the tindog coffeehouse

How accurate is NCAA Football 09 for the Wii at predicting the outcome of real football games? Probably not much, but it would be interesting to find out.

Each week I’ll play the Texas Longhorns (who else?) against their scheduled opponent and post the score here.

This week, UT opens the season at home against Florida Atlantic University. According to the Wii, the score will be 55-0, Longhorns.

Hook ‘Em, Horns!

Real Score: 52-10. Wow! Pretty close to the Wii. Maybe I’m on to something here.

I travel through the infamous Grapevine Funnel every day to and from work, and it’s the main reason I try to come in early and leave early. Hit the area just a little too late, and your daily commute goes from slow and tedious to simply painful. Throw in a minor fender-bender, and it’s enough to force you to do a U-turn and spend the rest of the day trembling beneath the sheets.

Aptly named, the Funnel is the area north of DFW Airport where seven different highways converge, a pretty good design if it weren’t for the roughly half million cars that pass through it five days a week. (Really, it must be more than that.)

There have been plans for years to reconstruct the area with additional lanes (including some toll lanes) and a better design. We were told it would take years to complete (up to 10 years by some estimates) and that it would get worse before it gets better.

Now it looks like it may just get worse.

Having done nothing so far, now the costs of construction are a reported $1 billion (up from $400 million in 2000), which has some people wondering if the project is too expensive to complete as designed.

Money, however, is not a deciding factor in this case. The Funnel provides a critical northern link between Tarrant and Dallas counties, and as the population of the Metroplex continues to grow, something must be done to relieve the pressure from all the cars that swarm the highways each morning and evening. Even if that something runs into the billions.

I’ve always had a strong dislike of toll roads, and this is no exception. But honestly, there are days I would happily fork over the extra cash just to relieve some of the stress of dealing with an already-long commute.

I’m sure there are many others who feel the same way.

The mainstream press is finally starting to catch on to the broadband caps issue.

It’s about time.

The phone company, Frontier Communications Corp., is one of several Internet service providers that are moving to curb the growth of traffic on their networks, or at least make the subscribers who download the most pay more. This could have consequences not just for consumers — who would have to learn to watch how much data their Internet use entails — but also for companies that hope to make the Internet a conduit for movies and other content that comes in huge files.

Meanwhile, ISPs such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are starting to get behind the push for P4P as a way to reduce the load on their networks while speeding up traffic. (Overview of P4P here.) That’s good news.

Previously:
Metered broadband: an experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: throttled?
Metered broadband vs. cloud computing

A Chicago woman is conducting a year-long experiment to see if it’s possible to live explicitly according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice.

No, seriously! I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

Why is she doing this?

Well, for several reasons. On one hand, I am concerned about the manner in which power is wielded by celebrities and on the other hand, I am doubly concerned about how willing we are to hand over our power to our gurus.

I believe the most influential American public figure today to be Oprah Winfrey. Many of us allow her to dictate what we read, what we watch, what we listen to, how we cook, exercise, organize, and how we vote. We are convinced by her powerful public persona that her way is the right way. The road to happiness and success. …

I’m interested in seeing what happens when an average American woman (I’ll give you all my stats in my next post) tries to keep up with Oprah’s advice to (as her website touts) “live your best life.” Can I keep up? What will the financial, emotional and time costs be?

That was in January. Along the way she’s learned how to align her “vibrations”, the importance of owning a white denim jacket, and that “avocado” comes from the Aztec word for “testicle”.

OK… Well, at least it’s not like Oprah is some sort of cult leader or anything. Oh, wait…

First, John McCain has trouble remembering how many houses he owns (7, apparently). Then Barack Obama throws together a TV ad mocking him over it.

