Sometimes you see something you want to buy, and you just can’t come up with any way to justify the purchase, except that it will, for a limited time, be a new toy that brings geeky contentment. That’s how I’m feeling right now about the Asus Eee PC. What a great machine for traveling and…not a lot else. Hmm.

We’re really having a news media field day about Obama’s “fist bump?” I refuse to talk about it here, except to say that the incident, like so many others, puts me in the mind of this slightly off-color Onion news report.

Braun: Mr. O’Leary, how can we in the news media do a better job of focusing on bullshit and really hounding candidates on these petty issues?
O’Leary: The fact is you’re doing a great job as it is. If it wasn’t for the media, there would be a lot less bullshit in these elections.

It may be 100º here, but that’s nothing compared to what tempers are going to be come this winter, when people start worrying about home heating oil. In the Northeastern United States, over six million homes use heating oil. Last October, the average cost per gallon of No. 2 heating oil in Massachusetts was $2.32. At the end of the season, in March, that cost had risen to $3.81. How much do you want to bet that by next season it’ll be up to six dollars or more? I’m no expert, but I wonder if this is a looming crisis for the region, and one that Hugo Chavez isn’t going to be able to bail us out of.

Summer rudely interrupted our fun this weekend, with muggy weather and temperatures occasionally topping 100ºF just a couple days after Harvard’s commencement exercises were nearly rained out. We should be swimming and boating, but in reality we have retreated to our air conditioned homes and our television sets. Spy Pond is right down the road but, like most of the water around here, it is too polluted for safe swimming. But for that (and a place to store it), I’d buy myself a kayak. A sad waste of a precious weekend.

I discovered today that EZPass New Jersey, in addition to the monthly $1 service fee, also charges me a $1 monthly fee for the privilege of receiving an email reminder that my bill has been posted online. That’s really thoughtful of them. I know in these days of fuel surcharges and turmoil in the Middle East, the cost of sending an automated email alert is going up, and I’m glad they aren’t passing those increasing costs on to me, their loyal customer.

I came into my new job not looking to get into any fights, turf wars, or political battles, but just to hunker down and get some stuff done. I’ve finally come to the realization that that sort of silly “can-do” attitude is going to get me exactly nowhere in this place. Three months to get a single server‽ So I’ve sat, twiddling my thumbs, when I guess I should have been fighting people instead of assuming they’d do the right thing.

It is too easy to get caught up in partisan traps. I never bothered to figure out what John McCain was trying to say when he got caught with the “100 years in Iraq” statement, so I looked it up. Of course, it is not nearly so unreasonable as Democratic Party attack ads make it out to be.

Which is important, because I consider myself a moderate, even if today in America moderate-liberal tendencies have somehow been transformed into “radical left.” And I like to try and believe in the fundamental goodness of people, most of the time.

Hillary Clinton has fallen slowly but inexorably into moral bankruptcy, to the point where I cannot see her in the White House. If somehow she wrests away the primary victory from Obama through underhandedness and fear-mongering, I might be driven to vote for McCain. He is threading a very dangerous needle, but I still feel on the whole that he is probably a principled man, even if, after his 2000 trumping by Bush, he is a changed one, and not for the better.

Edit: Okay, maybe not with the voting for McCain business. Gotta keep some perspective…

For those who say I never write about work anymore…
The first time I met the CIO of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences was a hastily convened meeting on the day that we were moving Berkman from Baker House to 23 Everett. I was dirty, smelly, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and I didn’t even know what we were meeting about.

Today, with no deadlines or meetings or people to bug, I spent the morning working from home. I knew I had to go in at 1pm for a training in the new version of our helpdesk software. Since it was just a two hour training and I wasn’t technically in the office, I threw on a t-shirt, khakis, and Tevas, and biked my unshaved, unshowered self over to the Science Center.

Who should plop down in the seat beside me but, of all people, our CIO, who had decided to drop in on the class. Unfortunate.

I wish I could remember things. In this 2004 blog entry I make a joke: Take that Walter Lippman! Reading it again today, my first reaction was, who? That’s probably the cast for most of my college-acquired knowledge.

Edit: It’s worse than that. I just looked over at my bookshelf. There, on the bottom, is Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, shelved next to a Su Doku book. Sigh.

There is this great Dinosaur Comics strip about saying stupid things on the internet. His thought is that after about five years, we gain the ability to look back on anything and laugh and say, “oh, but I was so young and stupid back then!” With that in mind, I present a few past online properties of my making.

