wow.
Life begins at 100 Mbps!

is an amazing bit of analysis which demonstrates that the former cto of british telecom is a smarty. if you’d like an inside peak into how the broadband situation got to such a sorry state then read the whole thing. twice. it also points towards a vision of a future that should sound familiar:

“So how are we going to advance? I think we have been here before. Back in the 1940s USA TV companies couldn’t find an economic means of providing signals to outlying communities. So people clubbed together to build towers and antenna systems, and wired their houses to realize Community Antenna TV. This was so successful that the expanded systems became the Cable systems of today.

In a similar manner, youngsters now frustrated by the lack of bandwidth are linking homes with CAT5 LAN wiring strewn across gardens. Schools are buying 802.11 wireless-LAN cards to create their own networks at a much lower cost than building wiring schemes. There is a message here for the network companies, and a huge opportunity. If they don’t provide the bandwidth demanded by rapidly advancing terminal technologies, people will just set to and provide their own. Hotels, schools, coffee shops and places of work are starting to look like the phone boxes of the 21st Century. People are gathering there to satisfy their craving for wide-bandwidth, which isn’t a 56Kbit/s or 2Mbit/s dribble, but orders of magnitude more.”

[ via
interesting people

]

i’m not sure exactly what it means, but it sounds like as good a resolution as any. maybe it’d be easier than quitting all those other bad habits that i’ve accumulated over the years.

while a few of of the photos are taken by people who went to the steven spielberg school of emotional manipulation, many of the shots from
msnbc year in pictures

are extraordinary.

it might just be me but it seems that the holidays put a much bigger damper on the blogging activity this year. i guess everyone’s out enjoying friends and family. bah! well, at least
glenn fleishman

has a few interesting things to say about
how networks mature:

“I believe my reports have been mistaken for extolling Boingo qua Boingo: rather, I am excited about the message that Boingo sends. Wi-Fi is open for business. Wireless ISPs are willing to cut the kinds of deals necessary to create more traffic on their networks to reach, ultimately, a repayment of their investment and actual profit.”

[ via
doc

]

while we haven’t seen nearly as much snow as
buffalo

, western michigan is still getting a good amount of
accumulation

thanks to the lake effect – over thirty inches have fallen since sunday with more expected through new years’ day.

whoa. time is flying by. i hope everyone had a happy x.mas, if you’re into that type of thing. you can all rest assured that the universe is continuing to engage in shenanigans at my expense. on christmas day, while happily enjoying a fine ritz cracker, i cracked a filling in a molar and lost about 70 percent of my tooth (i have one and only one really, really deep cavity).

thanks to modern dental technology, i got a quick repair job this morning for a whole 36 dollars. it involved injecting some gel on my tooth which polymerized in the presence of UV light, so no exposed nerve endings for me. whoohoo.

i usually downplay the fact that the literal translation in inuit of my last name, snowdeal, is “one who deals or makes snow”. simply put, this means i can control the moisture content in the air. of course, in the winter this translates into the ability to “call forth” snow.

i don’t talk about it much because it seems like one of those things that doesn’t seem so special. just look at who my role models were growing up. sure,
iceman

was o.k., but
aquaman

pretty much ruined any chance that water-based superpowers would gain widespread acceptance. granted, aquaman, just talked with the fish and didn’t really have anything to do with altering moisture content, but that’s the power of guilt-by-association.

besides the lack of any strong role model, there was also the big blizzard of ’78 in downeast maine. i was 8 and catholic and the nuns had plenty to say about fire and brimstone and remembering what happened to the women in salem. so, since having the fear of being turned into a pillar of salt, i haven’t been motivated to put my powers to use, save for the occasional mild humid day here or a flurry there.

if you live in the midwest, then i don’t have to tell you how pathetic an excuse for winter we’ve been experiencing and last night i decided that enough was enough and that i’d probably escape divine retribution with an inch or two of white stuff – nothing fancy-schmancy, just enough to give a capra-esque flavor to christmas eve.

so how did it turn out? well, i should have taken refresher course on the best laid plans and good intentions, since i awoke this morning to about 4 inches of snow and we might just end up with 8-12 inches by the end of christmas day.

yup, the dang lake-effect moisture has turned a little into a lot.