Then McCain spokesman Brian Rogers fires back:

“The reality is they have some investment properties and stuff. It’s not as if he lives in ten houses. That’s just not the case,” Rogers said. “The reality is they have four that actually could be considered houses they could use.” …

He also added: “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison,” referring to the prisoner of war camp that McCain was in during the Vietnam War. …

“In terms of who’s an elitist, I think people have made a judgment that John McCain is not an arugula-eating, pointy headed professor-type based on his life story.”

Translation: I’m rubber and you’re glue….

I can accept a certain amount of advertising on any website. Fine. I accept your ads in return for free content or a free service. But everyone has their limits. Put popup ads on your site, and I’m simply going to block them. Put up blinking or animated banners or ads that make noise, and with the help of Adblock Plus I’ll block those too.

Those who have succumbed to the siren song of social networking sites like Facebook have to accept that while web advertising is sometimes annoying, it’s either that or pay for the right to “poke” your casual acquaintences. Again, fine. Put some relevant text-based ads in an outside column or at the top of the page, I may even glance at them once in a while. But use your friends as a medium to spam you? I’m not OK with that.

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy discusses Facebook’s new “Engagement Ads” initiative in which interactive (intrusive?) targeted ads are delivered to users’ profiles. Users are encouraged to comment on the ads, give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, or become a fan of the product. Any of those actions, naturally, then show up in all their friends’ news feeds.

As Wired points out, what this really means is that marketers are using Facebook’s news feed algorithm to deliver advertising to you in your news feed presented as though it was coming from one of your friends, thereby blurring the line between a genuine personal endorsement from a trusted friend and a blatant paid ad.

What does that mean? If you get a newsfeed from someone you haven’t spoken to in years who “totally loved Dark Knight!” it’s probably because Warner Bros. paid to have it broadcast to you.

Normally, information that you put on Facebook is sent to the people in your network who would find it the most valuable. But the algorithm that Facebook has implemented to determine your closest friends can easily be translated into a marketing tool, with Facebook charging advertisers to get your positive messages about their products sent to as many people as they would like.

Of course it’s not just Facebook coming under fire. Twitter, the popular microblogging site, has become a magnet for legitimate advertisers and spammers alike, with spammers masquerading as legitimate users and companies data-mining Twitter posts to be able to deliver targeted ads to users.

I don’t think anyone would disagree that whether it’s technically spam or simply an overly-aggressive advertising technique, it completely undermines the entire social networking ecosystem. After all, once you can no longer differentiate between a real friend and a paid advertisement, you can no longer trust the system that delivers it to you.

Again, I can accept that advertising is part of the deal. Let’s just keep it within the limits.

TVGuide.com seems to be the only rational voice regarding the recent scoring controversy in the women’s gymnastics competition.

On the uneven bars Chinese gymnast He Kexin tied with American gymnast Nastia Liukin, but the Chinese gymnast got the gold medal thanks to an obscure tie-breaking rule. The NBC announcers were naturally outraged.

But TVGuide’s Olympics blog puts it in perspective (emphasis mine):

A great night of performances in a variety of sports was tarnished Monday by some unattractive whining from the NBC gymnastics crew. The controversial tie-breaker in the women’s uneven bars certainly didn’t seem to make sense, but you have to wonder how much howling we would have heard if an American had come out top. China’s He Kexin and Nastia Liukin of the U.S. had identical scores, but a seemingly arbitrary formula gave the gold to He. NBC’s team — Al Trautwig, Elfie Schlegel and Tim Daggett — took great issue with this, and Trautwig even went so far as to question whether He felt she deserved the gold. Back in the studio, bellowing Bela Karolyi continued his ranting to Bob Costas, who did his best to remain impartial. I don’t remember anyone questioning Paul Hamm’s all-around victory four years ago, when a scoring error pushed his South Korean opponent back to silver.

The next event, the men’s vault, also involved a tie-breaker, one with a more clear-cut resolution — and no American athlete involved. The NBC team let that one go.

So just to recap: If there’s a scoring controversy that results in an American losing, then that’s wrong. If it results in an American winning or if no American is involved, then that’s OK.