• Boogle – The front page of the Brandeis network scanner/file search engine I developed and ran for a while, until the legal atmosphere made it increasingly unsafe to do so. Everything works except the actual search. Check out the past logos for some fun times.
• JehudaDaddy.com – A silly domain name registered on a lark and then filled with a silly little article.
• Who Cares? – My freshman-year student senate campaign web site.

There is also one special entry that I found while poking around on an old backup CD-ROM. It is the site of my erstwhile web design business, Terrestrial Concepts. I was very proud of this site at the time; I pored into it tons of love and time and effort, and all of the HTML and web design tricks that I knew.

Comcast has all but confirmed that they are moving forward with a plan to implement clear bandwidth caps and overage fees in their cable internet service plans. This would mean that very heavy users of their internet service would be charged higher rates once they pass a certain monthly limit, currently proposed at 250GB.

I don’t have much respect for Comcast, and I’m always wary of any sort of entrenched monopoly doing anything that has the potential to harm customers, but at first blush this seems like a reasonable, open, and equitable solution to an ongoing and vexing problem. It is true that new internet applications increasingly focus on things like streaming video and moving around large chunks of data, and so-called “unlimited” broadband is an important component in the growth of these new services. In an ideal world, bandwidth would be plentiful and cheap.

Right now, in the US broadband market, bandwidth is somewhat constrained, but generally not terribly expensive. However, cable and telephone companies — the primary providers of service to something like 90% of American broadband users — feel that to expand and improve their aging and sometimes decrepit cable plant, they need to find new revenue models. Their other ideas include strange behavior like messing with internet protocols at a very low level to surreptitious disrupt certain types of traffic (and thus save their bandwidth bills by stymying heavy users), as well as the ludicrous idea of demanding that content providers pay for the bandwidth that their readers and viewers use. These violations of the concept of “network neutrality” would be harmful to pretty much everyone, except the broadband providers, who would make a bundle.

In that context, Comcast’s new idea of imposing reasonable bandwidth caps and charging reasonable overage fees, with reasonable procedures in place to inform customers and give them the occasional free pass, all in an open and documented and agreed to way, is the best thing I’ve heard so far in this whole ridiculous debate. Sure, I wouldn’t be thrilled to have my internet bill go up, and I’d certainly worry about whether Comcast might decide at some point to start lowering quotas and tightening enforcement. In a free market, all of these things would be fine, because more information would allow consumers to make more informed choices, including the choice to leave a company that is giving them a bad deal. Broadband internet is not a free market, but, in many markets, it is becoming an increasingly competitive one, as cablecos and telcos poach each other’s subscribers. We can rely on market forces, to a point, to keep providers like Comcast in line, and we can rely on increased scrutiny by the FCC, Congress, and the press to hold them to their commitments.

And so with all of those caveats and worries in mind, I accept, if not applaud, Comcast’s new direction, and look forward with at least a tiny bit of optimism and hope that perhaps there is light at the end of the net neutrality tunnel.

I’m having a lot of fun reading Pipe International’s blog documenting the process of building and deploying their PPC-1 undersea telecommunication cable. The cable is running from Sydney, Australia to Guam, where it will peer with other high-capacity submarine cables into various parts of Asia. It is fascinating to learn a bit more about the amazing advances in engineering that make the installation of a 6,500 kilometer long, 1.92 Terabit per second fiber-optic cable a reality. When it comes right down to it, they are building a massive infrastructure around a pair of tiny glass fiber cables that are each the width of a human hair. And through that itty bitty cable, they are able to pipe an amount of data equivalent to, oh, I dunno, some large number of Libraries of Congress per second. Or the example they use, a system that could accommodate the entire population of Australia simultaneously making overseas telephone calls.

Now, I know that a light channel that carries 10 gigabits per second needs to pulse ten billion times a second in order to work its magic, but I never really thought about that number: ten billion light pulses per second! And then, they multiplex it on different light wavelengths so that there are 96 simultaneous data streams, each 10 gigabits per second, which adds up to 960 gigabits per second, and then another cable doing the same thing in the other direction. All this over a fiber pair the width of a couple human hairs, traveling over six thousand kilometers over the ocean floor. And the time it takes for the data to get from Sydney to Guam? 35 milliseconds.

Yeah, when you think about it, its pretty damn cool.

It was apparently a suicide. How strange, and sad. Last July we spoke with her on the phone, back when she was in high spirits about her upcoming legal dispute. Needless to say, it didn’t go well for her, convicted on all counts and due to be sentenced next month to a multi-year jail term. All of her assets had been seized long before under ridiculous civil forfeiture laws.

I think all the members of the team agree that it is time to retire DC Phone List. In case you don’t remember, here is the background, here is the Hill article, and here is my On the Media radio interview.

