• Kevin Burton: Setting up a “River of Podcasts” View Within iTunes – “It’s been driving me mad that there’s NO way to view my podcasts in a “river of news” format.“
• Dummies Book Cover Generator – “Make your changes, then click here to get your code.“
• Great Circle Mileage Calculator – “Move the map cursor to the desired start location and click there. Then, move the mouse to the next location and click there. Continue choosing locations until done. Pan and zoom the map if necessary to find each location.“

Redmond’s Marymoor Park is just a couple of miles from our home. This morning I drove over to Marymoor, bought at $1 parking pass, donned my gloves, shoved my iPod in one pocket and my camera in the other, and set off for my weekly walk on the Sammamish River Trail adjacent to the park. I never tire of this trail. It is different every time — there are always plenty of people, bikes, dogs, wildlife, trees, flowers, fish, birds, and even some mountain views. It was a bit cold this morning (below 40F) so the trail wasn’t too busy. I got a whole lot of good pictures and though I would do a little photo tour. I walked a total of 6 miles today and here’s what I saw:

Entering the trail:

Lots of trees:

Wildlife:

Art:

Bridges in several styles:

People running, riding bikes, and pushing their kids:

Math:

• TagJungle Blog – “This blog will serve as a tutorial, discovery mechanism, announcement system and feedback system for TagJungle.“
• Solar Transit of ISS and Atlantis – “Image of the solar transit of the International Space Station (ISS) and Space Shuttle Atlantis (50 minutes after undocking from the ISS, before return to Earth), taken from the area of Mamers (Normandie, France) on september 17th 2006 at 13h 38min 50s UT.“

Executive Summary
I upgraded my house to Clearwire today and I want to tell you all about it. Its so good that it may become my primary connection. This wasn’t a planned upgrade, so I’ll have to start with a little background story…

Background Story
My Verizon DSL cut out without warning today. I wasn’t surprised that it happened, actually. The original DSL connection to our house dated back to early 1998, shortly after we moved to Sammamish from Potomac, Maryland. It was so old, in fact, that Verizon actually had difficult decommisioning it in order to upgrade it to a newer system that was both faster and cheaper. The DSL was on a second, “business” line that we no longer needed, which was costing us a few bucks per month. In late October I called Verizon and requested that they relocate the DSL from the second line to our primary home line. Turns out that they don’t have a simple, non-disruptive, consumer-friendly way to do this. Instead, they arranged to decommission the DSL on the business line and simultaneously provision the home line. I told the phone clerk that internet access was mission critical for me, and that any disruption would be very, very bad. She assured me that the entire change would be painless and that I wouldn’t even need to move the DSL modem to the other phone line (this didn’t compute).

So today the connection stops working. Checked all of the usual stuff, looked fine. Called Verizon, talked to a guy named Ahmet, and he was pretty sure that I had to plug the modem into the other line. Tried this, nothing worked. Around this time my sinuses kind of flared up, I got a terrible headache, and turned things over to my very capable son Stephen.

Stephen called them back and they worked through all sorts of things. Stephen dutifully tried all sorts of non-sensical things including plugging the modem into several different phone jacks, installing the DSL filters on the other phones, and even trying a shorter phone cord (as Stephen laughingly related to me later, this doesn’t take into account the fact that most of the wire is in the wall (or in the ground for that matter), and that the cord length can’t possibly make a difference). After trying everything they filed a trouble ticket and promised to call back next Tuesday to schedule a service call. I wasn’t too happy about this.

I had seen the Clearwire kiosk downtown earlier this year, and gave it some thought. Stephen was out running some errands, and he stopped by the local Cartridge World franchise — they are agents for Clearwire. He collected all the relevant details and called me up. I thought about it and decided that we simply couldn’t be disconnected for 3 or more days. At the time I was thinking that I would use Clearwire as a temporary backup, possibly even cancelling it when my DSL line came back to life. Stephen came back home and we chatted about it for a bit and decided to do it.

At the Store
Stephen and I hopped into our trusty Suburban and drove the 2 miles or so to the Cartridge World. Lorrie, the store manager, helped us through the process. I filled out a sheet with my name, address, and credit card info, and she entered it into her PC. I was originally planning to get the low-end (768 Kbps) plan, but on the spur of the moment went for the better (1.5 Mbps) plan, thinking that I could benchmark it against my similarly rated DSL. After not very long at all we were back in the car with our modem. Driving home, we decided to blog the entire experience, since I haven’t read any other reviews of the service. We also talked about how we would tie it into our home network (6 or 7 PCs, a couple of printers, and two wireless laptops). Luckily, I had a Linksys WRT54G lying around and ready to be pressed back into service.

