furtive explorations

And now I regret it if a day goes by without posting. I tend to mega post after those days to "make up for it". Pretty cool that the scene is getting written up in the papers at this odd junction of shitty markets and failing dotcoms.

If approved, the campus' 10 to 20 data centers would be completely self-sufficient, thanks to a new Critical Reliable Energy Center (CREC). The CREC would generate enough excess power during its first three years of operation that it would enable U.S. Data Port to sell the surplus electricity back to the county's local utilities.

About 2 million square feet of data center space is required to offset the cost of building and operating a CREC, said Shadle. U.S. Data Port's CREC is costing about $300 million. "If your primary business is hosting Web sites and managing IT infrastructure, then your core business is not real estate, energy or the network," he said.

U.S. Data Port's 250-megawatt CREC will be about half the size of an average local public power-generation facility and will generate enough electricity to power about 2,500 homes. Officials say the system will be reliable enough to offer less than 10 minutes of failure in 20 years.

A 2 million sq. ft. facility is 1000x500 floor tiles. Even including the endzones you could stuff about 40 football fields into that. Cabinets are 1.5 floor tiles big, or 6 sq. ft. They need about 3-5 feet between them for aisleway and you will blow about 5% of the floor space to HVAC and power distribution. loose another 5% to extra aisles and edges. Call it 1.8 million sq. ft. and use 14 sq. ft. per cabinet and front aisle. The back aisle is the next cabinet's front. That is 128,500 cabinets, approximately. Even with bad layout and 5ft aisles they get 100,000 cabinets in there. With 2 machines per "U" coming in the future and 42 "U" per cabinet that means a possible 8,200,000 computers in the center.

That has to be completely silly. I sure hope we snipe enough local business away to make megacenters like that the dinosaur they sound like.

Racing was set to return to the famous Sandown track today with an appearance by the much-adored Queen Mum. The grand old lady of Britain's monarchy was warned to wear sensible shoes because she, like everyone else, would be required to walk through a disinfectant dip. What kind of shoes does she normallywear to the race track? Furry mukluks with feathers and sequins?

One creative betting Web site has introduced hamster races; not as entertaining as horses, but for the compulsive gamblers, a race is a race. This section of the article is what we call "filler". OTOH, hamsters!!! Where did they get this idea?

The hamster race is set up so that there are six rodents racing simultaneously along a 30-foot track. In a nail-biting clincher, the winners of each of the week's four races will compete together in a showdown to see who will claim the title of Britain's fastest hamster. Come one, come all, see the fastest hampster i the whole of Britain orThis Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, it is Hamster, Hamster, Hamster Action! Kids get in half price! Also appearing will be the girls of Alligator Wrestling!

"You put an exercise wheel in the middle of a 10-inch-long dragster. As they run in the wheel, it moves the thing forward," Ed Pownall, a spokesman for the online company Blue Square, told The Associated Press. Note this word dragster. Not car or cart or vehicle or buggy. Dragster. Can you see these things kicking up tires and popping the front end up on the start? Little hamsters dying in flaming wreckage when the front wing pops loose and the car flips over and turns itself into scrap? Plowing into walls after the braking chutes fail to open? Exhaust pouring smoke and fire as they come off the line too quick and red-out the tree? Now, that I would pay to see.

Blue Square has been taking up to 350 bets per race — not an enormous number compared to the thousands of bets normally placed on horse races, but a spectacle nonetheless for those logging on to watch. No, the real spectacle is what the people betting on this are making...

Keep your eyes open and you will see more and more finely-pointed sites showing up. Why go to a hobbies.com when you have a love for Action-oriented Videogames? Look for the big players in general services to offer their sites out as ways for others to meet and greet in well-defined subject fields. Heck it is happening now, go look at Yahoo Groups or listen to Ebay's ideas on putting micro auction sections on other people's sites. They run it, you brand it and keep it on topic.

