March 11th, 2020 to me, felt a lot September 11th. Thousands of people didn’t die in one fell swoop, but it was when Coronavirus shifted from concern to cancellation. What once seemed far away was at our doorstep. A grim reaper coming that would rack up a worldwide death toll two orders of magnitude greater than September 11th.
As trivial as it sounds, WGI was cancelled on March 11th. With units traveling to Ohio from several countries (including Japan) and all over the US, it made sense to cancel it. Should we all be sitting in close quarters in a poorly ventilated arena? Probably not. Sites like is it canceled yet? had been tracking canceled events, and this was just another notch on the bedpost.
Maybe I could still enjoy some local live music? I had tickets for the orchestra that Friday, March 13th. It was to be canceled too, but not entirely. The orchestra would play – without a hall audience, and they would broadcast it on Minnesota Public Radio. The repertoire? Shostakovich’s 7th – The Leningrad Symphony.
Music is one of those things that gives people hope that there will be better days, no matter how bad things get. Shostakovich’s 7th was no stranger to tough times, having been both composed and premiered under dire circumstances.
Connection to Drum Corps
My love of classical music was reinforced through my 4 years marching in the Phantom Regiment Drum & Bugle Corps. I loved playing music that was new (to me), then researching a composer’s other works. I relished finding great recordings, which would further fuel my curiosity.
The obvious connection from Shostakovich’s 7th to my corps, is their 2002 program entitled Heroic Sketches – but long before that program ever took the field, I heard a piece that begged to be performed by a strong hornline. One that wound up being a cornerstone of 2002 show…
Back in the day…
The 1996 Phantom Regiment show Defiant Heart opened with a different piece by Shostakovich called the 4th Ballet Suite. As always, I would find recordings of the music we were playing to hear the original, and to hopefully hear something new.
I bought a recording of the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Jarvi on the Chandos Label. It also included Symphony No. 10 – boy was I in for a surprise. I had never heard that Symphony, let alone the second movement Allegro, and it is a thrilling performance.
One of my favorite things about classical compact disc recordings (if they’re included) is the liner notes. Sometimes they have a history of the composer and the piece, and I would often use that as a basis for more research, or just to simply help paint a picture of what the music was about. From this CD the liner notes read:
The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin
And here is the Phantom Regiment hornline playing an excerpt during their finals warm-up in 2002:
Simply amazing.
Symphony No. 7
That same 2002 program closes out with Shostakovich’s 7th. While researching that piece in 2020 during quarantine, I came across this recording which is stupendous.
I don’t have the CD liner notes to reference, but the comments on the YouTube video are worth reading. This one is my favorite of the bunch. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I choose to believe it is.
The story goes, Leonard Bernstein was in failing health and he knew he was never going to stand in front of the Chicago Symphony ever again. Apparently there has been a long standing tradition of never encouraging the brass section of the CSO; not even looking at them or else they’ll blow you off the stage. During the end of this concert, and being a helpless romantic himself, good ol’ Lenny not only looked at the Chicago Brass, but he asked for everything they had. And the rest is history!
There are severalgreat resources out there for setting up a gaming server on Microsoft Azure. This one is specifically for VirtualRC the R/C racing simulator.
If you want to host a race and participate in the race itself, you’ll need two VRC accounts (and possibly paid subscriptions): one for you and one for the race host. You can host a race with a free VRC account, but you’ll be limited to the free tracks and cars – that’s OK too – you’ll surely get a lot of people joining your server if you’re hosting races on the free-to-play tracks.
But if you want the most flexibility and variety, you’ll need to have the full all-inclusive subscription on your VRC account(s).
Continue reading →
With all the other news of the global Coronavirus pandemic, police killings, and riots, I want to take a moment to make sure a important local story doesn’t get lost.
It was recently brought to my attention that Duron Jr. has died. This apparently happened at the end of April, but I just found about it last week. This young man was only in the 5th grade when he was struck by an SUV while crossing 61st from Fridley Middle School to the Fridley Community Center.
Next the city took down the (useless) plastic fences and erected bollards on the road to keep cars from passing each other on the shoulder.
I wondered how long they’d be there, and I now know Fridley has bollards as one of the tools in its toolboxes for testing changes without doing anything permanent.
Then throughout 2019 the city took action to apply more treatment to the 61st. Ave. They added a median with a pedestrian refuge to give pedestrians a little more priority at the intersection.
There is now a marked bike lane on both shoulders as parking was never allowed there previously. And there’s double white-striped paint to reinforce that passing is not allowed.
61st is a city-owned street. No county or state policies or politics stand in the way of making the street safe for everyone. I’m glad they took what was relatively swift action for a government agency.