So what do we think, is Hillary Clinton staking the future of her candidacy on Obama having a large enough “gaffe” to derail his campaign? Because that seems like the only realistic chance she has of winning the nomination, and thus her only justification for tearing apart her party with a never ending nomination fight. No one likes giving up.

Or wait, is the eventual Democratic strategy going to be a twist on Clinton’s, namely hoping for a McCain health problem to sour the public to his candidacy? If so, they may be in for a shock, since the odds good at this point that he’ll live at least another ten years.

There is a really weird but excessively interesting New Yorker article called Mine Is Longer Than Yours about life expectancy. The author calls it “the last boomer game.” I’d quote at length, but life is (I guess) short, so here’s a morsel that might encourage you to click through:

We are born thinking that we’ll live forever. Then death becomes an intermittent reality, as grandparents and parents die, and tragedy of some kind removes one or two from our own age cohort. And then, at some point, death becomes a normal part of life—a faint dirge in the background that gradually gets louder. What is that point? One crude measure would be when you can expect, on average, one person of roughly your age in your family or social circle to die every year. At that point, any given death can still be a terrible and unexpected blow, but the fact that people your age die is no longer a legitimate surprise, and the related fact that you will, too, is no longer avoidable.

With some heroic assumptions, we can come up with an age when death starts to be in-your-face. We will merge all sexual and racial categories into a single composite American. We will assume that there are a hundred people your age who are close enough to be invited to your funeral. Your funeral chapel won’t fit a hundred people? No problem. On average, half of them will be too busy decomposing to attend. As Max Beerbohm noted in his novel “Zuleika Dobson,” “Death cancels all engagements.” And why a hundred? Because it’s easy, and also because it’s two-thirds of “Dunbar’s number,” of a hundred and fifty, which is supposedly the most relationships that any one set of human neurons can handle. We’re crudely assuming that two-thirds of those are about your age.

Anyway, the answer is sixty-three. If a hundred Americans start the voyage of life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns sixteen. At forty, their lives are half over: further life expectancy at age forty is 39.9. And at age sixty-three the group starts losing an average of one person every year. Then it accelerates. By age seventy-five, sixty-seven of the original hundred are left. By age one hundred, three remain.

I’m doing some Microsoft stuff at work, and in order to keep my sanity I’ll post the occasional inanity that I discover, at least if they’re humorous. I guess the requirement of one AD server for every 3 web servers is more sad than humorous, so that doesn’t count. But hey, check out this great error message!

A request has been received to deliver files over the internet. Because we had to launch this super-fancy ActiveX control to manage your huge download, clearly it is something big and important. So can you verify that you requested a file called “anyfile” with an extension of “ext?” Kay, thanks.

I’ve now had my Nikon D70 digital SLR camera for almost three years, and in that time I’ve taken about 600 photos that I have considered worthy enough to put on Flickr (some of which I have not yet posted). It looks like after listing fees and shipping and such, I could get about $400 on eBay for a camera that originally cost me closer to $1000, meaning a 60% depreciation or, put another way, each of those pictures cost about a buck apiece.

I love my Nikon D70, but a few months ago I made perhaps not the wisest decision in the world, purchasing a pretty amazing telephoto lens that, while powerful and convenient, also adds additional weight and bulk to an already weighty and bulky camera. As a consequence, I find I’m now even less likely to take my big, heavy, expensive rig with me when I go places. And there’s not much point having an amazing camera if you never take it anywhere.

So I’m thinking I might be putting camera and lens up on the auction block and “downgrading” to the smaller, cheaper, lighter, cuter Nikon D40. Being able to worry less about the heft and price of the equipment means being able to worry more about taking good pictures, which is really the point. Or am I crazy?

Neil Gaiman writes:

I drove Maddy to school this morning. She has an extremely cool crescent-shaped scar next to her eye, from when, as a small child, she ran into the corner of a table.

Weird. I also have a crescent-shaped scar next to my eye from when, as a small child, I ran into the corner of a table. From now on I’m gonna start explaining it the way Maddy does: sword fight. With Spiderman.

Reading The Subtle Knife, which is the second book after The Golden Compass in Philip Pullman’s trilogy, and enjoying it, but not being “wowed” by it. Climbing at Metro Rock with, among others, Deirdre! Playing the occasional game of Settlers. Trying to understand the cat’s neuroses, including his constant need to stare at the ceiling. Watching the first Battlestar Galactica of the new season, and loving it. Watching the first Doctor Who of the new season and hating it. Skiing at Mount Sunapee with Jer and having an absolute blast.