A History Lesson

    Every 1460 days or so, we add in another day, just for kicks it seems. It is commonly called February 29th, or leap day. Uncommonly it is called the bissextile day (read that word again, just so you don’t confuse it with another similar sounding word). A year, in which such a day occurs, is called a leap year or an intercalary year (which sounds like…anyway, let’s move on).

    February 29th occurs every year which is evenly divisible by four, with the exception of the century years, ending in two zeroes, which are not divisible by 400. Leap seconds are added on average every 18 months. Rumor has it one scientist suggested years divisible by 4000 should not be leap years either, but he was lynched by an angry math-challenged mob.

    The leap day has a long history starting way back with the Julian calendar which was introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, just before he had a salad. In the Julian calendar the day following February 23rd, known as Terminalia for the worship of the god Terminus, was to be doubled. That day and the day after were to be regarded as one day. And February 24th was called ‘bis sextum’ which means twice 6th (make sense to anyone?). This single day would have 48 hours, instead of the normal 24. Clock makers protested, but were ignored when they missed their appointment.

    The leap day moved to February 29th in the modern Gregorian calendar, when it was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582. The Pope wasn’t quite happy with the old Julian calendar because it’s year was too long, and the day on which Easter was celebrated kept changing too much. Basically, the Pope wanted the holidays to come sooner. A noble thought, that. 

    In addition the Pope decided to drop 10 days from the calendar. The last day of the Julian calendar was to be October 4th 1582, and the next day, the first day of the Gregorian calendar was to be October 15th, 1582. This caused massive amounts of sleep deprivation all around Europe. Historians say it was done to make the seasons occur at the right times, although I suspect the Pope wanted to spend 10 days in bed with his mistress. 

    The purpose for the leap day is so we may celebrate New Year's with the Earth at approximately the same position as last time. Even though we are too drunk to notice what position we are in anyway. Unfortunately, all this leaping about doesn’t quite do it. To add to the confusion, scientists introduced the leap second. These occur on average every 18 months. It is unknown when the next leap second will occur. Although they have confirmed it will not be in 2008, which is unfortunate because I could use the extra sleep.

    All this calendaring seems pretty arbitrary to me. So, why do we not change the calendar to have 73 weeks of 5 days each, with a 4 day weekend and add in an extra holiday whenever we feel like it? I’d suggest it, but I am afraid to be lynched by an angry math-challenged mob.

 

    Florida Power & what?

    In October of 2005 hurricane Wilma ravaged South Florida with 120 mph winds, caused more then 20 billion dollars in damage and left 3.2 million FP&L customers without electricity.

    In February 2008 an overheating switch in a power substation near Miami, costing a few hundred dollars, left 4 million people without electricity, under a light 5 mph breeze.

 

        On being a sprig.

    At last count the Technorati.com website was tracking more then 112 million blogs. Again, one hundred and twelve million blogs, written by a hundred million people all around the world from every culture and all walks of life. Some people maintain multiple blogs; other blogs are maintained by several people. And more blogs are added to the World Wide Web each day, although some are abandoned as well. 

    Gartner analysts have stated that the number of active blogs reached its peak in 2007. They expect the number of new blogs to equal the number of abandoned blogs. And all those abandoned blogs will just add to the websam (web flotsam). If a blog falls over in the blogosphere forest while a hundred million other bloggers are screaming for attention, does anybody notice? Does anybody care?

    There are many types of blogs, with pictures, videos, pod casts and writings in every style imaginable. Some blogs are the original web log diaries, where people describe their own daily lives; others are political, artful, environmental, sentimental, mental, anything goes. Some of these bloggers are serious journalists reporting serious issues. Others are pretend journalists that can not possibly be taken seriously.

    The quality of all those blogs is just as diverse as the subjects. Some blogs are the equivalent of an evening at the Joneses, being forced to watch a slideshow of their vacation snapshots (shiver) while wondering what time it will be socially acceptable to leave. Some blogs are informative, others are educational or entertaining. There are even a select few jewels that are all those at the same time. Some bloggers don’t even take the time to run their drivel through a spellchecker (you know who you are!), while others post works of remarkable compositions, elegant style and wonderful prose (no, I didn’t mean you!) (no, I didn’t mean myself either).

