Monday, August 30, 2004
The witch being TenEight.com. TenEight was a web site, forum, online apparel shop, and internet radio show I ran for law enforcement. It was up for 2 and a half years, had 300 or so users, and was dying out. No one had made a post in a month. Why? Well, any forum requires input from its operators to keep it going through the dry spells. I found I really didn’t have time to spend on that input and what time I spent I felt I could have used doing other things that are just as if not more important to me. So, away it went, with an abrupt jerk of the life-support plug. The webspace was transferred to a new domain, 5100bac.net, to house my web pages and my roommates’. I’m probably spending too much time as it is shuffling everything over and re-arranging it.
I’m on (wait, it’s after midnight) day 3 of my 4 days off. I managed to get the bulk of my weekend chores (clean the house, take care of the yard) done so I can spend the remainder on this site and on the throw-phone I’m supposed to build for work. What’s a throw-phone? It’s one of those closed-loop telephones that you can toss into a room where someone’s taken a hostage, so the negotiators can talk to the bad guy. Can’t be intercepted, controlled completely by the negotiator, and commercial models cost $2500 and up. I’ve been given $1000 in grant money to build one, and I’m wondering what I’ve gotten myself into. It’s a simple circuit, but there’s a long road from diagram to working model. It remains to be seen if I’ve wasted the grant money or not.