July 2006 Archives

We're on vacation on Long Beach Island today for a week, and Ellen is sitting at the table earlier, playing an online game called "Runescape." To say she gets involved to the exclusion of all around her is an understatement. She's sitting there and apparently Dad tells her some dumb joke and she doesn't even look up. No acknowledgement of anything. So he tells her the joke again. Again, she pulls a Buster Keaton--great stone face. No reaction. Dad finally says "Ellen, can you hear me? I'm talking to you."

Ellen doesn't look up in saying, "yes, but i'm ignoring you."

Oh, boy.

Kim and I were having a conversation in the kitchen. I'm standing there, with my cel phone and bluetooth headset on, we're talking about something, and my cel phone rings. I look at the caller ID and see that it's not just a telemarketer calling my cel phone, but it's a known religious zealot calling to preach to me. On my cel phone, no less!

So, I ask kim to hang on a sec and answer the phone with the friendly words "DIE DIEE DIEEEEE!" in my scariest Bela Lugosi voice. Maybe a little severe, but they deserve it...

Well, they might have deserved it if it were real. The problem was that although all of this happened just like I said, I was dreaming all of it, and the only part that came out out loud, of course, was the "DIE DIEE DIEEEEE!" part in the middle of the night in an otherwise quiet, sleep filled room. Lucky kim got to wake me up from me telling whomever to die horribly, asking me if i knew what I was saying, probably ready to call the police. Or a priest. Or a vet. Fortunately for me, I did remember exactly what prompted my pleasantness and was able to put it together clearly so that I could be at least somewhat understood, instead of being thought of as somewhat homocidal.

The moral of the story? Never call anyone in the middle of the night if you're a religious telemarketer.

OK, so I might not be the most articulate person in the world, but I'm not in congress. This is from William Gibson's Blog and is a quote from a congressman trying to explain about the Net Neutrality law and why it's either a good or a bad thing. The only thing I know for sure is that he wouldn't get my vote, even if I DID live in Alaska:

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), after voting against the Net Neutrality amendment, struggles toward a crucial conceptualization:

There's one company now you can sign up and you can get a movie delivered to your house daily by delivery service. Okay. And currently it comes to your house, it gets put in the mail box when you get home and you change your order but you pay for that, right.

But this service isn't going to go through the interenet and what you do is you just go to a place on the internet and you order your movie and guess what you can order ten of them delivered to you and the delivery charge is free.

Ten of them streaming across that internet and what happens to your own personal internet?

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

So you want to talk about the consumer? Let's talk about you and me. We use this internet to communicate and we aren't using it for commercial purposes.

We aren't earning anything by going on that internet. Now I'm not saying you have to or you want to discrimnate against those people [...]

The regulatory approach is wrong. Your approach is regulatory in the sense that it says "No one can charge anyone for massively invading this world of the internet". No, I'm not finished. I want people to understand my position, I'm not going to take a lot of time. [?]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?

Do you know why?

Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can't afford getting delayed by other people.

Tubes. It's all about tubes.