    Many blogs have advertising on their sites. And indeed many bloggers are desperately trying to increase traffic to their site, so they may glean some income from those adverts. Although in reality few even make enough to offset their costs. To this purpose the only real winners are those sites catering to the bloggers by offering advertising services, or schemes to increase traffic, such as the projectwonderful.com website. Some sites are nothing more then a thinly veiled form of click fraud. Many link exchange sites are little more then an I-click-on-yours-if-you-click-on-mine scheme. Sure, it increases traffic, but it remains to be seen if it increases actual readers.

    So, why are we doing this? Why am I doing this? Honestly, I am not all that sure. But I will admit I get a kick out of people who are actually reading my posts. Some don’t like it, some do. But just one visitor reading my work and appreciating it, makes me feel like I accomplished something, however small it may be.

    Maybe that’s all blogging is about. Rambling about whatever you feel like rambling about and perhaps some day, you actually hit on something that somebody finds valuable. And maybe that’s enough, just being a little sprig in this giant blogosphere forest.

    Don’t call me, I’ll call you.

    Not so long ago, in the house I lived in as a kid, we had a telephone. It was simple phone, with a rotary dial, if you remember what that is. If you wanted to talk to me, you could come over to my house, or call me on the phone, or write me a letter. Those were happy times, back in my long lost merrily squandered youth. Aaah…memories, light the corners of my mind… Uh, where was I? Oh yeah…

    I remember how excited the whole family got when my father brought home a second phone for the upstairs. It was an old phone he had pilfered from the company where they had just replaced all phones with newer models. Now we could transfer calls between the downstairs and upstairs. We kids just loved playing with this marvel of modern technology. I remember calling a friend from the downstairs phone, just so I could transfer the call upstairs and impress him. He was not impressed.

    Now, just half a generation later, I have a home address and a postbox address. I have a cordless home phone with four handsets, business phone with wireless headset, and a brand new Nokia cell phone, all with follow-mode, caller-id, call-waiting, voice mail and numerous other features I haven’t figured out yet and probably never will. I have a two-way pager with over 800 pager numbers programmed into it. I can receive faxes at home and at work. I have high-speed internet, over a dozen different email addresses, three instant messaging ids, and four Bluetooth devices. Voice-Over-IP, and inter-continental video conferencing are nothing new to me. Oh…and I have a blog. And I am not nearly as connected as many other people in this high-tech day and age.

    The costs of long distance calls nowadays are significantly less then when I played with that upstairs phone. Can you imagine paying $7 (with inflation that would be over 25 current day dollars) per minute for an overseas call with several seconds lag time, and a sound quality so bad that most of the call consists of “What? Can you repeat that? Hello, can you hear me?”

    These days, many people suffer from what is called connectivity overload. We are all too easily reached at any time day or night. Often times we find people wanting our attention when we are knee deep in a task that requires serious focus. Taking a few moments to say “I am busy, can we talk later?” is enough to lose that focus. As a result our productivity declines. Our attention span gets shorter by the day. And hair loss reaches epic proportions (my bald spot is getting decidedly pronounced).

    In a 2007 survey by PEW Internet, almost half of all Americans who only occasionally use modern electronic gadgetry stated that the pervasive connectivity is burdensome and they feel hassled by it. It is estimated that the US economy in 2006 suffered 650 billion dollars in lost productivity because of connectivity overload. 

    In addition we are raising our children in this environment. From their early years on they have access to high speed internet, their own cell phones, mp3 players blaring music at all hours of the day and the TV showing mindless advertising blurbs while they are trying to do their homework. Multi-tasking is a way of life for our children, not an achievement reached at later age, such as for my generation. I can’t help but wonder how this new generation is going to turn out.