People pretty much communicate the same ways. Some cultures will grow up around news-post style groups and some around instant chatter and others around more restrained discussion areas or mail lists. A few companies will make ways to tie those all up in a bundle with a few other services from heavy-duty service providers and you will see thousands of micro sites that keep people in touch with other people they want to know. Actually, you probably won't see most of them. You'll just find the few you love and occasionally hear about another that one of your friends likes a lot. =)

Also, to match posts, It looks like the POS will be sold for about as much money as I could possibly hope to get out of it. I'm going to go down tomorrow and get a new deed for it since I can't fricking find the old one. Also, I suppose I have to have GM fax me a letter stating that the lien is removed from it. Oh well, at least it gets a good home, a loving family, a buncha repairs and a second chance to die a glorious Camaro death -- blazing away on a road-side, engulfed in flames with bits of metal scattered behind it for a quarter-mile, slowing rush-hour traffic to a standstill. A beautiful, beautiful automotive way to go.

Speaking of car deaths... Psych! No way am I getting into that silly debate. The man died doing what he loved, people who love doing that will continue to do it. You can't swaddle the entire nation in soft words, round corners, and Sesame Street videos.

OTOH, what distracted me was possibly selling my old Piece of Shit to a loving new family of fixer-upper types who love the Camaro style. Now I get to spend tomorrow dealing with title changes and trying to keep my license. Yay! I get to visit the government!

Cannonical Tomes Catches my eye. I dunno if it will work. I'd bet on a shout fest or no one every going there after a week. They should have primed the pump with about 15 books in each category just to get things started. Man is it sparse in places.

Pieces of Peace come raining down. The Mir is falling, the Mir is falling! I wonder if these people have any idea how many tons of material hit the atmosphere every year? 130 tons isn't even that big, except that it is all at once and moving sooo slow. Plus, unlike prior falls *ahem* skylab *ahem* they can still steer this one.

Mozilla libpr0n is coming soon to a browser near you! Faster, better image conversion == faster browser for viewing Pr0n. Thus, the name. =)

Denial of Service on Exchange isn't the real story. Yet Another DOS on IIS just makes a really boring headline. They found another URL bug based on buffer overruns. Make the URL just the right size and make it an error and you can "blowed up" the server. Those with long memories will recall one of these getting fixed years ago in the great NT choose-your-poison days. Do you want the newest OS patch or the newest BackOffice patch -- Pick one? Did you really think they wouldn't have the same bug crop up again? Comeon, they are only human after all. Heck, even Apache had a few of those years ago. Oops, bad example, they haven't had any since... =)

The new domains from ICANN are delayed. Thus, the natives are getting restless and some goof had to stand up and start Yet Another Domain Name Registry. These "pirate" or "underground" registries have popped up more than once but they have never gotten off the ground because they can't get enough groundswell up to get a majority of the providers on board. If AOL and a couple other major ISPs start using them, they will stick and break it wide open, if not, be glad you didn't spend $25 for a domain you can't use. Either way, you lose, a broken and factionalized registry does no one any good and a slow, dodgy one isn't likely to move well with the times. Once they work out this "test period" and get a few new registries and suffixes live, they should commit to 1 new suffix every month for 2 years. They don't have to all be ".com" super domains but they should at least try and look nimble or we will simply trample over them.

Sex.com still fucked up Hah. There is my obligatory sex.com headline joke. What a great soap-opera! Too bad its relevance is now approximately zero...

Search Seizures... This little, unassuming "case-next-door" will have a deeper effect on your life one way or another for the next 20 years than you might think. See, this year it is infra red, next year it is microwave laser backscatter and diffractive ground-based radar and other wacky shit. There are already active "gun-shot scanning" microphones in some neighborhoods to listen for and note the times of gunshots and automatically alert the police and attempt to triangulate the sound.

3 parter on blogs with Ev skirts the sad story that is going on over there at Pyra and amazing thing this blogger nonsense has become. Don't worry Ev, some of us still believe that the Pyra dream was the real break through and that blogger is just the tip of the iceberg...