Costs
Several different service plans are available, with options for length of term, connection speed, some email addresses, some web storage, and even some static IP addresses. I opted for the one-year contract (with an eight day cancellation privilege). I pay $36.99 for the service, $4.99 for the modem rental, and a final 44 cents in tax for a grand total of $42.42 per month. The first three months are discounted by $17 per month, and there was a $50 activation charge. I could have gotten a slightly better deal if I had gone for a longer term.

At Home
We got home and ran upstairs, eager to see how quickly we could get our new connection up and running. We did stop to take some pictures, though! Here’s the box:

We opened it up with care. Inside we found the Clearwire modem, some documentation, a power supply, and an Ethernet cable:

Lorrie had warned up to plug in the modem and to wait 5 minutes before plugging in the computer. Reading the directions, it turns out that the modem takes a while to tune itself for the signal. The top of the model contains a row of 5 green LEDs. The LEDs blink while the modem is seeking a signal, and then show a value between 1 and 5 once the signal is acquired. We were also directed to rotate the modem on its vertical axis to find the spot where the most LEDs were lit! Here’s the cute little modem all by itself:

So we plugged it in and watched those lights blink for a while. At first we had just one green light and I was getting a bit worried. We are situated in a second floor home office with lots of metal, and a few walls between the office and the outside world. Stephen carefully rotated the modem and found a spot where we got 3 LEDs, and then made a permanent mark on the shelf to avoid future disorientation.

I plugged in my Amazon laptop, poked through the VPN, and we were up and running. I ran a DSL speed test and saw that I was getting about 1 Mbps through the VPN. Not bad, but I was hoping for more. I surfed around a bit and it seemed to be working really, really well.

Stephen and his friend ran out to buy a Beatles wig for a party, and when he returned we got the Linksys router up and running, configured its DHCP, and refreshed the DHCP leases on each of our networked PCs. They all worked fine, except for mine. Months earlier I had installed a cool little application called Fastcache and I had a hunch that it was getting in the way. Rather than figure it out, I simply uninstalled it, fixed my TCP/IP settings to use DHCP to locate the DNS server, and rebooted. This worked just fine.

So, how’s it work? Here are the Speakeasy DSL speed test results to their Seattle server:

Impressive enough, and definitely competitive with my DSL. Subjectively, I am about 85% sure that Clearwire has substantially less latency. Connecting to web sites just seems a whole lot faster. Repeatedly saving draft copies of this blog (where there’s no need to use DNS) is definitely faster.

I’m blown away by this new technology. So far it looks like a real winner. It is awe-inspiring to think of those million or so bits flying through the air every second via the modem just a foot or two from my head. As Stephen and I were waiting for the modem to train, we thought back to our earliest home network in 1995. We started out with Prodigy, and then used an O’Reilly product called Internet in a Box to connect to a real ISP. From there we used Windows NT 3.51 and RAS to serve 4 PCs over a 9600 baud modem connection. We’ve gone from “Internet in a Box” to “Broadband in a Box” in little more than a decade.

I had previously heard that Clearwire allowed only a select set of ports but this is emphatically not the case at all. My VPN works fine, and Second Life just flies. Once again, subjectively, it feels faster than DSL.

The modem is now showing 4 LEDs instead of 3, the service is getting better! I should probably clean up the cabling my entire office a bit, though:

Verizon?
So, the next question — do I still need my Verizon DSL? I’m not sure that I do.

I will let them fix it, but it will be the backup service for the next month or two. If Clearwire stays running, I’m going to seriously consider cancelling the Verizon service. I probably agreed to a contract extension when I had them switch lines, but I’m pretty sure that bringing up the fact that they totally flubbed it will count in my favor.

When I first heard about Clearwire earlier this year, I asked them about a PCMCIA card. At that time they told me that it would be available in Q1 of 2007. Today we heard that it was still a long way from production. Given the directional sensitivity of the modem, this comes as no big surprise. They would need to use some kind of active antenna to deal with portable use, or else have a little rotating popup antenna (that would be much, much cooler of course).

More news, if any, as this develops.

Every week or two I get a random email from some developer asking me to write code for them. Here’s a typical one:

I could rant all day on this, but I won’t. Can’t spell, can’t be bothered to use real words, can’t be bothered to actually solve the problem. And he’s getting paid for this?

Another one posted his code, his database table schemas, and his database as a blog comment and asked me to make major changes to it.

• Instructables: LED’s For Beginners – “This instructable shows how to wire up one or more LED’s in a in a basic and clear way. Never done any work before with LED’s and don’t know how to use them? Its ok, neither have I.“
• AirPower Wiki – “This wiki is dedicated to helping you find power while travelling at airports around the globe.“
• Hacking a GTD Moleskine – “I decided that I’d just build my own GTD-based system from scratch using a Moleskine Ruled Pocket Notebook and inspired by the Hipster, the PigPog, and a bit of my own interaction design to make it as intuitive as possible for me to use. “

I’ve had this long-time reluctance to subscribe to quarterly magazines. I’ll usually decide to subscribe only after buying newsstand copies for a while and deciding that like the magazine and want to save money. However, I always worry that my first issue of the subscription will be the last one that I purchased at the newsstand. For a monthly magazine this is ok (losing just 1/12th of the value of the subscription price) but for a quarterly its not, since I would lose 1/4 of the value of the subscription if this were to happen.

