Tag: Internet access

The End Of Open Internet Access?

If you want to view content on geofffox.com or yahoo.com or any website, you assume your Internet provider (probably your cable or phone company) is treating everyone alike. Right now, they probably are.

I wonder how long that will be the case? Maybe not for long. More ‘chatter’ today coming from BellSouth.

There are articles about this access issue on a number of websites, but I like the style and tone of this one from Networking Pipeline.

BellSouth’s new business model, a slightly more polite form of the kind of extortion practiced by Tony Soprano, is starting to pay off. The company says it is in negotiations with several Web sites willing to pay extra fees to BellSouth for more bandwidth than it provides to other sites.

BellSouth says that it shouldn’t have to bear the cost of providing bandwidth for big sites like Google. Instead, the sites should pay for them. But BellSouth ignores an inconvenient fact — it doesn’t bear those costs; its customers do. So BellSouth gets to double-dip.

What BellSouth seems to be saying to content providers is, pay us, or you’ll suffer second class delivery. That’s frightening. Of course BellSouth’s subscribers (who, as was pointed out in the article, already are paying) will be held hostage in all this.

It goes against every principle that’s guided the Internet so far, that Internet providers should be site agnostic.

What does this mean from a practical standpoint? An Internet provider could effectively block the ability to start a new business online or favor their own in-house content versus a competitor’s!

Take rocketboom.com (a great website, with a daily video blog). Rocketboom’s content is very bandwidth intensive. If they had to pay to get to my computer… and pay before there was any chance for revenue… they would have never been born.

Much of what I like about the Internet is my ability to choose what, when and how I will view content. It seems to me, when I pay my ISP (Comcast), I’ve paid for that ability – unfettered. If I pay for 6 Mbps, then it should be my choice how I fill that pipe – not their’s.

I am guessing Google and some other producers of Internet content will chime in on this. It would be tragic is BellSouth’s wish came true.

More From The Placid Pacific

Aboard the Norwegian Star

sunset through and inversionThe Sun has just set. I am sitting on our balcony, but the door to the cabin is open. It is comfortably mild (76&#176)with low humidity. There is not a cloud in the sky – OK one, but that’s it.

Our photographers at work refer to this time of day as ‘golden light.’ I know what they mean, and it’s even more obvious at sea. The setting sun created a brilliant cross between copper and gold on the water’s surface. This glistening area moved as the swells moved.

golden light on the Pacific OceanThere is an inversion – an area above us where temperatures rise with height instead of fall. I can tell because I was able to track the smoke trail from the few other ships I have seen over very long distances. Instead of continuing to rise and mix out, they hold steady at one level – a long tail of smoke.

A ship produces a lot of smoke and it’s 24/7. Of course, you can’t judge this smoke against a single car, bus or truck. Our ship is carrying around 3,000 passengers and crew. The ships passing by are carry enough containers to fill hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks.

On my TV, the readout shows 26&#176 38.47″ N 114&#176 37.58″ W. We are somewhere near the southern end of Baja California, holding a course of 140&#176 at 21.4 knots (24.6 mph).

Or cabin is on the starboard side, so we’re facing west as we head toward Manzanillo. No land is visible.

I do hear some conversations from the deck below from time-to-time and, a few minutes ago, a conversation with raised voices in some Scandinavian language, from the folks next door.

I wanted to play Hold’em and did participate in a tournament this afternoon. I was quickly gone. Unfortunately, the way these tournaments are structured, the blinds (forced bets) are so large as to award luck over skill.

I’ll play again later, with reduced expectations.

Norwegian Star pool areaI explored the ship earlier today. Parts of it represent the modern concept of cruising, like the restaurants, casino, theater and pools.

You’re never far from food, even at the pool. I guess that’s old school.

pool bandThough there are other areas as well, the pool is the main location for getting a tan. Through the day, there is a prototypical cruise band. They haven’t played “Red, Red Wine” yet… but they will. I did hear Gene Chandler’s “Groovy Situation,” played Reggae style. Very strange.

