Author: cosmo

So it’s 1:30 in the morning and I’m hard at work, jamming to some tunes and configuring servers. All of a sudden this big fat spider saunters across my desk like he owns the place. No fear at all.

Now, normally if it’s a smallish spider I’ll kind of scoop him up and take him outside, because everyone knows spiders outside are helpful and eat all those pesky bugs. But quite honestly, at 1:30 in the morning I’m not in the mood to be patient and gentle with a big juicy guy walking right past my keyboard.

So I grabbed some tent stakes (yes, I have tent stakes in my office… you never know when you might need them) and smashed him. Then I looked around and found an old paper towel in the trash, which I decided I’d use to pick him up, throw him away, and wipe the spider guts off my desk.

But.

When I turned to wipe him up, he was gone. Completely. Nowhere to be seen. Yet he’d left one leg behind (the tent stakes mashed him pretty good) and a bit of juicy stuff. How he managed to even survive the Tent Stakes of Doom is a mystery, but even more mysterious is how he crawled away across the desk in just a few seconds.

So now I sit here, a little worried because apparently this is a spider that can’t be killed by conventional means, and frankly he’s pretty ticked about the whole leg thing, and he’s silently plotting his revenge.

If he comes back, I’ll run him over with my mouse.

In the United States, the median download speed of a “broadband” internet connection (like the Comcast line I’m using now) is around 6 Mbps, or just under a megabyte per second.

In Japan, the median speed is 78 Mbps, or thirteen times faster than ours. Moreover, they’ve already deployed gigabit (1,000 Mbps) symmetric fiber broadband in some places, and plan to have the entire country running at least that fast by 2011. They’ve successfully tested– though not deployed for commercial use– connections running upwards of 160 Gbps. That’s more than 26,000 times faster than the U.S. median.

Now, Japan is a smallish country and it’s probably easier to deploy fiber all over the place, but considering how heavily the U.S. economy (not to mention most aspects of American business) rely on fast internet, you’d think we’d take a page from their playbook and bump up these speeds a bit.

An awesome (albeit obscure) entry from a contest on Fark. The topic was “It seemed like a good idea at the time”.

I laughed pretty hard at this, which annoyed Laralee who’s trying to get to sleep beside me.

(As an aside, almost all toothpastes contain sodium laurel sulfate, which is what makes it foam when you brush. But it deadens your taste buds to citric acid, which is why drinking orange juice after brushing tastes absolutely terrible.)

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.”

— Theodore H. White

At Zing we took the afternoon to race go-karts at a nearby track. Loads of fun.

(This isn’t us, but we looked pretty much like this except maybe our overalls weren’t quite as professional.)

I found this awesome family photo:

And now I can’t help but think about how I could get a t-shirt that says

JEFF
The man. The myth.
The legend.

(Oh, and the rest of the ensemble for Laralee and the kids.)

We ran the Longmont Sunrise Stampede today. It’s only two miles, so we finished in around 20 minutes. No biggie, but still a good time.

And it got me out of bed early– we were finished and I’d showered and dressed for the day by the time I would normally just be rolling out of bed!

Thom sent me a link to some old ads (circa 1930). Apparently people were much more blunt back in the Olden Days…

… and honestly, a little creepy. “Tingling pleasantly all over” indeed.

Fark had a Photoshop contest where they asked people to submit music album covers redesigned as advertisements.

This was far and away my favorite.

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

— John Gardner