So i’ve taken a fairly big brake from the internet (a whole 3 days) by going up to my family’s cabin in the Black Hills (pictures and video yet to be posted). There’s no internet, and well, when your up in the mountain, there’s not much else, except for a few other cabins. I arrived on a Wednesday, only to find myself waking up on Thursday to 10 inches (and then some) of snow.
It was the perfect mini-vacation (except for the fact that I could still receive text on my phone and everyone decided it would be a good idea to check up on me EVERY day to see how i was doing – you know, if I’m alive, breathing, or dead). Our families cabin is a 2 bedroom, one full bath, with kitchen, dinning, wrap around porch, sleeping cabin (sleeps 4ish), and a huge slate fireplace. The carpet is a short green shag carpet, the kind you can feel the carpet fibers slip in between your toes when you’re not wearing socks).
It was a good time, complete with 2 channels on the tv, and a dvd / vcr player. I watched, Crocodile Dundee I & II, Die Hard I, George of the Jungle, Young Guns and a few other movies, all on vcr tapes, all of them in bad shape. There were Tonka Toasters you could make yourself some toasted desert pies – but you have to be careful, the toasters themselves melt if you leave them in the fire too long (a whole storry right there that i won’t go into). And I brought my MacBook Pro along & managed to get the majority of new mock done for this blog site.
The one problem I’ve noticed when you’re doing something for your own site is that you are your own worst critic. This isn’t anything new, but this past week, it really hit home. Especially since my photoshop skills are not up to par and my creativity doesn’t like to be stretched (unless i’m playing guitar).
So, in just a week or two SilentGap will be sporting it’s new skin & the new platform will be WordPress instead of Blogger (sorry Blogger, not a fan of your features – you just not my type and you don’t do it for me. It was a good time while it lasted, but I must break it off w/ you. Take care), which I’m quite supprised that a producted owned by Google isn’t done up better, but oh well, they can’t be perfect either.
If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor (F), known widely for lumbering gas hogs.
I’ve seen ad’s for this car’s cousin for about 3+ years now (the Ford Ka or SportKa), and have been wondering if it or something similar, would ever come here. I like the fact they really don’t come out and say why, other than spouting off “But there are business reasons why we can’t sell it in the U.S.” – Sounds pretty generic – but until we get a car like this – here’s a cool vid of it’s cousin.
Alright, so at work, what started out as a conversation about getting internet access on dial-up with a windows ‘98 machine (sorry Karla, for having to endure the pain of messing with Win ‘98, much less Win ‘98 on dialup), ended up with the subject of a “cantenna“.
A cantenna is a directional waveguide antenna for long-range Wi-Fi used to increase the range of (or snoop on) a wireless network.
What would be fun is to have a competition to build one of these things and see how far away you could be away from a wireless access point and still load a page like Google. Build one you say? Yes – check out the “How to build a tin can waveguide WiFi antenna” for a blueprint of sorts.
The problem I run into is justifying breaking into my WiFi card, and voiding the warranty. Esp. when my home mac already has a wireless card built into it. Anyone have a cheap laptop and WiFi card I could ruin for this experiment (my boy and I (when old enough) will have a lot of fun building things like this (well at least I imagine we will))?
So I subscribe to a few of ZDNet’s newsletters & blogs, and in my inbox was a headline that said “AT&T: Internet to hit full capacity by 2010″. Naturally, being a developer myself, this peaked my interest. So I started reading. There were two subjects that really stood out to me. One subject dealing with the title, but another one that I’ve been hearing bit’s of rumors here and there, but wasn’t sure if it was true.
Andrew Donoghue of ZDNet UK said the following:
Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded.
Which I’ve thought about often, how much more the current infrastructure (I.E. servers, backbone (internet cable and wires), organization of systems & protocols, etc) will be able to hold out as the user’s hunger for online video increases.
Think about it, the idea of renting video’s online & downloading it to play on your entertainment system of choice (Steve Job’s talked about this in one of his keynotes for a feature in the newly updated Apple TV), is good one. Not only that, but now you can watch YouTube Vid’s in Hi Def – or at least in it’s original uploaded quality (A whole different post for this guy).
Cicconi added that more demand for high-definition video will put an increasing strain on the Internet infrastructure. “Eight hours of video is loaded onto YouTube every minute. Everything will become HD very soon, and HD is 7 to 10 times more bandwidth-hungry than typical video today. Video will be 80 percent of all traffic by 2010, up from 30 percent today,” he said.
Then comes the next subject that I was totally not expecting, but was glad he covered it. It’s in regards to “Net Neutrality”.
Net neutrality refers to an ongoing campaign calling for governments to legislate to prevent Internet service providers from charging content providers for prioritization of their traffic. The debate is more heated in the United States than in the United Kingdom because there is less competition between ISPs in the States.
Content creators argue that Net neutrality should be legislated in order to protect consumers and keep all Internet traffic equal. Network operators and service providers argue that the Internet is already unequal, and certain types of traffic–VoIP, for example–require prioritization by default.
Meaning, there’s been increasing concern & even fear that the ISP’s (Internet Service Providers – like Midco, Comcast, AT&T, etc.) will start limiting what can & can’t be viewed on the interent. Also that, these companies will give priority to larger companies – over the little guys. Even some rumors say that the internet will become like the TV / Cable system of today. You have your basic free service, your basic cable, your upgraded cable, your Hi Def cable and then satalite or anything else out there – only it will be for the internet
Personally, I’ll have to wait and see, i think some of these rumor’s are nothing to worry about, but there is not doubt, there will have to be a change in the way the internet works with the increase demand for user content.