UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

So, the UCI Alumni Association has sent out emails informing people of the opposition to Prop. 92 by the UC Regents, among others.
While the Regents may have a point, they undermine their own position by not cleaning up the wasteful spending at UC campuses.
A case in point is right here at UCI: instead of firing incompetent people like Bill Zeller and Kevin Ansel, they are "promoted away", and continue to get pretty good salaries.
If the Regents were really serious about the funding crisis, they would get such people fired, in particular since they have done considerable harm to the university's reputation.
Until then, the Regents' opposition to Prop. 92 is rather hollow. UC's funding crisis can't be all that bad if UC can keep demonstrably incompetent people employed...
Although one regent apparently has recognized that there is a lot of waste within UC, the whole UC governing body doesn't seem to want to act on that. Given that, they need to clean up their house first before they have any standing opposing Prop. 92.

As usual, Illiad from User Friendly brings it to the point:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080203

'nuff said.

It seems the disappointment over CCA is growing in the community of university network administrators.
From a post to a mailing list that discusses CCA administration (the official name of CCA is Cisco NAC):

The history of issues on this list has convinced us of the wisdom of our laziness, to wit:

1) We're still running 3.5.11
2) We never required use of the agent

And I'm actively researching alternatives to Cisco NAC, based on the Mac agent issues, and all the general sluggishness of response shown by Cisco to issues mentioned on this list.

We're pretty early adopters of many things, but recent history of this product hasn't been very inspirational.

I think this speaks for itself. In particularly #2, which we had always asked Resnet to do.
If only UCI Resnet personnel was as clueful as this network admin. But Resnet got suckered into CCA, hook, line and sinker. And they don't want to admit that they made a mistake (or maybe they just don't want me to be able to say "I told you so"...)

For years, I had the BBC News ticker running on my laptop. This got me real news, not the crap that goes under "news" in the US...
Unfortunately, the BBC hadn't updated the ticker for years, and it didn't work all that well on XP.
I finally found the time to look around for a replacement. It turns out that the BBC offers a new ticker, as part of their BBC News Desktop Alert system. That works quite well.
I also found a Linux implementation of the BBC ticker. That solves my other main complaint about the news ticker, the lack of a Linux version.

Update: The BBC has discontinued the desktop ticker. With the focus on smartphones nowadays, there probably was no demand for it anymore.

News outlets all over the place (e.g., here) report that the FCC has banned Cable TV lock-ins such as the one at UCI, where Resnet has contracted with one of the worst providers, Campus Televideo, which prevents residents from getting decent, popular channels like ESPN.
This ban on exclusive contracts by the FCC should force Resnet to allow other cable providers in on-campus housing.

This blog actually was started because I was forced, against previous assurances, to cancel my existing Cox cable service and go with Campus Televideo, which is pretty much just the most basic cable service, without ESPN, which doesn't provide premium channels (except HBO for an outrageous price), and doesn't provide digital channels. So, if Resnet had allowed me to keep my previous cable service, they probably could have avoided all the negative exposure they had through this blog.
But well, Mr. Ansel, who pushed the Campus Televideo deal, wasn't interested in listening to lowly graduate students... What else to expect from somebody who lied to my face...
Anyway, they now have to listen to the FCC ;-)