tony esporma

• Personal home page: http://home.pacbell.net/esporma

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• February 25, 1999, on Acura NSX Review:

  Nice pictures of the NSX. Which roads did you take up the coast? Did you take Highway 1 from Goleta up to Lompoc, and then up to Santa Maria? As far as those 'stuck up' buffoons that take on the NSX on account of "lack of cachet", "no history". heck they're the same ones buying Bose Acoustimass and listening to CDs in their cheap ass home stereos. I agree with the Bose car system. We have the same in our Acuras and I keep wishing I could stuff my Linn/CJ/ARC stuff into it. Do you think your SoundLabs would fit through the T-Top? As far as the NSX being an expensive Integra: hey, I had a 94 GSR which would really haul, it was fun and dependable and when I sold it -after 90K miles- I got back 65% of my purchase price. I love the NSX, my wife has driven it and loves it too -specially the 5 speed, but circumstances being what they are -California Homes are substantially more expensive than Boston Condos- we will have to be content with the new S2000. Also...

• February 25, 1999, on Communications:

  Ahhhh Don't Pick On Pac Bell: Here in Irvine CA, I get both Pac Bell ISDN with a Motorola modem and I pay only $29 /month. The pacbell.net ISP is an additional 30 /month. We also have -ahhh not only do we have good weather here in Southern Cal!- Cox Cable Modems. They work wonderfully. It's about $45.00 including the $15 rental for the modem. It also includes the @home.com ISP service. To solve the problem of ARP'ing, I shielded my home LAN by using two older 486 PC running win 95 routing shareware from sygate. One firewall runs two ethernet cards and the other one talks to the ISDN modem via a fast serial port. The ISP providers don't know about my LAN at all. In the next few months, Pac Bell will provision my area with ADSL at something like $60.00/month for the ~360K download service -not as good as the cable, but it provides two POTS and it's very nice to have redundant access and extra phone lines. On the installation side.. HAHAHAHA! I had my ISDN li...

• February 25, 1999, on Welfare Reform:

  I agree with Phil. The cost of managing welfare and many other government programs is absurd. As and example, Car and Driver once calculated that it would be cheaper for society to give a new car to every poor person who couldn't fix their smog polluting old car than it was to manage the complex smog controls that all of us are paying for and that the government is managing. I would somehow like to link the 'giveaways' with some electronic crosschecking that verified your income. For example, you wipped out your debit card and it would go up to an account maintained by your bank or some other entity. If you were truly needy, it would transfer limits up to some predetermined value from a public account. If we could work out the issue of privacy, this would solve the freeloader problem and would also reduce the stigma of being on public assistance. This system could also be used to pay for rent, etc... There'd would be some limits, ie: no premium cable, no condo in Bost...

• February 25, 1999, on Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists:

  The three best things I ever did in my life (besides the wife and kids) a) Did not pursue a PhD in Geophysics in '81 b) Quit working as an employee in '85 and started working as a contractor (software dev.) c) Bought Cisco stock early in the 90s. Yep. Maybe when I hit that bit $3E+6 I'll go back and get a PhD in Computer Science doing internetworking, but believe, research doesn't pay worth a damn. I worked as a contractor at JPL a while back, and while it was a fun job, the pay sucked big time -even for a contractor. I even worked with a number of MIT AI guys. Sharp, funny and damn broke. PHDs are most definitely not Yuppy material. Tony