One of my favorite spots is the promenade on Deck 7. On this deck you’re walking below the massive lifeboats. Along the side, all manner of lifesaving equipment.

Emergency escape instructionsI have been reading the instructions for some of the evacuation devices. It’s gonna be pretty awful before I slide down a chute or lower myself in a rope harness with a winch!

Deck 7 reminds me of what sea travel must have been like 50-75 years ago. Even the areas of teak deck seem out of time when contrasted with the rest of the ship.

I’ve spent more time than I’d like uploading blog entries and photos. We’ve got Internet access – but barely.

Email is nearly impossible to get going. My mail server isn’t responding at geofffox.com. The ship’s mail server isn’t much better.

Unless it’s really important, it will just have to wait a week. How 20th Century!

Helaine and Stef have decided we’ll have dinner at Versailles tonight. It is the largest of the dining rooms and has huge windows looking directly at where we’ve been.

This really is the good life.

A Day In Baltimore

I am posting this entry from Los Angeles. It was written before we left Baltimore. More on the screaming baby flight from Hell tomorrow.

If we would have stuck to our original reservations, our flight would have gotten to Baltimore 36 minutes after the Los Angeles plane left!

Now the entry:

baggage cart in our holiday inn roomNo need to rush. I’m writing this from Gate B17 at Baltimore – Washington Airport. It’s nearly 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. Our flight doesn’t leave until well after 6:00 PM.

Our night at the Holiday Inn – BWI was fine, but I have an admission to make. If you work at that hotel, you probably scrambled around, looking for one of those huge baggage carts on wheels.

It was in our room.

It was a conscious decision. We didn’t want to inconvenience anyone else… and we didn’t want to load and unload. OK, it was a selfish decision. Shoot me.

Helaine's shadow puppetActually, our night at the Holiday Inn was just fine, punctuated by Helaine’s discovery that ‘shadow puppets’ could be projected on the wall. She does the world’s best AFLAC duck. Steffie attempted a worm.

We are currently like a band on the run with a series of one night stands. Hartford yesterday, Baltimore today, Los Angeles tomorrow, our cruise ship in the days beyond that. Each city-to-city move is a series of intertwined coordinated actions. We’re getting pretty good at this.

The same driver who brought us to the hotel last night took us to the airport today. He said he remembered us. Tipping works.

At the terminal’s curb I went and got two luggage carts to move our stuff inside. The Skycaps looked with envy. A potentially big customer was rolling by and they weren’t getting any.

Stef and Helaine pushing baggage carts in the BWI rat mazeWe moved into the rat’s maze that leads to the ticket counter and scanned the agents. Who would we get? Who did we want?

We lose.

It didn’t take more than 15 seconds to see Jnacei&#185 didn’t have the normal Southwest spirit. Maybe she was having a bad day? Maybe she wasn’t feeling well. I would pay.

Our three reservations were considered separate. The bags would have to be split among the three tickets.

One of our bags weight 54.4 pounds. Too much. Unbelievably, Helaine and Stef removed exactly 4.4 pounds. It hit the scale at 50.0.

If it would have been 50.1 pounds, I sense we would have been forced to pull more out! This was not a rule bender we were dealing with.

Signatures were needed to ship our soft sided garment bags. That’s a first.

I’m not saying she did anything wrong – because she probably didn’t. It was just a tooth pulling experience all the way around.

Jnacei did lighten up as our time together was drawing to a close. Or maybe she was just taking pleasure in explaining how far it was to our gate and how much additional time we needed to set aside for that journey.

Did I mention – our flight wasn’t for another four plus hours?

Phillips SeafoodSteffie and Helaine were hungry, so we headed to a ‘real’ restaurant, Phillips Seafood. I must admit, though it cost nearly as much as Steffie bat mitzvah, it was very good.

I had lobster bisque and the premium crab cake as a sandwich. When my food was finished, the girls offered me their leftovers. I’m like Mikey in the cereal commercial. Give it to daddy – he’ll eat anything.

