One artifact of having been around for the start of the home computer business (back when we called them “microcomputers”) is that I have certain memory sizes stamped into my brain. 143K, 400K, 800K, 1.4M: the amount you could fit on various disks back in the days no one had hard drives.

I get a small dose of future shock whenever I see sustained Internet throughput at (one old disk) per second. Today I hit 800K downloading an Apple update, and I had this sudden image of a toaster-like device, with Apple and Comcast logos on it, firing 3.5″ floppies across the room while my laptop danced and pirouetted to catch them flawlessly.

I remember when downloading a 143K disk image was a “leave the computer on all night” endeavor. Now I’m wondering how long it will be before I get 800Kbps over a cell phone.

Some thoughts after having spent a few days bedridden with a low-grade fever:

There’s long been a fascinating line of study into parasitology and epidemiology that shows that certain diseases can cause their victims to behave in different ways, with results that are beneficial to the parasite. I’m reminded of a breed of ants which, when infected by a certain intestinal bug (or whatever passes for intestines in an ant), have an uncontrollable desire to climb up to the top of a blade of grass, where they get eaten by birds. The birds, naturally, deposit the ant remains and the still-living intestinal bugs some distance away, and this is how the wee beasties get around to new communities.

Therefore, I believe that poker is the result of a similar mind-alteration by disease. Think about it: you sit around a table for hours, passing small round objects back and forth with everyone else at the table. Invariably, you touch your face and eyes as part of your unconscious tell system, which also conveys anything on the chips from your hands to your mucous membranes, where they can wreak havoc.

Or at least, that the best explanation I have for why that coughing bastard was sitting at the table with me at Bally’s last week, who apparently passed along his cough along with several stacks of his chips. Granted that the amount I won is greater than my cost of meds since then — but sheesh, talk about a good reason for Internet poker.

Dear Sirs,

Considering that your hotel in-room products are, by definition, designed for customers who have not yet had their first cup of coffee, it would be splendid if you changed your packet design so it is more obvious which is creamer and which is sugar, especially for your customers who are so obstinate that they will pour in two packets of sugar waiting for their coffee to lighten.

Best regards,
Jeff Porten

Huh. I know the next president of Harvard.

Personal anecdote about Drew Faust: I was in her survey class, Am Civ 7: The American South, back when I was an undergraduate at Penn. Unlike most of my American Civ classes, this one was huge; fulfilled a lot of requirements and very popular. Maybe 300 students in the class.

A few weeks into the term, I had a question about something or other and showed up at her office hours. I’d been the front-row-sitting, ask-a-lot-of-questions kind of student in the lectures, but still expected to introduce myself. She looks up from her desk and says, “Hi, Jeff, what can I do for you?”

I’m thinking the Crimson made a good call.

With the rumor mills working overtime in preparation for MacWorld, I’ll take a chance at throwing my hat in the ring with a few predictions. Notably, the last time I tried this, I completely debunked the idea that Macs would switch to Intel, so hey, caveat lector.

Mac hardware: can’t say that I’m expecting much on this front. The Mac laptop line was recently refreshed to Core 2 Duo models, iMacs are already pretty sweet, and the desktop Mac Pro is already frickin’ fast. There’s talk of an LED backlight in new laptops, which has interesting implications for longer battery life, but in the meantime I’ll settle for toying with underclocking my Mac.

OS X 10.5 (Leopard): man, I’m seriously looking forward to this one, but no one is saying it’s ready yet. One or two components are already available in previews, though, and I have a strong suspicion that certain features will vastly change the way people work with their computers.

iTV: I’m expecting a more featureful preview of the iTV, a real product name that won’t conflict with El Gato’s EyeTV, and a ship date. With video iPods and the Apple Store already geared up, there’s just too much money potentially sitting on the table for Apple to miss this window for much longer. It would be nice to see something taking advantage of (or at least enabling) the 802.11n high-speed wireless for those of us with recent vintage Macs, but if I had to guess I’d expect this to be a Leopard feature.

iPod: I’m not an iPod guy, but I’ll comment in brief on the speculation about the “real” video iPod release — the current one being deemed “fake” because of the small screen. I’ve got a Palm TX that does beautiful video on the sort of screen that people want for their iPods — that is, one that covers the entire face of the device. Problem is, if you hold the gadget vertically you get the same small screen display (scaling a 4:3 or 1.85:1 video with the long edge along the width of the handheld), and it’s not physically designed to be held horizontally. I expect Apple could do a better job of this, but I’d expect to see this on a later generation of iPods rather than a current refresh.

iWork spreadsheets: this would be nice, as Microsoft Office is pretty much the only game in town at the moment. (I’m running a port of OpenOffice instead, but I don’t expect many other people would.) But what I’d really like is lightweight table support in TextEdit, so I could fire up a few numbers and sums without launching a huge bloated app. Application launch time for Office, OpenOffice, or Pages is annoying when I’ve always got TextEdit documents open anyway.

iPhone: this is the bit of kit I’m really hoping for, and I’m likely to be a day-one purchaser. As I rarely get tired of mentioning, my current phone sucks eggs, and my smartphone is showing its age. I’m extremely ready for a new handset, and iPod features would be nice.