But why do we wait until someone is struck by a vehicle – so severely that they risk death – to take action?
As car-loving Americans, we tend to have this have our cake and eat it too mentality when it comes to roads. Do we want safety? Yeah, sure, but dammit I’ll bitch to the mayor if I had to wait a minute longer in my car while dropping my kid off at school.
This last part is an unknown – I don’t know what the answer is right now, but I intend to find out. Sadly almost all of our government agencies, from city to federal, aren’t set up to proactively address problems in our built environment until somebody dies.
Will the crash that ended Duron’s life be recorded as a fatality? He sustained his injuries for over two years. But undoubtedly he would still be a thriving young student if he wasn’t struck that day.
Most of the chatter about this video is positive, but the first and last comments in this screenshot are what I want to talk about:
I get mad when I hear things like “just what we need – another class” or that something is too juvenile for them to have fun. No matter how you cut it, RC racing at its core is toy cars. Yes they’re expensive, configurable, luxury toy cars. But they’re still toy cars as much as a $400 magnesium yo-yo is still a skill toy.
Let’s look at the reality and see if can’t all get along or at least agree to disagree without starting a flame-war
For phones I have a Linksys RTP300 analog telephone adapter (ATA) that I purchased at a local thrift store. It’s a discontinued product, but they’re easy to find for cheap on eBay.
Since I did this years ago, some of the instructions and firmware files are getting hard to find, but if you need instructions – let me know in the comments and I’ll try to help as best I can.
Getting into the RTP-300 admin panel
It had been at least a year since I’ve logged into the admin interface on my RTP-300. Luckily, there are some fun things you can do to help figure out how to get in. If you have a phone hooked up to it and it’s powered on, you can use the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to get information. This article from Cisco (who purchased Linksys) has many of the available codes.
Pick up the phone and dial #### to get into the IVR menu. Then press 110# and the nice lady will read back to you the IP of your ATA.
Good info, but it wasn’t running the web interface on port 80, so I had to figure that out. The IVR option for port wasn’t working, so I did an nmap scan of all ports 1-65535 from the command line – you could use the raspberry pi or any other computer on the same network as your RTP-300:
$ nmap 172.16.0.11 -Pn Starting Nmap 7.60 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2020-04-04 18:02 CDT Nmap scan report for voip.lan (172.16.0.11) Host is up (0.0048s latency). Not shown: 999 filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 8080/tcp open http-proxy
There it is, port 8080. I made sure to add the address (with port) in my password manager. Then I had to use Firefox to finally connect to the ATA admin because Chrome wouldn’t complete the connection – likely because the RTP300 doesn’t have support for HTTPS. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
But we’re in! We’ll first do some configuration in Asterisk and then come back to the RTP300 configuration.
Once you’re logged in to the IncrediblePBX/Asterisk web admin, navigate to Extensions (under Applications).
There you can see there are a few extensions pre-configured for you, including 701 & 702, which will work great with the RTP-300.
Click the Edit button to the right (paper/pencil icon) to edit and view more information about that extension. You’ll need to do two things in here. First, copy the “Secret” key for each extension.
Second, for extension 702, also change the SIP port to 5061. There’s a note in there about how 5061 is sometimes used for “Line 2” on ATAs – and that’s exactly the case for the RTP-300.
RTP-300 Admin Navigation
The RTP-300 admin interface is little weird. Once you’re logged in you’ll want to navigate to the voice menu item on the far right.
Click the “Admin Login” link to switch from an informational view to one where we can actually make changes. Then click “switch to advanced view”.
Advanced view will show all of the extensions and settings.
RTP-300 Extension Configuration for IncrediblePBX
Configuring phone lines 1 & 2 is fairly simple despite the overwhelming number of settings fields on the admin. We just need to enter three values:
The IP address or domain name of our IncrediblePBX server as the SIP “Proxy” This is the SIP server the ATA is going to register this line with.
The Incredible PBX extension number as the “User ID”
The extension secret as the “Password”
Test!
Once you have these settings saved, the ATA should now register itself with Asterisk on your IncrediblePBX system. The best way to know if it worked is to pick up the receiver one of your lines – you should hear a dial tone 📞
If you’ve got a dial-tone and a phone on each port, you should be able to dial each extension with 701# or 702#. The # isn’t strictly necessary, it just instructs the ATA that you’re done dialing so it can stop waiting for further input. If you’re feeling fancy you could add a 70X entry to the dialplan on the line configuration of the ATA.
If that’s working, try one of the pre-configured Nerdvittles custom extensions. You can see them in the IncrediblePBX/Asterisk web admin by going to “Admin” and “Custom Extensions.”
Try 947# for weather by zip code ⛈️ or 951# for the latest news 📰