So that brings us to B17. Our flight is on the board as delayed, but Victor at the counter across the hall said it was only delayed by eight minutes. It is coming in from Islip, on Long Island, where it rained all day.

Southwest Hartford flight delayedOur original flight from Hartford is also on the board as delayed. I will watch with interest to see if it is in early enough to allow passengers and baggage to move to the Los Angeles flight.

Blogger’s note. Though there is no Internet access, a few moments ago a little balloon popped up on the bottom of the screen saying a wireless access point had been found. When I tried to connect – no Internet. On further inspection, it was someone else’s computer, “Carolyn.” Luckily for Carolyn, I’m not a hacker.

&#185 – I was going to use her real name, and then I realized she might sue me.

Vacation… Again

Here’s something new employees never look at, or think about (and not just where I work, but everywhere). If you stay long enough, you get a lot of vacation! Right now I get four weeks of vacation plus ten additional days for working holidays. That’s six full weeks off.

With that in mind, and Steffie getting six weeks between semesters (Wow – college is better than work!), we’ve decided to take a vacation.

I’ve mentioned my Southwest Airlines credit card before, and it enters into this vacation. With a bunch of free tickets stowed away, air fare was not a problem. Now, where to go?

I’m not quite sure how we got to this point, but a cruise was brought up by one of us and agreed to by all of us.

We’ve been all over the Caribbean, so decided to go elsewhere. We’ll be flying to Los Angeles, spending the night, at a hotel. then boarding our ship, the Norwegian Star, in San Pedro for a trip down the Mexican Coast… or as the cruise lines call it, the Mexican Riviera.

Norwegian Star Intinerary
Day Port Arrive Depart
Wed. Los Angeles – – 6:00pm
Thu. At sea – – – –
Fri. At sea – – – –
Sat. Manzanillo 10:00am 6:00pm
Sun. Puerto Vallarta 7:00am 6:00pm
Mon. Mazatlan 8:00am 6:00pm
Tue. Cabo San Lucas 7:00am 2:00pm
Wed. At sea – – – –
Thu. Los Angeles 9:00am – –

Originally the ship was to go to Acapulco first and slowly head north over eight days. That changed a few weeks ago when a problem showed up on the ship’s propulsion system. It can no longer do 25 knots… only 20. Acapulco is too far.

They say the ship will be fine until it gets dry docked in March. I don’t want to see us cruising behind a tow truck.

At first we were disappointed. Helaine and I went to Acapulco for our honeymoon. As time went on, we were told Acapulco isn’t what it once was (and even when we were there the beach had Federales armed with automatic weapons!).

From Los Angeles we go to Manzanillo, Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas. Mostly I will go with the flow, doing what Helaine and Steffie want to do (i.e. mostly shopping).

In Manzanillo I plan on meeting up with a professor from the Monterrey Institute for a day trip to the Colima Volcano. It is just a plan because the professor hasn’t written back in the last day – we’ll see.

There have been changes to cruising since we last went. The ship has its own cell site – though at $1.99/minute mine will be turned off! There is also Internet access. It is also pricey and slow, but I will be checking email (which is how our voicemail will be delivered too). Having Internet access also means the blog will be fed.

We decided to get a room with a balcony. OK – I decided to get a room with a balcony and then convinced everyone else. This way, if there’s any conflict, the offending party can be thrown overboard without breaking the porthole glass. I think it was a practical decision.

I do have one fear on this trip – weather. The forecast for our departure from Connecticut is rainy with a little frozen stuff mixed in. California, though suffering from awful weather for the last few weeks, should be sunny with temps near 70.

We have never cruised the Pacific. Though Magellan thought it was placid when he named it, it can be anything but! I will be popping Bonine like there’s no tomorrow. I once got seasick while snorkeling! Hopefully the waves will be small.

Is Internet Access About To Change?

Last week I wrote about concerns Internet providers might some day change the unfettered access we currently have. You can understand their worry about providing me a workaround to services they’d like me to buy from them, like local telephone and pay-per-view video.

