In a fit of last-moment planning and improvisation, we’ve decided to attempt to do a live video broadcast of our wedding ceremony from the beach in Kauai, Saturday 9/12/2009, 2pm local time (5pm Pacific, 6pm Mountain, 7pm Central, 8pm Eastern, 9pm Atlantic… and a half hour later in Newfoundland 
).
If you want to check it out, go to the Ustream.tv page for the event.
The video should come up automatically when we start broadcasting.
The odds that we’ll actually pull this off are not great, hence the following disclaimers:
- The ceremony may be delayed in case of rain;
- The video broadcast stream may falter, or halt entirely; in the absence of a reliable Wi-Fi connection I’m doing this by connecting my laptop to the Internet through a tethered 3G data connection on my iPhone; the brief test I did yesterday showed it could work but who knows?
- The camera work will probably be not good (pointing the built-in camera in my laptop without being able to see the screen may prove problematic);
- The audio will probably be even worse (there’s wind, lots and lots of wind);
- Even if everything else works, Ustream.tv has been known to fall on its face for no good reason.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope this works!
The first challenge was getting the car there. The San Jose convention center where the show was held was only a couple miles from my shop where the car is stored, but the car hasn’t been registered for road use in over a year. A couple days before the move I went to the DMV to try to get a temporary moving permit, but unbeknownst to me starting this year the rules for issuing these have tightened, and I wasn’t able to get a permit. That wasn’t a big deal, as towing the car was always an option, but spending 30-45 minutes for loading/unloading, not to mention driving an unwieldy tow rig around downtown SJ, seemed a bit silly for moving an otherwise road-worthy car a couple miles.
We got more winter rains this week, and of course, this being California, it meant that people started crashing left and right again. Every time it rains I get a bit of perverse satisfaction from watching
Death, taxes and stupid CA laws
Written by vtluu on June 9th, 2009As if the California government hasn’t done enough to increase misery and suffering through tax increases and budget cuts, last week they took the initiative to do it in a more direct fashion. The state Senate approved SB 484, a bill that once signed into law would make pseudoephedrine, the only truly effective decongestant component of cold medications, available only as a prescription medication.
The motivation as most people already understand is that pseudoephedrine is a key ingredient in the illegal manufacture of methamphetamines, so measures reducing its availability may discourage people who can’t easily obtain it from making their own drugs.
What many people don’t know about is that pseudoephedrine’s over-the-counter replacement, phenylephrine, simply is not effective taken as a pill or syrup which is how it’s most often packaged. Have you noticed your cold medication hasn’t worked worth a damn lately? Take a close look at the active ingredients list; most drug makers have quietly substituted phenylephrine for pseudoephedrine in their cold remedies.
Moreover, what the law’s proponents have so far overlooked is that addicts and the criminal elements who supply them are highly motivated. Making prescription-only a medication that would remain available over the counter in other states, not to mention more readily and cheaply from, say, Mexico, would have negligible impact on methamphetamine addiction. What the proposed law might instead do is shift the manufacture of meth to areas where pseudoephedrine is more easily obtained like, say, Mexico. (As if the Mexican drug gangs needed any more business and by extension, money and power…)
What the proposed law will certainly do is make effective cold symptom remedies more expensive and less accessible to law-abiding citizens, thereby generally increasing the level of suffering (since the common cold isn’t going away anytime soon)… One might plausibly speculate that there would also be some economic impact due to reduced productivity, with more workers immobilized at any given time by cold symptoms.
The bill is currently before the state assembly; Californians, contact your Assemblymember and let them know that this proposed law is a bad idea that needs to be nipped in the bud.
In the meantime, I’ll be stocking up on pseudoephedrine, just in case the law passes and forces cold-relief-seeking citizens to become drug smugglers.
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