    While multi-tasking is supposed to improve our productivity, our brains aren’t really up to it. I am sure mine isn’t. Is it any wonder I screen calls on all my phones, employ spam filters on all email addresses, have a firewall on my internet connection, set myself ‘away’ on instant messaging, and purposefully let the battery on my pager drain so I can say “Oops, sorry you couldn’t reach me." 

    I saw a rotary phone on sale the other day, marked as Vintage and priced outrageously. Do you think they’ll accept cell phones as a trade-in?
 

Perhaps a Haiku would work better?

There once was a politician from Nantucket,
who went to Washington with a bucket.
He tried to clean up,
but quickly gave up,
and said "You know these politicians can't even write proper limericks."

 

HD DVD is dead, long live Blu-Ray.

    The war is over. Yesterday Toshiba announced it would stop producing HD DVD equipment. And thus Blu-Ray has won. Although not as expensive as the war in Iraq, Toshiba, Microsoft, Paramount and Universal are still going to have to cope with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to their support of the losing side.

    A war that has been waged for several years has seen many battles. But after HD DVD lost the battle of Warner Bros to victorious Blu-Ray, an unconditional surrender was all but inevitable. And Friday’s announcement that Wal-Mart was going to support Blu-Ray was merely the death-knell.

    The true winners in this conflict are you, me, and all the other consumers. Acceptance of the new DVD technologies has been delayed by an estimated 2 years because of this war. So, let us rejoice as we won war.

 

Fighting Comcast’s duality brutality.

    A new piece of legislation, "The Internet Preservation Act of 2008", has been introduced to support Net Neutrality. Although the bill itself is rather general and narrow in scope, if passed, it will have severe repercussions to internet providers (read Comcast) which throttle or block certain types of traffic.

    As US Congressman Edward J. Markey stated: "Internet freedom generally embodies the notion that consumers and content providers should be free to send, receive, access and use the lawful applications, content, and services of their choice on broadband networks, possess the effective right to attach and use non-harmful devices to use in conjunction with their broadband services, and that content providers not be subjected to unreasonably discriminatory practices by broadband network providers.". Trying to translate it from politicospeak, he states “Comcast bugger off”.

    As you may have heard, Comcast is screwing with their customers internet use by throttling bit torrent traffic, starting some nine months ago. Of course Comcast denied doing this even after the entire world had already verified it to be true. But then again, big corporations don’t have to be truthful; they just have to make money. In the meantime Comcast is the target of a class action lawsuit as well as an investigation by the FCC. As a result, Comcast recently updated its terms of service to better correspond with how they were actually screwing their customer’s.

    In the meantime however, the internet community in itself is still unclear if Net Neutrality is a good thing or not. Some say that Net Neutered would stifle content providers abilities to innovate, upgrade and improve their services as well as slowing acceptance of new technologies by customers. The opposition says exactly the same; that ISP’s will be unable to innovate, upgrade and improve their networks.

    It seems to me the truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle, and it is best to leave well enough alone. Except Comcast of course. 
 

Why are we doing this anyway?

    I am going to assume most of my readers are not totally oblivious to today’s date and the fact it is generally recognized as Valentine’s Day. For the rest of you, you are either single, or you will be shortly, unless you get your butt in gear and go buy some chocolates and the pitiful remains of whatever passes for flowers after all other desperate shoppers got there before you.

    So, why are we doing this? What compels us to spend our hard earned money in a vain attempt to prove to our significant other that we love them by buying them overpriced flowers that will turn into brown muck before the end of the week? We do it because it is tradition, it is expected of us and if we don’t, we find ourselves sleeping on the couch. 

    Who do we blame for this tradition?

    Some say Valentine’s Day is named after Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni. Although it is possible they were actually the same person. Either way, they are both dead. And death is not very romantic so that can’t have anything to do with it.

    Another possibility is fertility festivals celebrated in ancient times around mid-February. To begin such a festival, a priest would gather all the villagers and sacrifice a goat. The boys of the village would then take strips of goat hide and slap the girls they liked. I am not sure about you, but I would not want to date any woman whose idea of romance is being slapped with bloody goat hide.

