Since moving back into a rural area, I’ve had to give up my precious high-speed Internet options and settle for what’s left. Downtown, I can choose between Comcast cable (boasting up to 6Mb downloads), Verizon DSL (3Mb downloads), Sovernet SDSL (1.5Mb), or a T1 line in my office building.
Out in the sticks, however, the options are fewer. I am restricted to the wonders of satellite, cellular, and dialup.
We’ve had Wildblue for satellite Internet for the last year, and it’s been pretty terrible. I decided to go with Wildblue after a client of mine had it installed, and it worked extremely well. There was very little latency, and I could run a VPN connection over it. Unfortunately, my experience with the service was not nearly as good, and it turned out to be very slow, and drops several times a day, requiring me to power cycle the modem, and often just going without service for a long time.
I tried using an EVDO card from Verizon Wireless, and also using my Nokia e61 as a cellular modem from my current provider, Unicel. Unfortunately, despite my installing a cellular repeater in my house, the signal is not strong enough to sustain a reliable Internet connection.
So, I’m biting the bullet, and ordering another telephone line. In the year 2007, the best Internet access option I have at my house is dialup. 26.4kbps.
Pathetic.
MS Works to be Free of Charge (Ad-supported)
Apparently the next version of Microsoft Works will be free! Excellent! Now it’s worth every penny you’ll pay for it.
How Much Caffeine is in That Drink, Anyway?
Ever wonder how much caffeine really is in that Starbucks coffee or your Mountain Dew? Want to know which late-night pick-me-up will turn it into an all-nighter? Check out Energy Fiend to find out.
Two Nifty RSS Management Tools
So Yahoo! Pipes is not new, but I just started playing with it after I saw a brief tutorial on how to use it on Lifehacker. Very cool. It provides a very simple, totally graphical, AJAXy way to filter your RSS feeds. From the initial announcements from Yahoo!, I had no idea that this is what it was for. While I had done similar things with other services, the Pipes graphical interface simplifies things a lot, and gives you a great visual way to see exactly what the end result will contain.
Anyway, following the tutorial, I was able to merge two RSS feeds (Digg‘s Technology feed and Techmeme) and then filter them out so that they don’t give me the same results from other feeds. Since I already subscribe to BoingBoing, Lifehacker, and Marc Andreesen‘s blog, for example, I added filters so that Digg and Techmeme and would not show me stories from these posts, making my Google Reader a lot less cluttered with duplicates.
The second tool I found is actually new: AideRSS. AideRSS ranks your favorite blog posts according to the amount of feedback they receive. The presumption is that the more feedback, the better a post is. The result is that you can use it to dramatically reduce the amount of “clutter” in your feeds. For example, Lifehacker averages 388 posts a month. AidRSS ranks 83% (325) of these as “good,” 55% (215) as “great,” and 14% (58) as “best.” So you can easily filter out a lot of chaff from a blog.
Unfortunately, the first feed I tried to give it was my custom Pipes feed. Given that Techmeme and Digg have different structures for their comments, this was too much for AideRSS to handle. Luckily I quickly figured it out and instead flipped it so that my AideRSS feeds now drive my Pipes. Another drawback is that it really only works on blogs. I can’t use it to cut down on the amount of noise on various mailing lists or forums that I receive in RSS format, which would be very nice. Perhaps they will work on that and offer this feature in the future.
The US Dollar is Pathetic
During my entire childhood and most of my adult life, I’ve known that the Canadian Dollar was worth $0.75. Today, while vacationing with my wife in Montreal, QC, I exchanged $100 (US) for Canadian dollars (what we affectionately refer to as “Canadabucks”).
I handed the nice lady at our hotel’s front desk $100 (US), and she handed me back $100 (Canadian).
And 39?.
I verified that this is right in line with today’s exchange rate (1 US Dollar = 1.03853 Canadian Dollar), minus a couple of bucks for a conversion fee.
How the mighty have fallen.