In the past Helaine and I bought Major League Baseball’s web package. It’s delivered by Comcast on my high speed Internet connection and competes with Comcast’s own video-on-demand service. Comcast is the passive carrier and gets nothing from this sale. My gain is Comcast’s loss – literally.

If you read this article from the Washington Post you can hear toes being stuck in the water. Bell South wants this to change. I’m sure they’re not alone.

Of course it makes sense for providers to try and monetize their service. But my selfish concern is me, not them. I want to be able to decide what I want, when I want it, and then get it with all the speed I’ve paid for.

Unless my ISP is currently holding back (and I don’t think it is), the only way to make some services faster is to throttle back the non-favored while allowing the others free access.

This is a very complex issue, as cable and phone companies watch their core businesses get cannabilized by ‘fat pipes’ they themselves provide!

You haven’t heard the last of this. The fact that it’s in the Washington Post as a news and not tech story, written by a staff writer, says it’s already on the mainstream radar.

Blogger’s note: I own a very small amount of Comcast stock as part of my retirement plan.

The Trouble With Comcast

There was no blog entry yesterday. Grrrrr.

We got home from Philadelphia only to find no high speed Internet access. OK, I thought. We’ve had these sporadic, intermittent problems before. Wait a while and it will return.

Meanwhile, I got on the phone and gave Comcast a call. The guy on the other end was nice, but couldn’t help me. He wanted to arrange a Tuesday appointment for service, but I pled my case, asking him to look at the myriad times I had complained about lost service earlier.

The repairman came around 11:00 this morning.

My little home office is a pig sty and I wasn’t thrilled to invite him up, but Internet service is Internet service. It’s not what it was nearly 20 years ago when I started logging onto Compuserve… at 300 baud.

Having Internet access is as important as having a phone or television set. Without it, in this day and age, you’re cut off from the world’s information.

The technician removed the coax connector from the back of my cable modem. He took the tiny bare wire that usually makes the internal connection and touched it to another bare wire. He frowned.

He went to the splitter. Another touch. Our signal was down by a lot. He’d go outside, where the cable service entered the house, and if that didn’t work he’d go to the basement.

About ten minutes later he was back at my door. He had found a corroded connector on the side of my house. It was a Comcast installed piece of equipment, so I didn’t have to feel guilty.

By the time we got back to my room, the modem lights were on. What had been a 0 db signal was now an 8.5 db signal&#185. He did a little more checking and tightened a few not too loose connections before going.

Hopefully my connection problems are solved. However, I am surprised the ‘innards’ of my cable modem doesn’t report its signal strength back to Comcast so they can head these problems off before failure occurs.

It would seem to me my modem is already capable of this trick. Maybe Comcast is just not asking.

&#185 – db, or decibels, measure power on a logarithmic scale. A 8.5 db loss (which is what seems to have been happening) means about 90% of the cable signal was being lost to corrosion before it got inside my house!

Comcast High Speed Internet Hosed

Steffie called earlier this evening to tell me the “Internet was down.”

There are many possible failure points before leaving our house, but a quick check of some user forums shows the problem was Comcast’s and not limited to Connecticut. There are some angry subscribers out there tonight.

National

General Outage – Resolved at 4/7/2005 6:40:38 PM EDT

(Connection to the Internet is currently unavailable. Our technicians are aware of the situation and are working to resolve the issue. This outage was logged at : 4/1/2005 6:14:00 PM EDT.)

General Outage

(Connection to the Internet is currently unavailable. Our technicians are aware of the situation and are working to resolve the issue. This outage was logged at : 4/7/2005 5:32:00 PM EDT.)

Could that have been written to be any more confusing? I think it means it’s out… it’s still out.

This is related to their DNS servers, the Comcast computers that tell your computers where to find other computers, were down or slowed or otherwise impaired. So, when you type www.geofffox.com, your computer is never told that corresponds to 66.225.220.189. There are rumors, which I can’t confirm, that this is some sort of organized attack on the Comcast DNS to route users to infected websites.

There are some simple fixes for users. I talked the husband of a co-worker through the procedure in about 90 seconds. Hopefully that won’t be necessary too much longer.