Pocket presenter I almost just linked this up with the sex.com bit above. It is cool enough to show on it's own. A VGA-Out for a Handspring Visor that can be used for video presentations. I think the "Powerful Presentations From Your Pocket" slogan may have to be tossed though. We are talking joke trying to escape here...

Rodopi What a goofy name for a billing package. Still I like its options and its price. Maybe it will help us cut corners at work so I have a job for 2002. =)

I need fucking titles and Blogger doesn't do them. Plus I want keywords and search. And I want styles by topic. And I want embedded images by category. And I want dynamic content.

For now, I'm faking the titles inline in the text but I want them to float with the templated layout eventually. I'm going to have to write my own weblog soon, I can feel it. And in order to do it right, I'm going to need MySQL or Postgres and mod_perl and TT2 and a newer Apache and dangit a newer computer with a bigggggger hardrive that can swing all that. And I'll wind up doing some evil XML hack with Blogger to rip my archives. And it will never wind up as cool as blogger is with the options and will be spaghetti coded when I get sick of doing it right and will cause me no end of headaches and I have too many side projects and well shit.

That may be an "and" record for me too. Too bad I can't search and see...

I have no idea what the real deal is behind Rock Toons, so I have to guess that it really is just what it seems. A horrible, horrible pun gone awry and now the breeding ground for freakish art. =) PB Galaxy is a running SciFi toon hidden away on the site. Getting better with each update. This is one I will be watching closer...

I hope to begin to seperate my current interests and start moving some of the comic stuff to its own set of pages. I've clearly stuck with them long enough that they aren't going away any time soon. And I'm feeling more and more latent words that are trying to crawl out of my head about them. I need a place that isn't this temporally constrained to put thoughts like these poking about in my brain.

Obviously, when it finally happens, a lot of it will pop up here and I'll likely use this as a leader into it with short blurbs from the articles I kick out. Promise. =)

Strip Notes:I'm updating the link to Dykes to Watch Out For since I hate having to remember where it is on the site. My only real "gay" comic in the modern they've-made-this-insult-a-complement sense. I don't count JerkCity since it really is just mind-bogglingly rude moreso than "gay". Also, Sheldon, You Damn Kid, and Ozy and Millie move up to M-F, Occasional, and Daily, respectively.

Also, I think Blokhed may be gone. *sniff* Also, it looks like Whore Bucket isn't going to post again either. That sucks greatly. Both of them had rather unique art styles that I wished to talk about. At least WB is still a live archive; see it while you can.

In the middle of a huge net.bust, where is all the speculative cash coming from for the Napster Clones? I guess some VCs just haven't yet lost enough...

AOL seems to have forgotten they are a big, evil faceless corporation and are finally standing up for small, not-quite-evil, faceless people. Either that or they are just sick of subpoenas asking them to reveal who posted the most recent insulting message and the quickly following backlash as all the mouthy types realize that yelling FIRE in a chatroom might get them in trouble too.

Electronic Paper. Hmm does anyone other that pathetic geeks like me remember the company/product "GRiD"? Basically a laptop with a touchscreen/handwriting interface. It was crushed out of existence either because M$ fucked their world or because no one in their right mind would spend all day writing on a 6 pound piece of glass with a shitty OS. Heck even Microsoft couldn't get anyone to buy their version for Windows. It took like 8 years for the handwriting/touchscreen interface to find a real home. And no, we don't consider mall/museum/travel kiosks as anything more than gimmicks. Printing a new book each week would have been cheaper, folks. Palm and Handspring have proven the interface a winner though I still find myself scribbling notes on the back of a business card. I'd bet on a similar fate for EP. In fact, the same fate might work. Would EP get me a high resolution PDA with lower power output? A PDA that can keep a static picture up even when off? Hmmm...

If you should happen to read this article you will see a nice repeating of other people passing the buck on who is "to blame" for the "Dot-com" ballon inflation and subsequent giant-razzberry deflating sound. Also included at no extra charge from a no doubt equally guilty pressman is some mild tch-tch'ing over all the blame being hurled about like Earnhart tributes.