The Great Internet Crash of 2007
This reminds me of an article I wrote over 10 years ago where I accidentally deleted my home town. Excellent production quality. I wonder if I could fool anyone into believing this is real.
Oh who am I kidding? Of course I could…
The Internet Crash of 2007
Facebook is World of Warcraft (in disguise)
It just hit me, while I was scouring my old address book and AIM buddy list, that social networking is really a MMORPG in disguise.
For the last three nights, I’ve spent more time digging through my old contacts, address books, buddy lists, and memory than I have killing orcs, retrieving Rethban Ore, and mining Fel Iron! My wife says I’ve spent as much time grinding through my contacts as she has spent grinding for rep in Felwood.
Take today, for example. Here I am, after a full day of work, and a couple of hours of WoW, and what am I doing? More work! (Say that with a woodcutter accent.) My LinkedIn network is 80% complete. I just invited another colleague. That will put me at 85%. But wait, that’s not all! Once that’s done, I need to finish my profile. Yes, I need to quest to get my profile complete too. I need to post my resume, my interests, and my past work experience, etc. All of these things add up to a complete profile, which, I guess, is kinda like hitting 60. I’m assuming there will be more afterward, like, the LinkedIn Expansion Pack or something. Maybe the “Job Hunting Crusade?”
I have even contemplated using LinkedIn or Facebook’s built in “invite your contacts” (read “spam”) feature, to invite people who are not part of said network, to join. So far, my hatred for spam has outweighed my temptation to do this, and I have not sent an invitation to anyone who is not already a member. But I thought about it…
And don’t even get me started on my lame Facebook account, with four measly friends in it, one of whom I cannot even say “how I know” because Facebook does not have an “Other” option like LinkedIn. The more I compare these two social networking sites, the more I think of World of Warcraft versus GuildWars. “This one has henchmen!” “Oh yeah, this one lets me invite people from my Yahoo! Messenger account!” The parallels are shockingly similar…
Here are some interesting parallels. Draw your own conclusions.
| World of Warcraft | |
| Groups | Factions and Guilds |
| Friends | Friends |
| Messages, a primitive email system | Mail, a primitive email system |
| Actions (poke, bite, lick, etc.) | Emotes (poke, bite, lick, etc.) |
| Applications | Add-ons |
| Messages suggesting you should join a network | Automatic subscription to “guild recruitment” channels |
| “Invite a friend links” on your home page | Free 10-day trial on your Launcher |
| Tutorials on how to use your account for business | Leveling guides |
From the "It Can't Possibly Get Any Worse" Department
I had a rather lame day, which included a DNS outage (took down paradigmcc.com for a while), an insurance agency’s WAN connection dropping, a medical practice’s scheduling calendar for the next quarter getting deleted, two missed appointments, waiting for hours for technical support to return my calls, and being generally crazy-busy from 8 AM to 6 PM.
So, at home, working late, I prepared to wrap up my day by putting the finishing touches on a few IT policy documents for one of my clients. (You may find this hard to believe, but it’s somewhat relaxing compared my other daily work activities).
My Boxer, Kali, however, had other plans. Plans which apparently involved Murray. Who is Murray? Why, Murray is the skunk who lives under our house! Apparently Kali arranged to have a little meet-up and the result was that the family and I spent the rest of the evening dousing the stupid dog in tomato juice, vinegar, baking soda, and dish soap. And now the house stinks. It’s not like regular skunk smell either. It’s like some sort of gamma-irradiated skunk or something from the black lagoon. This is one nasty Mephitis.
Keep this in mind the next time you feel tempted to say your day “can’t possibly get any worse.”
The Ultimate iPod Anti-Theft Device
I just stumbled upon this, the ultimate iPod anti-theft device. What better way to protect your iPod then by making it look like a Microsoft Zune player?
Why Parents Should Be Licensed
People should be licensed before allowing to breed.
Read this MSNBC article and tell me you don’t agree. On the “We Suck At Parenting” meter, these idiots are light-years ahead of the pair who brought four children under the age of 10 to see the new Transformers movie last week.