Now that Internet access is being used for everything, including phone service, it’s time it became as dependable as a public utility.

Watching the Eagles at the Bar

This is two out of three weeks now. Helaine and I have become ‘regulars’ at Eli’s where the bar is ringed with TV sets showing satellite delivered football feeds.

We decided, so we’d get a good seat, to go at 12:30 for the 1:00 PM start. Maybe we could have gone a little later, but not much. The place filled up pretty quickly with groups of fans clustered near individual sets and games.

To our right a group of Detroit fans watched, cheered, and complained, as the Lions played . When Detroit lost on a botched extra point with a few seconds to go, they were crestfallen. As fans they have lived a life built on heartbreak.

As ways to spend an afternoon go, this is pretty good. Within a few minutes of sitting Helaine ordered a soda and I had some coffee. Then as the game began, so did the food!

Actually, this allows me to question the whole economics of football at a bar. There’s no doubt we got our money’s worth. The food was good. We were thrilled to watch the Eagles. Would it be cheaper over the long run to drop cable and just get DirecTV and the NFL package?

The problem becomes my high speed Internet package. The cable company would ramp up its cost if that was the only service I bought from them – and I’m not about to get my Internet access from anyone else right now.

Something to ponder before next season.

The Eagles’ game was painful to watch. The Eagles went up 6-0 early. The Eagles scored a touchdown but David Akers, who is to kicking as FedEx is to packages, failed to deliver. It was 7-6 a few minutes later, and Dallas stayed ahead most of the way.

One of the Eagles star receivers, Todd Pinkston, dropped another ball in what seemed like a case of hearing footsteps. If, all of a sudden, he’s lost his nerve, that’s troublesome. Then, all star receiver Terrell Owens went down with ankle problems. It’s too early to know how serious that injury is.

Toward the end the Eagles scored to go ahead, and did win. But it was an ugly win for a team that has been a dominating force in football.

Going into this game the Eagles had so little more to gain by winning that a performance like this goes down as a moral loss as much as a “W.”

Next week they’re playing on Monday Night Football. Helaine can watch at home. I will watch at work. We’re out of the bar scene for one week.

The End of the Hobby Era In Computing?

The lead story on Extreme Tech is all about building a computer. Build It: A Speedy PC For $800

I’m certainly not adverse to building a computer. The PC this is being typed on was assembled right here on my office floor from parts I specified. It does everything I designed it to do (though it has incredibly noisy fans to remove its internal heat, and I wish I would have designed that out). And, as a bonus, it actually worked when I plugged it in!

The question is why build… and even if you want to, how much longer will that be possible?

My computer was built to edit video. To that end, I threw in the ATI All-In-Wonder 8500DV video card (on which the DV “Firewire” connection never did work) and a Soyo motherboard with built-in RAID (two disk drives act as one for the faster service necessary for video). The on-board audio conflicts with the video card, meaning I then had to go get another audio card.

It was a great learning experience, but today you can buy machines off the shelf that do the same thing. And, increases in processor speed cover a variety of sins. So a machine not totally optimized for video will still do fine because everything else is so much faster and the disk drives are so much larger.

As I was passing by Home Shopping Network earlier today, they were selling a Gateway PC (I am not a fan of any particular brand. All major computer manufactures are just putting together other people’s parts.) with 17″ monitor and printer for under $1200. The CPU on their machine is better than twice as fast as mine! If you’re interested, here are the specs.

It’s tough to build when a speedy machine, pre-assembled, sells for a price like that.

For hobbyists, like me, there will always be the allure of building the ‘perfect’ screaming machine. But, I suspect within the next few years that won’t be possible either.

I remember in high school, a friend of mine bough a Model “A” Ford and restored it to running condition by hand. What he couldn’t get, he modified. Now, there’s hardly anything on a car you can fix or modify on your own.

Computers are going in that same direction. There are a number of reasons, but the most significant seems to be intellectual property rights. My computer is capable of copying DVDs… even copy protected DVDs. I can do all sorts of other things that upsets other rights holders too!

