Diamond Dave’s Blog

at&t/SBC/Pacific Bell will be cancelling the Time of Day recording (Socal 853-1212, Nocal 767-2676 aka POP-CORN). It will be discontinued as of September2007. They claim that the machine is very old (it is an ancient Audichron) and difficult to maintain (I’m sure you can’t get parts for it anymore). Also, they claim that there are other sources of time (this is true, but I still like something to set my watch to) so they want to cancel the service. I’m recording it for posterity sake, so hopefully we can preserve it as much as possible. I’ll record segments of it and use a free piece of software to play back the samples.

Here are a couple of links to news articles talking about it: Sacramento and Los Angeles newspapers. Thank goodness I had a chance to dial it when I was out in San Diego. Clear as ever, sad it will be gone.

I’m out in San Diego for a conference this week. Overall the town is pretty nice, but the traffic sucks. In DC, the freeways are nuts. Here, its the city traffic that’s a zoo. The people tailgate because they’re impatient (don’t blame them really). Some people drive too slow, others too fast. It doesn’t help that the rental car place where I got my car sucks. Very slow and the cars don’t work right. The steering wheel wobbles when you drive arond 50 MPH, and I had to put air in the tires yesterday (the car has one of those tire pressure sensors and it said the air pressure was low).

I went to the first day of the three day conference yesterday. Being backed up on the Coronado bridge was NOT fun! I’m not a huge fan of heights and being up on that high bridge for that long was not what I wanted to do. Traffic on that small island is a zoo. Two Naval bases on there and a tourist trap in the middle. Not my ideal place to either work OR vacation! And to top it off, the conference was held in an old run down movie theater with NO air conditioning! SD is having a heat wave (normally it never gets into the 80s here) and it was HOT in that place! Fans? Yeah right, they’re broken! Ugh.. Yesterday it was death by Powerpoint. Today is when the real work begins.

I bought a new digital camera a couple of days ago. The greater half purchased the spare battery and memory card for my birthday, while I paid for the camera and (gasp!) the extended service plan for it. The camera is a Canon Rebel XTi (aka the Canon 400D). It is a very good camera, still trying to figure it out. I’ll be taking it with me to San Diego tomorrow (yet another business trip!).

I found out this morning that Joybubbles (born Joe Engressia) had passed away on August 7th of an apparent heart attack. Supposedly some of his blind friends had been trying to get in touch with him and were unable to and contacted the apartment management and found that he had indeed passed away.

I won’t go into details about him, read the Wikipedia article on him if you’re so interested.

Joybubbles was more of a “friend of a friend” but we had spoken a couple of times in the past. Probably the last time I talked to him was about a year or so ago, discussing the various kinds of telephone switches that we were familiar with an their differences. We also talked back in 2005 post-Katrina discussing the whereabouts of our common friend (Mark) who finally contacted myself and a few others when cell service returned to New Orleans.

There wasn’t an official obituary on him, but I found this article here that seems to be legit. I called his voice line and the voicemail is full, so it appears to be true.

So this year alone three people that I knew in the telephone realm have passed away (Mike Ravis, Stan Cline, and now Joybubbles). Last year Parris Wood passed way. I don’t want to know who may be next. We damn near lost Mark in 2005, hope this is the last of the line of “old schoolers” for a while. I know of some minor health issues with some other of us phone enthusiasts, but nothing really bad… yet!

Rest in Peace Joybubbles. Hopefully you’re met up with “Mr.” Fred Rogers in Heaven by now.

Finally, after a couple of weeks of humidity from hell, today’s weather was half way decent. You can actually go outside without the “brick wall” effect.