's up to over at her Spirituality and Life blog

Firework Photography

After working around the house for several days, trying to get projects completed and mostly trying to sort through stuff we no longer need (tranlation moving piles of junk around) we decided to go visit our friends Hannah and Spencer. I took my camera along and gave a go at some firework photography. Some of these turned out pretty cool.

A couple of tricks I tried include:

• Auto-focus late at night can be a real problem. Try to auto-focus when there was a firework going off, and then switch to manual mode after it is set.


• To help the focus, use a large f-stop such as f22 in order to get a better depth of field


• Try a long exposure, and manually cover the lens when a particular firework is done. This allows blocking much of the excess light for a darker background. Although the appearance of fireworks over a well lit background can be pretty interesting too.


• Oh yea... Use a tripod

Judge for yourself

Outsourced IT cluelessness

A guy I know works for a large fortune 500 company, that outsources their IT. The IT guys decided on the day before a holliday to do the next step in outsourcing for their business unit and move DHCP off to the central server. Yet they didn't provide any notice to the development group there, about when it was happening, and of course several things broke, including all access to the cvs repository which had origainlly been set up without an FQDN.

The big peve is that they did this right before a holiday weekend, without notice. Only by chance was this guy there, and able to help resolve the problem, otherwise several people would have been impacted for some time.

Checking out Google Gadgets

I just discovered Google Gadgets. These are pretty cool. It allows you to embed on a web page gadgets like you would see on the iGoogle.com page. They are very similar to portlets on many portal sites, except that they do not need to go on a portal, but can be embedded in any web page.

Here you can see the weather in Bothell, Washington

Engineering Week - Lays an Egg?

So this was Engineering Week where I work. It is a week to focus on the success and people in Engineering. In addition to handing out several awards for invention disclosures, and project accomplishments, we had an Egg Drop contest.

The objective was to see how high you could drop an egg from and not break it. You had 6 straws, 6 paper clips, 6 3x5 cards, and 6 rubber bands and a standard 8.5x11 piece of paper to use.

My entry, dubbed the Deffective Satellite in honor of the deffective spy satellite just shot down yesterday, broke on the first drop. It was in good company.

Stop Motion - video

My son and I took down the Christmas tree yesterday, and of course after the tree was down, we realized it would be a great opportunity to try a stop-motion movie. So we used the cleanup part as a way to make the movie.

Took around 150 shots for about 40 seconds of video. We used Windows Movie Maker to pull together the shots into a movie. It lets you go down to .125 seconds per image. However at that rate, it was smoother, but way too fast. We would have spent twice as long taking photos to get this to work, so we expanded it to .25 seconds per image.

We only needed to toss about 6 shots out of the whole mess that had one of us still in the frame when we fired the camera.

It was also a great chance to try out my new remote for my Canon XTi. That turned out to be very handy for this sort of thing.

I ran into problems importing the audio as MP3 this time round with Windows Movie Maker. It would crash the application. I converted the audio to WMA and it seemed to solve the issue. I did not have this problem in the past, so suspect some other application I have added regarding multi-media has broken that within Windows Movie Maker...

btw - I have tried to do time-stop animations in Roxio's Videowave, however I can't get the images to have less than .33 seconds duration so you can't get very smooth operation.

Cheers!