Blender Magazine polled John McCain and Barack Obama to find out each of the candidate’s top 10 favorite songs.

McCain prefers ABBA (2 songs on the list, including “Dancing Queen” at #1) and Merle Haggard, while Obama lists Bruce Springsteen, The Fugees, and will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” (a song about Obama himself) among his favorites. Both candidates seemed to agree on Frank Sinatra.

Taking the role of devil’s advocate, it would be easy to take a potshot at McCain here. ABBA? The Platters? Are his political views as old and out of touch as his taste in music?

But then there’s Obama’s list. I don’t know. For some reason, it just doesn’t seem very sincere. U2? Nina Simone? How very hip and cool and trendy. A hundred bucks says that some staffer answered this question for him after doing some market research to see what would appeal most to his base.

In that regard, both candidates’ answers are very telling, wouldn’t you agree?

This reminds me of the question posed to President Bush a while back about what music is on his iPod, and he answered The Beatles, which raised the eyebrows of a lot of folks because at the time none of The Beatles’ music was available on iTunes.

So maybe the question for McCain and Obama should be, how many of those songs on your iPod are actually legal?

(A couple of sidenotes:

1.  Yes, it’s probably a stretch to suggest that McCain owns an iPod since he can barely work a computer. The question was what is their favorite songs, regardless of whether they’re on an MP3 player or 8-track.

2.  For the life of me, I can’t erase the image of John McCain dancing around in a sequined jumpsuit singing “Dancing Queen” at the top of his lungs. Yes, I have a twisted mind sometimes, and yes, I’m sorry I’ve now put that same image in your head.)

I’ve really enjoyed watching the Olympics this year, especially the swimming events.  Watching Michael Phelps compete and win gold medal after gold medal is exciting, but it’s almost just expected that he’s going to win and that everyone else is competing for silver and bronze.

But the 2nd-biggest story to come out of Olympic swimming has got to be the sheer number of world records that have been shattered. I knew the new fancy Speedo LZR Racer suit that everyone is wearing had a lot to do with it, but mental_floss has some other reasons as well that aren’t obvious to non-athletic viewers like me.

The pool in Beijing, known as the “Water Cube,” is 3 meters deep, instead of the previous depth of 2 meters. This allows swimmers to dive deeper and continue their push off “dolphin kicks” for a longer period of time. Olympic medalist and commentator Rowdy Gaines says, “It’s just deep enough to where the waves dissipate (and) the turbulence dissipates down to the bottom.”

PhysOrg.com also speculates that the water sanitation and filtration system used in the Water Cube, which oxidizes the water instead of using chlorine, could be giving the athletes an edge:

According to ProMinent, the Ozone technology built and utilized by the Water Cube is the most powerful oxidation agent and disinfectant that exhibits an extremely broad and effective biocide spectrum. It is an environmentally and human-friendly technology that generates ozone from pure oxygen or from oxygen in the ambient air and meter it into the water.

Update: Radar Magazine points out two other features that were not included in the Water Cube that could’ve increased the swimming speeds even more: porous endwalls which would soak up water like a sponge, and starting podiums with adjustable flaps which would give the swimmers something to push off of. The spongy walls were nixed by the Chinese over cost concerns (??) and the podiums were rejected by swimming’s governing body until next year’s world championships.

OK, this is officially the most I’ve ever talked about swimming in my life. Whew!

According the ever-popular (and self-deprecating) blog Stuff White People Like, white people like Facebook:

Social Networking sites have been embraced by white people since their inception. Because these sites use profile pages, white people can more efficiently judge friends and future friends on their taste in film, books, music, and inspirational quotes. Advanced level white people, fearful of being judged on their tastes from last week, will often only list one or two ironic things as their favorites. For example under music they would simply list “P.M. Dawn” or under films they would choose only Armageddon. In both cases these ironic answers serve as protective shields from the harsh gaze of other white people.

