Update from my post on July 10th (below) about my Fiberoptic bandwidth upgrade to 20 Mbp/s. The connection will be symmetrical, i.e. 20 Mbp/s both upstream and downstream. The vast majority of broadband internet connections in the US today are asymmetrical - the publicize their downstream speeds but keep their upload speeds throttled to a ridiculous extent.

 

A symmetric connection is especially useful for online gaming - if you can't talk to the server as fast as the server can talk to you, then you could get fragged. You may have actually pulled the trigger a fraction of a second before the other guy, but if that action doesn't get delivered to the server as fast as the server sends the data of the other guy pulling the trigger downstream, well, game over...

 

My upload speed tests from July 10th to today:

 

Download speed tests from July 10th to today:

 

The full service is due to roll out August 1st, but upgrades have already been happening. There seem to be a lot of fluctuations which I am putting down to "upgrade still rolling out". If I still see such wide swings in bandwidth after August 1st, I'll be calling tech support pronto! For the best part of $100 a month, they'd better give me my bandwidth!

OK, so there were no parts I to XXIII, but there are just so many unique things in Japan that it seems like I could just go on and on...

 

Here's an alarm clock which (a) wakes you up to tunes played on Tokyo's JR Yamanote Line, (b) displays the Yamanote Line train schedule, and (c) keeps the schedule up to date with wireless updates. This lies somewhere between cool, geeky and freaky. I guess if you are not a regular commuter on the Yamanote line, you're SOL.

 

Following on from yesterday's posting about that giant Homer Simpson "art" publicity stunt over in England, I though I'd share something in a similar vein today. Less funny, but definitely more artistic.

It seems that rice-paddy farmers in Japan have taken to large-scale art projects too. The best ones seem to come from the farmers of Inakadate in Aomori prefecture, as shown here. Above is the 2007 effort, below is 2006.

OK, this is just brilliant... as part of a marketing campaign for the new Simpsons movie, someone has painted Homer with a donut in the field next to the ancient Neolithic artwork of a giant man bearing a club at Cerne Abbas, in Dorset, England. The creators of this image anointed the giant with a gigantic erect phallus, as you can see in the image.

 

 

(original here.)

 

The Homer image will eventually be washed away by rain and the giant will be alone again. But even better, one creative soul has taken this image and created what must be the best animated gif of ALL TIME:

 

 

 

You can read more on the origins of the 180ft (55m) Cerne Abbas Giant here.

It is surprising what an effect a piece of furniture can have on your life. After more than 2 years living in my house, I finally gave in and purchased a dining table and chairs. I thought it was a relatively unnecessary purchase as we already had a breakfast nook table with 2 chairs, which was all we needed for eating meals. However, the house had an empty dining room and eventually I gave in to the need to make the house look like a proper home, and filled that empty room with a nicely-sized dining table, comfortably sitting 8 people.

 

Well, tonight we just finished our 4th dinner party (and our second dinner party of this weekend, hosting on both Saturday and Sunday evenings). And we have at least another 2 dinner parties lining up over the next 2 to 3 weeks. I guess that having had only 2 guest visits over the previous 2 years, there's quite a backlog of "we owe you dinner" for people that we have visited in the past. But even so, I wasn't quite expecting my life to become so social. Not that I'm complaining, of course :-)

Everyone's favorite Mariner has just signed a $90 million, five-year contract extension. Yep, we still have a reason to watch the Mariners, thank the baseball gods...

Rumor has it that Ichiro and the Mariners are in final negotiations to keep Ichiro in Seattle for 5 more years. Rumor also has it that the contract will be worth 100 million smackaroonies. I'm sure the money is an important factor, but personally I think if Ichiro decides to stay, it will have a lot more to do with the Mariners performance as a team than the money. Fortunately for us all, the Mariners are 13 games over .500 right now, so fingers crossed that this deal will actually happen.

 

BTW, Ichiro was named the MVP in tonight's all-star game when he hit the first INSIDE THE PARK HOME RUN in all-star history!

 

Where I live, all the houses have fiber-optic internet connections. However, the ISP, Highlands Fiber Network, has done a pretty poor job of giving us access to the speeds fiber should be capable of (in the 100Mbits/s range) and the fastest (and most expensive) package they offered was 8Mb/s down, 2Mb/s up. Here's a pretty typical speed test result for my current connection (from http://www.speedtest.net):

 

 

The connection speed is relatively OK for my typical internet usage, but it pissed me off that Comcast with it's mere mortal cable infrastructure could offer customers 8Mb/s connections too - why bother having fiber?

 

Until now. My ISP is rolling out new packages and the top of the line is now, wait for it, 20Mb/s up, 20Mb/s down! Yes, synchronous up- and down-stream bitrates! I could, in theory, upload a 50Mb file in 23 seconds, according to their advertising.

 

Needless to say, I've signed up. Once they've enabled my new speeds I'll update this post with the speedtest results for comparison.

So yesterday was 7/8/07, and Boeing launched the Dreamliner, AKA the 787 (hence the date chosen for launch). One of my friends works for Boeing and I'm curious to hear her story about the launch party. The day before that was also a significant date - 7/7/07. Since 7 seems to be a lucky number in many western cultures, it was a really popular day to get married. It was a pretty insignificant day for me, a day of mostly resting and recovering from a very busy vacation full of physical labor. The aches and pains have mostly subsided but I still have a lovely week-old bruise on my thigh that has an amount of healing to do.

 

I'm on Facebook now. Seems like everyone is getting on there. I joined for the Popfly apps but found many of my colleagues already on there. I hope this doesn't turn out to be yet another "social networking" waste of time. Orkut, LinkedIn, and now Facebook... hmm, we seem to go through mad phases of signing up for these services and then they languish, since other than adding your friends there's not really much else to do. Maybe Facebook will change all that? In any case, Popfly is kind of cool but they need a translation object. Yahoo Pipes has one (Babelfish), so why not Popfly??? Hit me up on Facebook if you want.

 

Oh and tonight I went to see a movie at a friend's house - he just put in a home theater room and spent about $20,000 on it! It was pretty impressive. Stadium seating (with reclining seats and footrests and cup holders!) and THX Ultra 2 7.1 sound (at THX volumes too!), oh and 100-inch screen with a front-projector. It was my first time to see a Blue-ray movie (via a PlayStation 3) and it was excellent. So yeah, I'm jealous. I'm looking at buying a 60-inch plasma one of these days but I can't hope to compete with what I experienced today :-(

 

You can do it too! Just drop by this site to convert any text.

 

It works better in ASCII but it still works to a lesser extent in other scripts, i.e. Japanese merely renders the entire string in reverse and does not flip the individual glyphs:

日本語のクラスはむずかしいですよ！

！よすでいしかずむはスラクの語本日

 

(buıoqbuıoq ɐıʌ)