I really like O’Reilly’s MAKE Magazine and finally ordered a subscription a day or two before Christmas. Today I received my confirming email but it didn’t indicate which issue I would start with. I mailed them back at 3:57 PM and had my response at 4:09 PM.

Very impressive.

Warning: This post contains explicit references to surgery and to my nose!

I’ve had a small problem with my sinuses for a couple of years. My family reported that I would make weird noises in my sleep, and my wife thought that my breathing was a bit irregular. From time to time my nose would become very, very stuffed up — to the point where I was essentially a mouth-breather.

I went to an ENT (Ear, Nose, and Throat) specialist early this year and he diagnosed my problem as nasal polyps — some grapelike growths inside of my nasal cavity. He injected them with a steroid of some sort, gave me a prescription for Prednisone, and also discussed surgery as an option for the future.

The polyps have also nullified my sense of smell – I can’t smell my wife’s perfume, the scent of her fresh-baked bread, or anything else for that matter. What’s worse, it turns out that a lot of what we typically think of as taste is actually smell. The tongue has sensors for a few basic flavors, but most of the “flavor” is really based on scent.

The worst part of all this is that it has come upon me very gradually. Like a slowly boiled frog, I didn’t realize how bad it had become over the last several years.

Earlier this month the problem finally got to the point where I was having trouble sleeping, and I went back to my ENT yesterday. We agreed that it is time for the surgical option, and that we’ll get it scheduled for early January. In preparation for the surgery I had a CT scan yesterday. The doctor explained that he will use the scan as a guide, but that during surgery he’ll use a real-time 3D imaging system to guide him into the deeper regions of my nose. He’ll use a small, precise grinding device (or maybe a Moto-Tool) to whack away at those nasty polyps. I’ll need to rest and recover (by reading blogs, and living a more mobile Second Life) at home for 5 to 7 days afterward, with a couple of followup visits to the doctor over the course of the following weeks.

After that I should be able to breathe a lot easier (literally). The doctor isn’t 100% confident that my sense of smell will return, but I think that it will. He told me that the polyps can sometimes destroy the nerve cells associated with smell. My confidence comes from the fact that I do occasionally get a full-on scent if I inhale deeply enough. That tells me that the cells are there, but just covered up.

So, why do I write stuff like this? Too many people wait and suffer needlessly from correctible medical problems. I find that knowing a lot about the mechanics of the problem and also understanding the solution gives me the information needed to make informed judgements about what I should do. I don’t see any reason to be ignorant or squeamish about your own body.

Earlier today I had a wickedly bad sinus headache – so bad that I was tempted to head out to the garage for my own Moto-Tool. It has subsided a bit now, but I’m sure it will be back.

More updates as things progress. Oh yeah, one more thing — I am going to ask for the raw data file from that CT scan. Perhaps I’ll see something interesting inside!

• Journal of Visualized Experiments – “JoVE is an online research journal for publishing visualized (video-based) biological experiments. We invite submissions in all areas of biological sciences.“
• Productive Strategies: Free Academic Podcasts – “The 134 lectures in this list are all free and don’t require any type of authentication–you don’t have to be a student to download them. The links are to the rss feed of class lectures.” Good list, but they missed the one I’m currently listening to, Professor Richard Pogge’s Astronomy 161.
• Union Square Ventures: Customer Service is the New Marketing – “Customer service is the new marketing because you can realize the radical efficiencies of the web only by enlisting the users of the service as co-contributors. The best web services provide bandwidth, cpu, storage and a governance system and then their users create the service.“
• Earning with Image Hosts: A Mini Tutorial – “All of these image hosts have payment ratios that are determined by the number of impressions. “

According to Joi Ito, the 23C3 conference features PowerPoint Karaoke:

You get up. They cue up a random presentation. You ad lib it.

An IEEE student site in Germany defines it like this:

In a powerpoint karaoke you can do a short powerpoint presentation with slides you never saw before

Perhaps I’ve been presenting for too long, but this actually sounds like fun.

Another form of extreme presentations is the Pecha Kucha model. All of the presenters at Ignite Seattle used this format and it was a ton of fun. Under this discipline, each presenter has 5 minutes to present 20 slides, or 15 seconds per slide. This rapid-fire pace means that you have to know exactly what you want to say, and that you can’t take the time to think as you present. If a particular presentation isn’t something you care about, you simply wait a few minuntes for the next one. There’s no time to get bored or to zone out.

Any more ideas for extreme presentations? Leave me a comment.