    Then there is the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer. Apparently back in 1382 he wrote these lines:
    For this was on seynt Volantynys day 
    Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.
If I attempt to translate that to modern English, it seems to have something to do with birds making cheese on Valentine’s Day. We move on.

    In the early 1800’s a bookstore owned by the Howland family in Worcester, Massachusetts started making and selling embossed paper lace Valentine’s Day cards. In the middle of the 20th century people started exchanging gifts, candy and flowers as well. And in the 1980’s the diamond industry pushed jewelry as a way of saying “I Love You”.

    And there we have it people. Stores selling cards, flowers, candy and jewelry are to blame for Valentine’s Day. It’s all about getting their greedy little fingers on the money.

    I’d suggest boycotting them, but I don’t want to sleep on the couch tonight.

    So, I wish a Happy Valentine’s Day to my readers. I love you all.
 
  

Monkeys, all of them.

    I imagine corporate management to be like a gaggle of monkeys. And despite the ubiquity of bald spots, I imagine them like hairy monkeys. They are all sitting in this fruit tree, with the executives on top.

    The fruit in the tree gets sweeter the higher you go, and of course all monkeys are trying to get to the sweetest fruit. The monkeys on the lower branches are competing with each other to gain the upper hand and get on a higher branch. But the ones higher up aren’t stupid and are pushing the climbing monkeys down.

    Of course the monkeys on the higher branches are in danger, for if they fall, they fall far and hard. Occasionally a branch of the tree breaks off and a whole bunch of them fall. And sometimes a monkey thinks there may be sweeter fruit elsewhere and he jumps from one tree to another.

    The monkeys at the bottom are relatively safe, they don’t have far to fall. But they have to endure all the crap coming down from above.

    I feel like having a banana. 
 

You have a Wireless Router? Then you will want DD-WRT.

    I used to buy a wireless networking router, install it and didn’t stop to think much about it. Then again I rarely stop to think much about anything. But when I finally did, I found that a wireless router is much like a little computer; it contains a CPU, memory, firmware, I/O ports and colorful blinking lights good for hours of mindless entertainment.

    Wireless routers come with manufacturer supplied firmware pre-installed. And it can be configured using a website, build into the firmware, that you can access using a browser on your computer. And just in case there is a bug in the firmware, there is an option to update it with a newer version. And here lies the key; that option can be abused to install firmware that is not sanctioned or created by the manufacturer.

    DD-WRT is such a firmware package. It is open source software, developed by a group of very smart people from Germany, based on a tiny version of the Linux operating system. It is compatible with a wide range of wireless routers commonly used at home and small businesses. It has loads of features no ordinary manufacturer would ever consider putting in their own firmware because it is not profitable and those whiny ingrate customers wouldn’t know what to do with it. 

    So, it is free and better then the original? What is the catch?

    There is no catch. Well, a few minor catchettes perhaps.

    First, DD-WRT doesn’t work on all wireless routers. See, the list here. Second, some manufacturers give their products a lobotomy, reducing the amount of memory available, and so only a stripped down version of DD-WRT can be used. Perhaps most important is that replacing the preinstalled firmware with DD-WRT is tricky business. This is not for the faint of heart, or those less then experienced computer techknows. A slight mistake can easily brick the router, resulting in a trip to the nearest techy store for a new one.

    (Bricking: [transitive verb]: to brick, turning a working piece of equipment into something more or less squarish and very dead.)

    Fortunately, there are excellent step-by-step instructions available for most supported routers. The result is a wireless router with faster, better, more stable firmware with many more features then you originally paid for. I installed it in my own Linksys WRT54G router a while ago. Mostly because the original firmware was having problems with port forwarding and the manufacturer did not have a fix available. I have not regretted it. 

    Oh, but don’t for a moment think that the manufacturer’s warranty will still apply. They will have a hearty laugh at your expense if you try this and screw it up. And don’t come knocking on my door either. I warned you!