I’ve mentioned innumerable times how much I loathe Time ‘Join the broadband revolution, erm, but with no upstream’ Warner. Despite my distaste for them, they’re actually one of the better cable monopolies. The essential problems are that they are a monopoly and they own content companies so their service offerings are compromised by their steps to aggressively protect their intellectual properties. Meanwhile the telcos, who everyone hated in the 70’s, have stumbled about over the past decade or so, unable to formulate and execute a rational strategy to deliver data services to consumers. Maybe things are slowly beginning to change for the better though. Supposedly by the end of this year a portion of Verizon’s customer base will be able to subscribe to 30Mbps dsl (10x faster than cable’s 3Mbps) and Verizon is also dropping over a billion dollars on an upgrade to their wiring capacity, with the intention of delivering fiber optic to our doors.

Sign me up is all I can say. Competition rocks, someone finally looks to be challenging the cable monopolies. One caveat though – goddamnit they better deliver asyncronous upstream bandwidth or at least something close to it at the same time. This isn’t a fucking broadcast medium, what it will take to get these companies to understand that I don’t know, but a first step is weaning them off their intellectual property holdings, it’s compromising their ability to offer service.

Anyway here’s hoping.

Wednesday shortly after I got home from work there was a knock at my door. The only folks who knock on a regular basis are the Jehova’s Witnesses or other brands of jesus freaks who show up now and then, so I approached the door with some trepidation. On the other side of the glass stood a middle-aged woman with a government badge hung around her neck. I had one of those ‘oh shit!’ moments as I tried to parse her credentials – was it the feds, on my ass because of the server break in a couple of months ago where hackers managed to get at my mp3 collection? The fact that I routinely download tv shows and other media off the net, and somehow they got onto me?

In the end it turned out to be someone from the US Census Bureau, and they were visiting me on behalf of the US Commerce Department. apparently, similar to say the Nielsen’s, the Commerce Department surveys US households on a regular basis. My address got picked out of the proverbial hat and from now on they will be surveying me once a month. The data folks like me provide is used to analyze the state of the US Economy. So the next time you hear one of those news lead-ins on the evening news ‘according to Department of Commerce statistics, 24% of Americans now….’ you can think of me.

I added several photos to my Misc. photos gallery, including:

My new car:

And a photo of the spring’s first kayaking trip:

That particular shot shows this very short stretch of rapids that I actually could not make it past on a tributary of the Royal River in Yarmouth. The water speed was not the issue, it was the submerged rocks and the fact that the water was only about 6-8 inches deep, leaving me unable to get a bite with my paddle. I must have tried getting up past this about 20-25 times using various approaches, all to no avail.

There’s also a pic of Nick, who came for a visit a couple of weeks ago, during which we went on a long bike ride over hill, dale, and treacherous swamp:

It’s not the best pic of Nick, but it was the only one I got so it will have to suffice. We followed a power line trail off of a road I bike along often. I was pretty sure I knew where the trail would come out (and I was) but what I wasn’t sure about was if there would be marshland along the trail similar to the trails that are near my house. There was, a lot of it. Nick and I spent about 1-2 miles of the bike ride hauling our bikes from hummock to hummock in the marsh. Still in all it was fun.

There are a few more pics to be had on the 5th page of the misc. photos gallery for each of the above subjects.

So my beloved but well worn 1995 Saturn SL1 is nearing the end of its days. I’ve been shopping for a new car as a result, having settled on a Mazda 3 hatchback after much research. Anyway today I spent my morning at the dealership working out the details on purchasing one. After finishing that up I walked out to hop into the Saturn, go to open the door, and the door handle breaks in my hand. Methinks my poor Saturn is trying to tell me something ;-(

House, Trance, Techno, Jungle. What’s it all mean, and what are the differences between these styles of electronic music? Check out this cool guide to electronic music. It has samples of all the different genres and sub-genres and a sort of ‘tree of life’ or topic map showing the relationships and evolutions within each genre. Very handy if you’re interested in electronic music. Note that it requires flash.

Yep, it is. If you’re a geek like me anyway. This week is the annual E3 exposition, devoted to all things videogame. The games we’ll be playing over the next couple of years get shown, as well as the hardware we’ll be playing them on.

This year there’ve already been several interesting announcements, including a major disaster for sony (EA providing online access to its sports games on Microsoft’s XBOX live service) and Nintendo coming with a new handheld. There’ll be plenty more, all starting tomorrow. If gaming is your thing, stay tuned, I’ll cover some of the major and not so major announcements.

Check out this most excellent interior design utility written in flash. Thinking about moving the couch to the other side of the room but not sure how it will go? Use this to check before doing. Or just scope out a well designed flash app with a great interface.