wiredfool

As I was driving along an interstate in central Washington, I ran across….

Unfortunately, there was no destruction, fire breathing lizards, weblogs, or open source web browsers. Just a little town.

“The vast potential of broadband has so far benefited nobody as clearly as it’s benefited downloaders of pornography and pirates of digital content,”

So says Peter Chernin, President of News Corp. link

Leaving aside his beneficiaries for a moment, let me count some benefits to me.

1. Community – Broadband gives me the opportunity to interact with bloggers, family, and friends across the net, both by reading and writing. I own my own press. I can run my own chat/mail/news/web servers. I have a degree of independence that I didn’t have at a hosting company since at this point, I have the technical capability and computer capacity to self host.
2. Connectivity – Before broadband, I had several news sources. The local radio, maybe a TV station, and local and national papers. After broadband, I have my choice of feeds: local (and remote local) news sources across the net, bloggers with personal expertise, the large national news sources. I have a choice of feeds, and oddly enough, none of them sound like the local evening news. Most of them point out where the mainstream news isn’t on the ball.
3. Growth – Broadband fosters a community of collaboration and learning if you are at all interested in looking for it. Entire classic programming texts are online. Every programming envrionment has an online forum of some sort. Everywhere I look, there’s some sort of site that makes me think, ‘If I only had time to explore that…’
4. Instant Gratification – For most of the computers I own, I get software and updates by typing a few commands or waiting for the auto updates. I can buy books, bike parts, plane tickets, and computers at midnight without leaving the couch. I can research what tires I want to get for my little red sports car while I’m on the phone with the retailer.

These aren’t front page big story benefits. They won’t force anyone out of business. They might steer traffic to the little guy with better quality or prices. But they’re the sort of thing that wouldn’t have happened pre-internet. They’re a change in the way that people relate to the vast body of people and information around them.

People now assume that there’s a vast body of knowledge out there and that it’s there for the finding. Businesses are realizing that people can check up on what they say in realtime, and two days later can be the top hit on google for their business name. People are seeing that there’s the potential to create something and have an audience. Everyone needs an audience, however small it may be.

I’ll leave the obvious digs at the leader of Fox TV lecturing net.inhabitants on morality and decency for another day. But I will end with an ad hominem attack on network executives. People on the net will generally do what they would when they don’t think anyone’s watching. It’s the same sort of thing that CFOs do when the SEC isn’t watching, only it doesn’t involve billions of other peoples’ dollars. But when it involves billions of dollars, it’s a ‘restatement’ or an ‘accounting irregularity’. When the little people download music worth $1000 (retail), it’s called a ‘felony’.

(o.b. max headroom quote: How can you tell when a network executive is lying? His lips move.)

• Coming Soon! Garden Powers in ZucchiniMember! Apparently it’s the result a bizzare accident that left him stuck in the garden over the weekend.
• Summer is a good time to explore the cat/puddle of fur duality phenomenon.

I have infringed upon a patent, and I have no regrets.
ActiveBuddy now has a patent on your garden variety chat bot, and they plan on enforcing the patent. Unfortunately, I’m not prior art. But lots of things on the net are…

Somehow, the patent examiners neglected to do a google search, as the first page of hits for elizabot has two examples of prior art (prior to 8/2000), irc bot comes up with a few, as does chat bot. The Net::AIM module for perl (including a simple bot) was released a year earlier. The ALICEbot won prizes before the filing.

So go ahead, sue me. (sosumi-bing!) But first you have to figure out if the entity on the other end of the chat is me or a bot.

Could bad handwriting be an encryption mechanisim? Would attempting to read that handwriting be a violation of the DMCA?

Hillary Rosen (RIAA) notes:

“In the age of $150 sneakers, $12 movie prices and $40 video games, I’m just unsympathetic,” Rosen says. “At any price in the $10 to $18 range, CDs are a great value.”

What she’s not noticing is that that $12 movie comes on dvd with interviews with the cast, outtakes, and theatrical trailers. And in some cases, the DVD of the movie is less expensive than the random soundtrack that was thrown together for a little additional profit. As for the shoes and video games, well, it’s all about style. Perhaps unpopular cd’s should sell for $5, and popular, stylish ones should go for $20.

Janis Ian has a good idea: Take the out of print catalogs from all the majors and put them online in MP3. Charge $.25 a song, and see what happens in a year. It opens up lots of material that is not readily availiable, tries something new in search of a model, and more importantly, would make digital copies of some lps that I have easy to get. (that means you AOLTW, bring the Talking Heads out of the vault.)

One final note about Digital Rights Management, or rather the right to reach my digital in box (the one version of DRM that I support). I’ve been testing SpamAssassin for the past week and a half, and so far we’re at 3 false positives, (including a reminder that I need to pay my dsl bill), 12 false negatives, 720 non-spam, and 350 spam. Pretty good, but the false positives could have been really bad.

In a couple of ways, SpamAssassin is taking the wrong approach to the problem, in that the difference between spam and non-spam is permission, not content. It scans content, technical header issues, and realtime blacklists. Of these, the last 2 are good technical predictors in the general case. But with the first, SpamAssassin is taking the same track that the virus scanners have taken on Windows in the last 10 years, that is look for things that look suspicious. The criteria are public, so anyone can work to get past it. It’s going to be a constant war to keep spam definitions up to date in the face of ever changing incoming spam.

