billso.com

According to an announcement posted a few minutes ago on the university’s intranet and on the wireless notification system, classes will be held on the downtown campus today, Wednesday, 5 December 2007.An email announcement was sent out a few minutes later at 8:05 am.

I plan on working in my university office today as usual.

Classes are cancelled today at the Hawaii Loa Campus.

I’m reporting these announcements as a courtesy. I’m not an official news source, of course. The university sends announcements to local radio and TV stations, as well as the campus intranet.

Our recent windy weather has shut down many of the public schools on Oahu, according to this report in the Honolulu Advertiser. The Pali Highway is closed townbound.

According to Erika Engle in this morning’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin, KM Communications has received some interesting news from the Federal Communications Commission.

The commission assigns call letters for all radio and television stations in the United States, and has given KM’s new TV station on Maui the rather unfortunate call letters (I had to edit this because at least one ISP was blocking this post.)

Families can learn a lot from television

KM also received KWTF for a new station in Arizona.

The company’s management is shocked, absolutely shocked, about this development, and has asked the FCC to change the letters for both stations:

From Skokie, Ill., comes a sincere apology “to anyone that was offended,” said Kevin Bae, vice president of KM Communications Inc., who requested and received It is “extremely embarrassing for me and my company and we will file to change those call letters immediately.”

Back in 2005, an FM radio station in Aspen, Colorado got permission to use KCUF.

Read it backwards, people… the station claims it means “Keeping Colorado Uniquely Free”. Yeah, right!

UPDATED on 27 July 207 at 11 am HST. See also:

• TVsquad.com
• In Media Res
• MSN TV Blog
• The Sniper
• Technorati.com

As I predicted on June 11, DirecTV will offer WiMax.

Clearwire has agreed to cooperate with two satellite television providers in the US. DirecTV and EchoStar will sell Clearwire WiMax Internet connections to customers.

Clearwire will also get to sell video services from EchoStar and DirectTV to its customer base. Reuters has a few more details here.

This agreement helps all three companies compete with AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, and other telcos that are developing all-in-one service offerings for the consumer market.

Here are two posts from Boing Boing and an article from Newsweek that describe what may happen n May 15 if the US Congress doesn’t act soon.

The short story: the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) wants to collect royalties for every recorded song played on Internet radio stations. The old rates were calculated on each Internet station’s revenue if the station was a small operation.

The new royalty rates are on a per-song, per-listener basis, and are high enough to drive most of the small and independent Internet radio sites out of business on May 15. On that day, stations will be retroactively charged for the royalties owed since January 1, 2006.

Approximately 72 million Americans listen to an internet radio station each month.

One of my recent IS 6100 assignments addressed the Global Positioning System (GPS). Randolph Schmid of the AP reports that the system’s stability is threatened by powerful solar flares that are due to hit the earth sometime before 2011.

Recent findings indicate that the flares emit 10 times more radio frequency interference (RFI) than expected. The GPS satellites cannot broadcast a signal strong enough to overcome this static, and most civilian GPS receivers can’t filter out the solar noise.
The article also examines how IT has become dependent on GPS for a variety of tasks that have nothing to do with mapping, driving or transportation. Banks use the GPS atomic clocks to synchronize money transfers, for example.
In the end, the US government will have to replace the GPS satellites with stronger models, or tell users to buy new GPS equipment and antennas. My guess is that the latter plan will be suggested, unless the Department of Defense decides that GPS signal strength is a national defense priority.