(Be right back. Just have to make a few quick edits to my profile. Let’s see, that’s P-dot-M-dot-space…)

So I’m chugging along in my month-long experiment to measure my home Internet usage while simultaneously cursing the very thought of having a usage limit imposed by my ISP, and all of a sudden the question smacks me upside the head: What about cloud computing?

“Cloud computing” is one of those fancy Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?) buzzwords for software that runs from a web server on the Internet instead of your local computer. It extends beyond web-based email or even blogging. Google has a whole suite of web-based applications (Calendar, Google Docs, Picasa, etc.). Adobe has rolled out Acrobat.com as a web-based collaboration tool that integrates with their Acrobat products. They also have Photoshop Express, an online photo storage and editing portal. And Microsoft has their Office Live online application suite. Those are just a few examples.

And then there’s Midori, Microsoft’s experimental web-based platform that could possibly one day replace Windows.

Where do all these things fit in a world of metered Internet access?

The answer is, they don’t. You can’t move your applications, let alone your OS, to the web if the meter’s running every second. It’s gotta be one or the other. The Internet of the future will either populated by web-tethered applications and appliances, allowing for a seamless integration of data across multiple platforms; or it will resemble the Internet of the past, with its dial-up connect-on-demand limitations.

Something really weird has happened since beginning this experiment. Even though my ISP doesn’t currently set any usage limits, just knowing that my usage is being monitored has drastically affected how I think about the Internet. I’m hyper-aware of every song or video I download, every website I visit, every desktop application that polls the Internet for updates.

It used to be in the early days of home Internet access that a dial-up account included a limited number of minutes. As you used it, you unconsciously counted each minute spent online so that you wouldn’t hit your limit before the end of the month. Now imagine that same scenario but with a limit based not on minutes but on megabytes.

With a limited number of bits you can push or pull over the wire, are you going to waste them downloading a movie from Netflix or uploading the pictures of your kid to Shutterfly? Are you going to use them to watch your favorite TV show on ABC.com or Hulu, catch up with your friends on Facebook, or talk to a loved one over Skype? (NBC has already warned visitors about viewing Olympics coverage online if their bandwidth is metered.)

The irony of this metered bandwidth crap is that the same companies pushing for it (AT&T, Time Warner, etc.) are the ones that have the biggest vested interest in keeping it wide open. AT&T, for example, is heavily promoting its U-verse service as a way to compete with Verizon’s FiOS and “triple-play” services offered by many cable companies. If AT&T then put a cap on that Internet usage, that doesn’t exactly fit in with their “Your World Delivered” mantra, does it?

Metered bandwidth may become a reality through much of the U.S. at some point in the near future, but cloud computing is already here and growing. The two are not compatible. Which side do you think I’m on?

Previously:
Metered broadband: an experiment
Bandwidth experiment, day 2: throttled?

Updates (both via Ars Technica):

1. AT&T is launching it’s own cloud computing initiative, again reinforcing the theme of moving applications and data to the web.  While the initiative is for the enterprise while presumably any bandwidth caps would only apply to residential accounts, it seems very hypocritical to push for cloud computing on the one hand, while punishing customers for using the Internet with the other.  Translation: They just want more money from everybody.
2. A researcher at the University at Minnesota has shown that Internet traffic growth rates are stagnant or possibly falling, while transmission rates are declining.  He suggests stimulating traffic growth, in essence increasing demand for Internet usage to meet the supply.  As the article mentions, though, that might not be such a good thing for ISPs who have struggled to provide adequate bandwidth to the last mile.
   

   Any day now, when everyone has fiber to the premises (*cough*), bandwidth caps and throttling issues should hopefully become relics of the distant past. The core has plenty of bandwidth and is growing along with traffic, so once that last-mile gets expanded into an eight-lane superhighway, everything should be copacetic. Until then, we’ll continue to see enlightened policies like 5GB monthly caps.

It’s so hot, the thermometer is on fire:

(From the Forecastfox add-on for Firefox this morning.)