Just as printer manufacturers have added chips to try and thwart aftermarket ink cartridge manufacturers, PCs will be ‘smarter’ (really more restrictive) in what they let you do. The quaint concept of ‘fair use’ will go out the window, because manufacturers now understand how easily their hard work is ripped off.

Will future versions of Windows be built so it only works with ‘trusted’ hardware and software that can be more closely controlled? My opinion is, yes. Sure, a computer could be run on Linux or some yet-to-be-designed operating system, but that would deprive you of much of what’s available today.

I’m not sure where the ‘sweet spot’ is, balancing the rights of those who produce with the rights of those who use. I suspect that PC’s wouldn’t be where they are today… capable of doing what they do… if the restrictions to come had existed earlier.

Continue reading “The End of the Hobby Era In Computing?”

New York City Trip Report – Day 3

Click here, or on any photo to see my album of photos from this trip.

Lots to talk about as we finish our three days in New York. But, before we get to the day, a little housekeeping.

First, there’s the question of Internet access. The Millennium Broadway doesn’t have high speed access. In this day and age, that’s inexcusable. I knew it coming in. The location was our most pressing concern. Still…

The first night, I used dial up and got a fairly decent speed. I haven’t used dial up regularly in a long time. I don’t want to get used to it again.

The Sony Vaio laptop I brought along had a WiFi 802.11b card in the PCMCIA slot, so I tried to see if it would find anything. Zip from the desk. I moved the laptop to my lap and sat by the window. With all the buildings surrounding our hotel you’d think there would be some activity… and there was.

Using Netstumbler, I started looking at what I was hearing. First, most of the activity is concentrated on channel 6, which is in the middle of the band and probably the default for most access points. It was for mine (though I’ve since moved it).

Much of the traffic is WEP encrypted. That’s smart. There was a cluster of encrypted AP’s, all with ID’s that made me think they were owned by Bertelsmann Music Group. There were other encrypted transmitters and, a few that were open and in the clear. They just weren’t very strong.

Thursday evening, I was able to send and receive my mail using an AP that identified itself as Apple and then a cryptic series of digits. Probably an Apple AirPort. I sent myself an email through that AP to see the actual IP address. It was routed using road Runner, which is the time Warner cable modem service.

When the weather turned rainy on Friday, I was no longer able to connect to Apple or any other in the clear AP’s.

Over time, we grew to dislike our little room. It never really seemed clean and had some stains in strange places that weren’t right. The bathroom floor always seemed dull, even after the maid had visited.

I still don’t know how a hotel becomes 4-star. Is it self assigned?

Finally, I made an interesting discovery, looking at our window on that rainy Friday morning. There were weeds and moss growing on the top of an air conditioner unit. I am unsure if this unit is associated with the hotel or an adjacent building.

Now, with all this said, it’s on to Friday. It was a rainy day – the antithesis of Thanksgiving. Thank heavens the parade was yesterday!

Helaine and Steffie wanted to do some shopping and go to lunch before we headed back to Connecticut. We left the hotel and headed toward Macy’s. Being a good weather oriented family, we were prepared with the proper outerwear.

Macy’s isn’t too long of a walk, so we headed out to Broadway and then downtown, toward 34th Street. As you leave Times Square, Broadway is a monotonous series of cereal box office buildings with first floor storefronts. It is an area without much charm.

Macy’s is located in Herald Square. I’m not sure how it got its name. It might be a similar story to Times Square, in that there was a New York Herald (which, by the time I was growing up was the Herald Tribune, and whose Sunday supplement was New York Magazine).

Macy’s is probably unlike any other store you’ve ever seen. Its two buildings cover a full city block with 10 stories and over 1,000,000 square feet. Above the 4th floor, the metal escalators give way to wooden ones that must be fifty years old. The store is beautifully decorated for Christmas.

Since Macy’s attracts so many shoppers, it also attracts its fair share of everything else. By the time we got there, there was already a TV crew with a microwave truck from one of the local stations. I also saw a reporter/photographer team from a Spanish newspaper and a long photographer from Women’s Wear Daily.

