Day of the Dead, Part 2

    The Monument to the Heroes of Cavite and Santiago de Cuba is a sculptural group commemorating the Spaniards who died in the Spanish-American War. It is situated in the port city of Cartagena, Spain. It was created in 1923 by the sculptor Julio González-Pola. Seem the statues were originally done in stone and later redone in bronze.
    Cavite and Santiago de Cuba are cities where Spain fought battles during the Spanish-American War. Santiago de Cuba is where the battle of San Juan Hill happened on July 1, 1898. Cavite is on Manila Bay in the Philippines and is where the Filipino revolt against Spanish rule started.  The American Asiatic Squadron engaged and destroyed the Spanish Pacific Squadron there.

Based on stuff I extracted from Wikipedia.  I would have thought stone would be the more enduring material, or maybe this sculpture is something completely different than the original.

Banksy <3's New York

Banksy might be a vegetarian, but I'm not. I am not sure if he is pushing a be-kind-to-animals agenda or just trying to be funny. I think it's funny, but then I'm a hard hearted grump. See his grafitti about grumpy people. It's very true. Via Roberta X.

The Ocean Corporation

Iowa Andy forwarded me an email from this outfit. Seems my nephew is contemplating becoming a commercial diver. The Ocean Corporation offers courses in diving and non-destructive testing. A few bits in that email stuck out:

Oil and Gas Pipelines in the Lower 48 States

Active Gulf of Mexico Offshore Oil & Gas Platforms

90% of commercial diving hours are billed in the Gulf of Mexico. In the United States alone, there are over

• 190,000 miles of pipelines
• 597,961 Bridges
• 149 Oil Refineries
• 104 Nuclear Power Plants
• 300,000 commercial and military aircraft.

January 2018 cleaned up some ugly html.

WW 2 Economics

Professor Jim Lacey at the Soldiers', Sailors', Marines', 

Coast Guard and Airmen’s Club in New York City.

Iowa Andy, who may not be in Iowa anymore, reports:

Just watched a humorous C-SPAN history program. an author who had written a book about the USA economics of World War II. What was funny, his New York City audience were 90-year-old economic wonks, a very argumentative group, questioning sources, who said what when, when shipyard contracts were initiated/cancelled,  how Germany had production but whose logistics were destroyed,  how Japan ran out of planes & pilots through bad economic planning.  Then assailing the podium & speaker after the mics were turned off.  I liked the appearance of a stooped bald pated rabble rouser with his baggy black & white checked shirt, 2 foot scraggly red beard.

Ah war, how invigorating!

Don't really know where he is today. Man jets around the country like he's playing hop scotch. The video is an hour and a half long. Somebody has a longer attention span than I do.

Day of the Dead

Or All Saints Day, yesterday in Wroclaw, Poland.

I always thought that Wroclaw was just somebody's funny idea of how to spell Warsaw, until today when Smok claims that Wroclaw used to be a German city. I'm pretty sure Warsaw is, was and always has been Polish, so I check and it seems that they are not the same place. Huh.

Deus ex Machina Temple of Enthusiasm

Honda S90 Cafe Racer by The Deus Ex Machina Temple of Enthusiasm in Bali

Via Return of the Cafe Racers.

How to email a text message to a cell phone.

My next virtual ninja-assassin girlfriend.
My kids all make extensive use of the text service on their cell phones, so much so that we pay the $10 a month per phone for unlimited use. Sending a text also seems to be a more reliable method of contacting them. No one ever seems to answer their cell phone, but somehow text messages manage to get through. A while back I figured out how to send a text message to a cell phone using email. To do this you need two pieces of information: the phone number and the domain name of their carrier. It used to be that simply having the phone number would be enough to identify the carrier, but then portability came along, so that is no longer a sure fire method. There are services available that will identify the current carrier right now, but all the ones I have found so far seem to be geared to high volume customers, i.e. $12 a month and six cents per inquiry. I just want one, and no I'm not going to pay anything for this piece of information. I mean I could just ask my daughter who she signed up with, but that would be cheating if I'm writing a how-to article.

Search Bug will look up a phone number for you and tell you who the carrier is with this caveat: 

The phone type and carrier identified above are only correct if the number was never transfered, sold, ported or changed. Shown information represents original phone number assignment. Therefore, the above report may not be accurate as of today.

I looked up a number and got back this piece of information: 

Carrier* (not verified):

T MOBILE (OCN: 6529)

T MOBILE, I know who that is, but what's this OCN stuff? Wikipedia answers that one:

OCN - Operating company number, in telephony, a code assigned by the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA) to telecommunications carriers (including landline, wireless carriers, and resellers of various types). Also known as a «NECA Company Code».

Well, I'm sure that's very interesting, but it's useless as far as what we are trying to do. Let's move on. Now we know the carrier we need the domain name. On email text messages I found this

T-Mobile

• 10digitphonenumber@tmomail.net

So now I create a new contact, call it daughter Text. I combine her phone number with the T-mobile suffix tmomail.net and store it as her email address. Creating a new contact is the only way I found that I could reliably send text messages to a list of cell phone users. If I just add this address as another email address to an existing contact, there doesn't seem to be anyway to tell Gmail which address to use.

     If you have read this far you might be wondering why I needed to look up my daughter's carrier if I'm paying her text messaging bill. Well, she's gotten independent and bought herself a smart phone. I'll pay the fee for texting, but I'm not going to pay the $50 or whatever it is that Verizon charges for a smart phone data pack. She wasn't impressed by Verizon's prices either, so she shopped around and picked T-Mobile.

Update: Got a confirmation by return text, but the domain was now brightspotmobile.net and the phone number had a 1 in front of it.