All posts by Jack

golf

Oh, the heartache

I watched Tom Watson make his penultimate putt on the 72nd hole of the British Open. If it goes in he wins and it is the Ultimate putt. Oh, the heartache.

I had been watching Tom play the previous day and as he sat there at the top of the leader board, the TV cameras captured his image and it was an image of joie de vivre. As some of the commentators remarked, he had spirit. And I saw it today, as well. Here was a man playing the game of his life and loving it. He knew he could win and he would win. But that penultimate putt veered away from the hole and ultimate putt put him into a playoff. You could see that the spirit had left him at that point and that he had conceded the playoff; he was just going through the motions. And when the cameras focused on his face during the playoff you could see that the spirit had been replaced by a dull heartache. It was such a vivid heartache I felt it myself.

Thanks, Tom, for a great tournament and I hope you make the ultimate putt next year at St Andrews.

fandom, travel

Making Plans

It is summer again and time to plan for Worldcon. This year it is in Montreal – Anticipation. I was in Montreal a few years ago and remember that there was an international fireworks competition over the summer, so I googled online and found the schedule. A more current schedule is here. They have a different country every Saturday. The Fireworks are at the old Expo Park site and you can get on a bridge and be eye level with them going off in front of you. It was impressive. The Con is August 6-10, and by the Schedule I see that the US is competing on the August 1st and South Africa is on August 8th.

So, I have planned a convoluted way to get to Montreal in time to see the US compete. I am flying into Albany Thursday evening, spend the night there and then take the train from Albany to Montreal – through the Adirondacks – and arrive in Montreal Friday Evening. And then return to Albany by train after the convention and fly back home the next day.  I just hope there are no hidden pitfalls in Albany to worry about.

Should have a few days to sightsee around Montreal before the fun begins. Now, is it worthwhile to rent a car and travel into the countryside for a day?

Geek Stuff

Paying the Piper

I have often wondered about the networking costs of the big sites like YouTube and Facebook. For the amount of bandwidth they need to provide ubiquitous access to all those large files, and the servers that store all those files, it quickly turns into some serious money and this Slate article discusses the economics.

So rather than hosting all the content themselves, and the network connections to access the content, why don’t they let the content sources host the information. All they have to do is provide a directory to where the content is. (Didn’t Knapster and some of those previous file-sharing entities do that?)

If I go out and post a video on my server on my ISP, I could send the link to it to YouTube and if someone wants to watch it, they follow the link and stream the video directly off my server. If several million people want to see it, then my ISP service will probably shut down access to my server after I hit my bandwidth cap, or they will ask me to pay more for increased bandwidth. Then it is up to me to decide what I am willing to pay for.

YouTube’s main role would be to develop the applications that I would have on my server to allow the streaming and to provide some coordination between all the videos that people post. (Presumably they would get some advertising revenue from people browsing their site to see what videos are available.) If the video is not available because the server isn’t on line, that’s not YouTube’s fault.  (Actually, YouTube could do a quick query to see if the video is available before providing the link to the browser.)

I suppose YT could come up with a way to disguise the IP address where the video is coming from to stop people from bypassing YT for future videos.

Certainly sounds better than losing half-a-billion dollars a year.

Politics

Or what about…

“Representative Democracy? We don’ need no stinkin’ Representative Democracy.”

and

“Well, I don’t care who is in charge as long as I don’t have to pay for anything, but I get everything”

Politics

Some Tea Party Slogans

I have a couple of slogans for people to show off at their next Tea Party:

What part of “Me the People” do you not understand?

and

Down with Representative Democracy!

Catchy, huh? I have another one that I need to represent graphically, so that will have to wait.

Politics

WWCD

Cries of protest, censorship greet news of cybersecurity bill

The sweeping legislation included a provision to give the president the power to “order the disconnection of any Federal government or United States critical infrastructure information systems or networks in the interest of national security.”

Critics of the measure said the provision needed to be more clearly defined, but expected the Internet, along with telecommunications and banking systems, to fall under “critical infrastructure.”

Some people get a little too upset, too quickly. Just put it in perspective. Is this the sort of power you would want Dick Cheney to have wielded?

Economics, Politics

U.S. Is Said to Agree to Raise Stake in Citigroup

News Alert: U.S. Is Said to Agree to Raise Stake in Citigroup From the NYT.

Why? Why? Why?

Why can’t we just let these ‘big’ banks die? Are the Treasury officials afraid that their friends won’t talk to them any more if their friends lose their shirts and pants and West Side condos? There are a lot of fiscally sound banks out there that can pick up the credit load and remove the credit crunch problem, especially with several hundred billions of support from the Fed. Problem is that they are more ‘Main Street’ banks than ‘Wall Street’ banks.

Providing Citigroup with an additional influx of cash won’t help the credit crunch. All they are going to do is pay off their losses which won’t leave enough for lending to anyone.

Let Them Die!