Everyone seems to agree that it’s going to be a GSM worldphone with iPod software included; rumor has it that there are separate batteries for the two features so you can’t kill your phone by listening to podcasts. I presume it will rock with Bluetooth and EDGE data, hopefully with Mac integration that won’t require 3rd party support to use as a modem. It’s been a while since a really solid phone came out of the box with perfect iSync and Bluetooth modem features, and who better than Apple to sell me one?

But a phone needs a network. My thinking on that topic in roughly descending order of probability:

1) There was talk for a while that on launch, the iPhone would only work with Cingular despite technical compatibility with any GSM provider. As a T-Mobile customer who thinks their data plan is still the best deal around, this would be a bummer. But I don’t think this will be the case — this would require locking the phone down with crippled firmware, with the sole advantage going to Cingular. I don’t see that as a standard Apple strategy. I’d sooner expect to see an unlocked GSM phone on sale immediately at Apple Stores, Best Buy, and whichever carriers wanted to pitch it.

2) I think there’s enough disenchantment in the cellular industry, and that Apple’s got sufficient positive mindshare and retail footprint, for them to make a serious move in selling their own phone service. But the catch is that their entire target market already has phone service and might be reluctant to switch carriers. This announcement therefore wouldn’t surprise me, but I’m not expecting it.

3) There are interesting possibilities with VoIP, though — Apple already has an investment in video clients with iChat, and their market is now well-acquainted with using Skype to reach landlines. The problem with VoIP handsets, though, is their lack of coverage: no wifi hotspot, no phone service. Folks like me are happy to reconfigure their handsets accordingly, but I wouldn’t call that a mass market technology.

On the other hand, take the same handset and give it Bonjour, and you can have it automatically handshake wirelessly with your laptop or desktop. Now you can tell your customers, “if your computer has an Internet connection, your cell phone gets unlimited minutes.” That’s something that people can easily grasp. I think it might be a bit too Star Trek for Apple to try it — but then again, the lack of players in this arena might very well be the best reason for them to do so.

Okay, Steve. We’re waiting — what’s the “one more thing”?

There’s something about how these Canadians eat that really appeals to me. I figure a similar approach in the Washington, DC area would probably require until 2074.

According to the BBC, 200 million blogs were abandoned last year. I wonder if I was included.

Also reported that in the UK, flushing costs 1.5p. Since that’s used, on average, to discard 1.0p, I deduce that Britain has a 50% p surcharge.

Hide the kids, then set Tickle Me Elmo ablaze.

Interesting article from the Denver Post about snow science. But what I really liked about it was my misreading of one phrase:

“Once it gets packed down, it’s hard to peel it up with a plow blade,” he said. So in addition to plows Tuesday, Denver sent ninth graders and seven front-end loaders onto city streets to slowly scrape up packed ice, Kennedy said.

Actually, the article said nine graders. But high school kids would probably be cheaper.

Both quotes from the Washington Post:

In Crawford, Tex., President Bush said in a statement, “This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people’s determination to create a society governed by the rule of law.”

Street violence continued in Iraq with a string of lethal car bombings Saturday. About three hours after the execution, 34 were killed and 58 wounded when a car bomb exploded near a market place in Kufa, a Shiite city near Najaf. Later, 25 people were killed and 65 injured when two car bombs went off in the mostly-Shiite Huriiya area of Baghdad, according to a spokesman for the Iraqi Interior Ministry. Two other cars blew up, one in the mixed -neighborhood of Dora and one in the mostly-Sunni Sulaikh neighborhood, but information about casualties was not immediately available. It was not clear whether the bombing was in response to Hussein’s execution.

When car bombings and 59+ casualties are such a part of the daily landscape that you’re not sure whether Saddam’s hanging had anything to do with it, I suspect paeans to the rule of law are a bit premature.

Rounding out with some Harpers-style statistics:

Number of Iraqi deaths for which Saddam was found guilty and hanged: 148

Number of Iraqi civilian deaths currently tabulated by Iraq Body Count: 52,139-57,707

Number of Iraqis estimated to have been killed by Saddam in atrocities trials that are now cancelled: “hundreds of thousands”

Number of Iraqis estimated to have been killed in post-Saddam Iraq, according to the Lancet, in the past four years: “We are quite confident that there’s been somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 deaths, but it could be much higher.”

But never mind that. Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.

On the last version of this site, I had a tagline that read “sporadically ignored since 1997.” See, this is what I meant. Only thing I’ve posted recently was that Christmas item that I teed up in June. Let’s see if we can’t make 2007 a bit more prolific.

I just watched the Steve Jobs presentation on the new iPods and iTV, and had a terrifying moment near the end. Jobs started running through a list of places Apple connects to:

and for a terrifying moment, I thought the extra space was so he could announce “one more thing” about how Apple was going to be in your bedroom. One can only imagine….

Apologies to Brian if he was going to publish this first…. This is ostensibly the mural on the ceiling in a smoking lounge somewhere. If it’s Photoshopped, it should be the mural on a ceiling in a smoking lounge somewhere.

This teddy bear is a vicious killer.

Newsweek demonstrates some interesting editorial choices in their American and international editions.