April 2005 - Posts
From adrants.com:
“While it's about five minutes longer than it needs to be, this video, created in January to promote LiveVault disk data back up, thankfully, features John Cleese who can make anything amusing. In the video, Cleese, taking on the persona of Institute for Backup Trauma Director Dr. Harold Twain Weck (ha, ha, get it?), explains why disk back up is better than tape back up. Particularly humorous is when Cleese goes off on the IT staff explaining that while it might be difficult explaining the need for dick back up to IT types whose offices are festooned with Dilbert comics and stacks of Diet Pepsi cans as if they were the latest Martha Stewart home decor, Cleese's Institute for Backup Trauma has the solution.”
You can find this hilarious video here too:
http://www.backuptrauma.com/video/default2.aspx
I’ve been having some issues with Comcast lately. First my bill seemed high and second they kept declining pay-per-views. Of course we were trying to watch pay-per-view movies on our family movie night (Saturday) and when I would call Comcast (based on the on-screen message) they’d say “you have some billing problem, we can’t access the billing system, call back during the week”. Of course they’d authorize access anyway (without actually saying so…sneaky customer service…but good!).
Anyway, I finally got around to calling them today to figure this all out. It turns out I was still paying for a “AT&T Broadband Pro” account. Gave me 3mbps down/300 up. But I was paying $79 a month. You can now get standard Comcast cable modem service in my area that delivers 6mbps down/768kbps up for around $50 a month! All I had to do was reset my modem.
And they fixed the pay-per-view problem.
I used to hate the cable company. I hated that I couldn’t get DSL where I live now. But now, I’m actually becoming a fan of Comcast. I really like my HD-DVR set top box…the MS DVR software it runs is a bit lacking, but overall it works very well. And their customer service is, well, good. Wow, I can’t believe I said that about the cable company.
I ran a speed test a www.broadbandreports.com before recycling my modem
download speed: 2984 kbps
upload speed: 302 kbps
After resetting the modem:
download speed: 5983 kbps
upload speed: 706 kbps
(I’ll attribute the slightly “below advertised” speeds to other activity on my network; Outlook is running on this machine talking to Microsoft corpnet, my wife is clacking away upstairs, and I’m sure a few aggregators are hitting my blog or people browsing my site).
This just rocks.
It is a small world and I always get a kick out of discovering connections between seemingly unrelated people and events.
A few weeks ago I received a mailing from my high-school alma-mater, The Webb Schools of California, that was the typical “send us money” thing. It contained an article on Kurt Pitzer who was a year ahead of me and whom I played soccer with at Webb (he was goalie). The article talked about how Kurt had recently co-authored a book with the scientist who ran Iraq’s attempt to manufacture enriched uranium for it’s nuclear weapons program, Mahdi Obeidi. The book is titled The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind.
Sounded like an interesting book and the Amazon reviews looked positive so I ordered it. (I also ordered John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War; John also went to Webb and was a year behind me).
Yesterday I set down to read the book and found it super interesting. It’s well written and an easy read.
On page 83 I found this:
“As the flight descended into Denver International Airport, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains appeared just as I remembered them, rugged and eternal. As Dr. Farid and I stepped out of the terminal, the crisp mountain breeze brought forth a rush of memories. I drove us to the Colorado School of Mines campus in nearby Golden. So much had changed. The town had grown into a little city in my absence. At the administration office, I learned that most of my old professors had retired. I briefly stopped in on Dr. Stermole, a junior professor at the time I was a student, and I was saddened to learn that Dr. Dickson, the head of the Chemical Engineering Department who supervised my master’s work, had died.”
“Dr. Stermole” is my father-in-law who had just been out visiting the previous week! It does not surprise me that Mahdi Obeidi mentioned Frank given how he appears to have been loved and respected by so many of his students. But it was still shocking to see this in the book. As I was reading page 83, but before I got to that paragraph I just knew Frank was going to be mentioned. Wild.
I’ve been a programmer for 20+ years now, so you can imagine how dumb I felt today when I first read about the INTERCAL programming language. INTERCAL was invented in 1973 by Jim Lyon and Don Woods. I learned about INTERCAL today because I just hired Jim Lyon to my group and he wrote about it in his bio that we sent around announcing his joining. Interestingly enough, I don’t remember seeing it on his resume.
Go read the INTERCAL manual here. Tons of great resources here. I hear there may be a VisualStudio add-in and a managed version of INTERCAL coming!
Raymond has a interesting blog post today about the number of crashes we’re seeing from the online crash analysis we do on the dump files that are submitted when you say “Send Error Report” in Windows.
The net-net of it is: If you overclock your machine don’t blame software companies when the software you are running crashes.
I think the new header image on my blog does a pretty good job of setting the stage for Summer. Don’t you agree?
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