There were also protesters. I’m sure this isn’t isolated. Macy’s was being picketed by animal rights activists, who themselves were corralled into a small pen, shouting about animals being killed to make fur coats. Outside the front entrance, a lone woman railed on about Macy’s policy of racial profiling and how they had a prison in the basement. If she was changing hearts, it was impossible to see. No one seemed to pay her any mind.

As Helaine and Steffie went shopping, I walked through the area. It’s not a really thriving shopping district, though there is a lot going on. The area holds Penn Station, Madison Square Garden, and The Empire State Building.

Across from Macy’s, in a microscopic triangular shaped park, Yahoo had set up four laptops with wireless Internet access and was extolling their shopping site. Everyone I saw who entered their little promotion won a hat… except me.

I met the girls at the base of the down escalator, and we left the store and hopped on the subway. We were heading to Greenwich Village to Jekyll and Hyde – a theme restaurant with a SciFi/Horror bent.

Getting off the subway at Christopher Street, we headed into Sheridan Square. Up ahead was a theater that has been the home to the long running “Naked Boys Singing”. Hey, it’s Greenwich Village – don’t be surprised.

I had actually been at either Jekyll and Hyde or the restaurant next door back in the mid-60’s when Bob Weiss’ family took Bob and me to see Jean Shepard do his live Saturday night broadcast on WOR. For a kid who idolized Shep, that was an incredible experience. I wonder what happened to bob. I probably haven’t spoken to him since 1966 or ’67.

Maybe I was a little tired, and ready to go home, but Jekyll and Hyde was not that great for me. I had a pretty good turkey club tortilla wrap, while around us, figures mounted on the walls came to life. At the same time, some jerk at an adjacent table made loud cell phone calls. Across the way, a little girl was celebrating her 4th birthday. I wonder if Jekyll and Hyde would cause her nightmares to help remember the day?

We hopped the subway and headed back north. While I looked at the “Rodenticide” sign, Steffie had a ‘wildlife’ spotting on the tracks. Obviously Rodenticide only works so long.

By the time we returned to the hotel to pick up the Explorer and head home, it was nearly four. I reached for the claim check… but it wasn’t there! We did find it, in my coat which had been left in storage with the bellmen.

The trip home was pretty easy. The day after Thanksgiving may be busy at the stores, but it’s less than pedestrian on the Connecticut Turnpike. Manhattan to our house took a little less than two hours.

During our stay in New York, I took nearly 500 photos. On Thanksgiving alone, I snapped nearly 1 GB worth of images. We all had a great time. Our anniversary will go in the books as a happy one. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade will be a lifetime memory.

As I type this, early Monday morning, Priceline has just sent me a survey, asking about my hotel. I told all.

Click here, or on any photo to see my album of photos from this trip.

Look Ma – I’m on Slashdot

I love Slashdot. How could I stay away from a site whose slogan is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”

I am there at least 4-5 times a day, following their links to see the latest in high tech. It is Linux biased in much the way The Catholic Church is Christian biased. But, it’s geek and nerd populated and I share a certain sensibility with many of its habitues (though, unfortunately I no longer share the same generation with them)

Its readers, rapidly responding to the story postings, add insight, insult and everything in between.

What makes Slashdot so effective is its self moderating system which starts limiting what you easily read (you can always get to everything, but probably don’t want to) as users come on and rate the postings. Judging by what I see, there are a lot of people moderating at any given time, though Slashdot only gives you the opportunity to moderate every once in a while. Then, later, the moderations get moderated!

In many ways it is analogous to Google, where your association with others decides your relative importance and where your links appear.

Anyway, I’m writing all this because I finally got a posting of mine on to start a thread. It started this morning, early, when I saw an article in the New York Times about speeding up media (listening at double speed, for instance) and how that is a burgeoning field.

I have used that same technique in my studies at Mississippi State, watching DVD’s at double speed. For me, it’s been very effective. Now, it’s shared with others.

Continue reading “Look Ma – I’m on Slashdot”