Well, we got our new modem yesterday. This was an upgrade by Iowa Telecom. MidIowa Net just resells their DSL service. They scheduled the upgrade from between 9:00 am and 2:00 pm. I dunno why they didn’t do it at night. Doesn’t make much sense to me.
I installed the new modem this morning around 9:30. Internet came back on around 10:30. Most people in the Nevada office are in Ankeny this morning for a bunch of meetings about some new diet lines. It’s good that most people are gone on the day that the intenet was out for a few hours. I’m just glad it didn’t take until 2:00 pm, I have to check for orders online at noon. I probably would have just downloaded the orders at home during lunch if we didn’t have internet by noon.
The speeds increase wasn’t very great. I get a little over 60kb/sec down. Mediacom, my cable ISP at home, is starting the 5Mbit down upgrades. There’s been reports of people in Dubuque, IA getting 5Mbit down. I’m gonna reset my modem when I go home for lunch to see if anything has changed for me.
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This piece at The Jawa Report caught my attention this morning. It points out how many moderate muslims don’t worry themselves with defending their religion as the “religion of peace” they say it is.
It’d be nice to hear some condemnation of terrorist attacks by these moderate muslims. Wouldn’t it help the Muslim religion as a whole? It would seperate those Muslims who really do believe Islam is the “religion of peace” from those that enjoy killing innocent people. There’d be a clear line of seperation then and the moderate muslims wouldn’t have to worry as much about being “persecuted” because they’re Muslim. Instead they decide to condemn TV shows like 24.
Groups like Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) have a track record of condemning — but only targets like the Fox television show “24,” which they blasted earlier this year for having terrorists who were Muslims.
Never mind that CAIR officials have refused to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah when asked to do so by The Washington Post and others, describing questions about the terrorist groups as a “game.” And MPAC maintains, for example, that the Hezbollah murder of 241 Americans in Lebanon in 1983 was not a terrorist attack.
Yah, that really makes sense. Condemn Fox for staying mostly true for once to the way things are in the world. Kinda ironic. The entire article can be read at the Washington Times.
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I saw this yesterday but am just not actually reading it. It was on World Changing this morning.
Anyway, someone has created Chicagocrime.org. It’s basically a database of reported crimes in Chicago. The coolest thing is it’s integrated with Google Maps. So, you can see where in the city of Chicago crime is mostly happening. The World Changing people related this to the different map views in the old Sim City game. In that you could see crime rates and that sort of stuff. Throw a police station down in the middle of the high crime rate places and watch the crime rates fall.
It’s a very interesting site and a really neat project. I hear they’re aiming to eventually get real-time crime data available. Here’s a little opener about this from the World Changing site. They’ve got a really good write-up of the entire system.
Regular players of SimCity will recall that the map of the town where you see the buildings and the little people going about their business is actually not the most important map in the game. The data maps — showing crime rates, pollution distribution, traffic and the like — are far more critical tools for figuring out where to put that police station, wind farm, or subway. But what if you could have similar maps for real cities?
You can read the rest at World Changing or visit the Chicago Crime website.
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Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent, says there’ll soon be a torrent search engine on bittorrent.com. There’ll be sponsored links mixed in with the search results, which isn’t anything new. They’re going to index all types of torrents I guess, even ones that help people obtain copyrighted material. I think this is pretty neat, the MPAA and RIAA might not be too exited about it though. And they have good reason not to be.
Here’s a little bit from the Wired article:
Whiz kid inventor Bram Cohen and a small cadre of developers and entrepreneurs are in the final stage of launching an advertising-supported search engine dedicated to cataloging and indexing the thousands of movies, music tracks, software programs and other files for download over Cohen’s popular BitTorrent protocol.
I originally read this at Slashdot. It’s supposed to launch within 2 weeks. I’m excited to check it out. I wonder if the MPAA or RIAA will be purchasing any advertising space on the search engine…
UPDATE: Tried going to search.bittorrent.com and was presented with a “Test for apache installation” page. I’d guess the search engine will show up at that address once it’s ready. So keep an eye there if you’re interested in trying this out once it’s available.
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WordPress 1.5.1.1 was recently released as many of you know. So, what’s in store for 1.6 you may ask? A number of import/export features are planned as well as a link manager overhaul. Some neat sounding template additions are slated too. That includes versioning of template files, it’ll save the last three copies. I assume this is going to be implemented in the WordPress admin interface where you currently edit templates.
A list of features that will be in 1.6 can be found here, on the WordPress Codex. Blogging Pro pointed the way to this little item for me.
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I think I’m gonna go pick up a dvd burner this evening after work. Not sure yet as to what I’m gonna get. I just know I need one. I bought a 160Gb hard drive a few months ago, it’s about 90% full now. I wanna free up some space on it by burning some of the files to DVD’s.
I was thinking this one from Wal-Mart looks pretty good. It’s an HP 16x DVD+/- Double-Layer LightScribe Drive. Those LightScribe drives are pretty cool. They have the ability to etch labels directly onto the DVD. So no more crappy looking titles/labels made with sharpie markers.
Not quite sure what I’ll end up getting yet, but I’m definately gonna get something.
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