The final thrust of the article is "Hey look at all the whiny people who got their comeupance." Of course, if this is all there was to it, would I be in rant mode?

The naked fact is that people are personally smart and mob stupid. The more people in on a discision the worse it is going to be. If it is a good choice, it took forever and made permanent enemies; most of the other paths that mob-rule take are much worse than that happy outcome.

Now my history isn't much better than anyone else in my generation but let us just try for the sake of argument to think of a prior time in the dark past when people acted in a like manner. Let us also try and remember who they blamed at the time when the bubble burst and who history finally blamed...

First, an obvious one for all Americans, the California Gold Rush. Ahh the smell of easily obtained, life modifying wealth. Massive numbers of people hurry to one place trying to it while the getting is good. Staking out their claims in an ever shrinking space, pining at how the people that beat them there have snatched up all the good spots only to try and sell them later when they can't develop them all. Can you say "Domain Names"? Good, I knew you could! Remember also the larger rush of people who headed out there to service those people and the insane things they did in the name of efficiency. They sent laundry to Hawaii!

Second, a good one for our European brethern to ponder, Spice Fever. They blew up mountains, treked through deserts, conquered foreign powers and ran hundreds of ships aground trying to find better, newer spice routes and ways to get there and back faster. Heck, the POPE got involved. Better still the later years of that lead to our third point and yet more trouble with the Pope.

Third, another obvious one for many Americans and quite a few others, the rush to conquer the "New World". This one stretched out over quite a while as a legitimate enterprise but if you read the histories there was a huge explosion of completely silly expeditions and mad companies founded strictly on rumor and speculation between 1492 and the eventual opening of real trade routes.

Fourth, back to Europe and especially Britain for this one, Tea in India. One big company and a thousand little enterprises. Some nasty wars, some nastier politics, and quite a bit of agriculture. All because the whole continent had decided when their blood sugar dropped low around two PM that they would rather drink a stimulant and have a sugar cookie than take a little siesta and rumple their taffeta. Dig back a little and spot the tea madness that surrounded it all.

And a few assorted more for people to ponder here and there: African slave boom, sugar cane, railroads, interstates in America, industrial expansion, diamonds in Africa, oil in Brazil, coffee/banana republics, etc...

The point of all this is, people are really greedy. Seriously, that is the whole problem. Every major economic-socialogical change is followed by a speculative boom-and-bust period before the world settles down and goes back to hoping they win the lottery. Some of the events change the world more than others, some cause more of a stir than others, some cost more lives and livelyhoods but in the end the pattern is the same. You will see it again before this decade is out, in one form or another.

Those who ignore the past are doomed to start pets.com and hire a sock puppet to promote their company.

First, comics on the radar screen:

• TrueNuff seems to be rather amusing. It shall likely be added to the side bar for watching. I like the goofy giant round head style.
• Comics Ex Machina may bear looking at again if only for the interesting things they do with real photo backgrounds...
• KeenParody probably isn't worth the effort to read unless you know a serious number of KeenSpot comics and rather a few others. Art is pretty crappy and so it the attitude but they hit a few notes as clear as bells.
• Beetle Classics is for those who like The Japanese Beetle but wish it had less refined art and vague historical perspective on how the TJB came about. Pretty darn cool in my book.

From the browsing of comic artists comes this art site. Aimee's Art is pretty darn good. And her eponymous Aimee Kitty is quite the cutie. I can't draw a good picture of a fish but this lady can make a cat-girl that blazes with life... Oh yeah, here is a guy who can draw better with his eyes than I can with my hands...

Computers: IBM begins to seriously pimp Linux. Way cool, make sure you click on all the little dots and arrows. Sez there they will spend 1/5th of their $5 Billion R&D budget on Linux related research. And they don't feel that they will be the major player. There you go geeks. 10 years of volunteer labor has been priced at more than $10 Billion worth of research. P.S. Linux runs great on our NetFinities at work. And our Cobalts. We partner with 'em but that didn't influence this post. Fucking corporations can take care their own advertising...