But the problem of permission is something that’s not easy to solve. It needs to be easy and automated for both the sender & receiver, a distributed system, and attack resistant. Ideally it would not be a boil the ocean scheme. But more on this later.

So Lance Armstrong is once again ripping up the field in the Tour. There’s something so satisfying when you know that he won’t attack till the mountains, being patient while the sprinters have their day. Then the tour gets to the mountains and he wins the next three stages.

In the paper today, they mentioned that he has the fastest time for the climb up Mt. Ventoux, the moonscape where he gave the stage win to Pantini a couple of years ago. The paper reports that it’s 5280 feet (exactly on mile) up, 13 miles, and he did it in 58 minutes. I’ve done one climb of that magnitude also 5280 feet up from sea level to Hurricane Ridge over 20 miles. I was in good shape at the time, but it took me 2:20, or about 2.3 times as long.

Doing some rough guesses at the math, it looks like Lance was producing an average of 350 watts. Nearly half a horsepower. (power = mass * g* h / time, or 170 lbs/2.2lb/kg * 9.8m/s^2 * 1600m/(58min*60sec)) That’s ignoring wind resistance, which should be a reasonable assumption for 13 mph. Numbers for me? 170 watts.

It’s beginning to be that time around here when neighbors should be on the lookout for suspicious packages of vegatables left on their door steps.

The zucchinis are here. I’ve had them for three nights in a row, and there are two more in the fridge. One was a 2lb monster that doubled in size while we were off riding to Portland. The big one was roasted with goat cheese and mushroom filling, a small one grated into a frittata, and a medium one into udon noodle soup.

This is as many as I got to eat last year. The squirrels kept eating the flowers, and something devoured most of the leaves when the plants were still small. This year I lost 2.5 of the three early plants, so I planted a couple more. The half survived, as did the other two, and this year the squirrels don’t like zucchini flowers.

We made it, had great weather and a great time. The mornings started out a little cool and cloudy, but by noon or so we had full sun. Light sprinkles of rain and mostly tailwinds. All in all, nearly perfect riding weather.

There were a lot of parent/child tandem teams, and one family of five split between a tandem and a triple. A bunch of hand cyclists (trikes that are powered by hand, generally ridden by paraplegics), a few pedaled trikes (one mountain style with 2 kidback tandem attachments), one unicyclist, and a rollerblader.

The course hasn’t changed a whole lot since I did it the one day 4 years ago. It ends a bit sooner by going up and over the St. Johns Suspension Bridge. The road surface on Highway 30 in Oregon is much better now that they’ve resurfaced it. If they’d just do something about the section near Ft. Lewis, all of the really nasty sections would be gone. I only noticed a few hostile light trucks. (I’d say cars, but they were all SUVs or Pickups). The traffic control over the Lewis and Clarke Bridge made that crossing much less dangerous, even though it meant that we were at the tail end of 1000 cyclists going down the bridge. We still got to fly through the 270 degree banked turn at the bottom.

The feel of the ride changed a bit now that I have a stoker. Tandems are fast, at least when they’re not going uphill. They carry much more speed through to the next uphill, so there’s more of a payoff to getting up to speed and power over rollers. There were a few times that we were clearly going 10 mph faster then the singles to the right of us. Thankfully, none of them violated rule #1, don’t get in front of a descending tandem. That’s not to say that they didn’t violate rule #2, which is don’t get stuck behind a climbing tandem. But that’s more their problem.

There were quite a few people who saw a tandem as an invitation to wheelsuck, even when asked not to. This caused a wreck that we passed, where a single bike got crossed up with a triple and went down. We had quite a few people suck wheel, and no one ever really pulled through. After a while, it became a bit of a sport to drop those behind us without doing anything dangerous. A bit of a move sideways and a bit of a jump was normally enough. There was a twit in a blue jersey on a grey Cannondale that just wouldn’t take the hint. He stuck with us through a jump, but then lost interest as we needed to stand up, stretch, and coast for a while. Of course, we did this just before heading up a hill, so when we passed him on the downhill, we were going fast enough that he couldn’t catch on again.

We ended up passing many of the same people over and over, either on the hills or leapfrogging at rest stops. It’s amazing that you recognize so many of the people after riding around them for a couple of days.

I do have a couple of suggestions for future iterations of the ride. When the road shoulder is about to end, it’s good to mark that 15-30 seconds ahead of where it actually happens, so that people have a chance to merge without causing chaos in passing riders and cars.

At the end of a ride, the first things riders think about are food, drink, rest, and showers. The hardest of these to improvise is showers, and they were the most lacking. At centralia, it took asking twice for location, they were a 1/2 mile ride from the campground, and they were $6 each. At the finish line, they were free and obvious but there was an hour long wait for the men.

But I still want to do it again, preferably with several friends on tandems to ride and camp with.

Except for Weather.com (motto: don’t like our forcast? wait 5 minutes) who can’t seem to decide if tomorrow is going to be sunny, cloudy, rainy, 70 or 88 degrees, the consensus is that the weather should be like today, maybe with a few more clouds.

That is to say: beautiful.

I’ll return with pictures of the road to portland.

We are go for liftoff.

or rather rolloff. The weather forcast is getting better. I’ve added all the necessary doodads to the bike (fenders, rear rack and aero bars). All color coordinated in silver and black. Charging the camera batteries. Finding the camping supplies. Checking the weather again.