Carl Hutzler’s Blog

1. You can FTP files to/from your website almost as fast as you can copy them from one folder to another on your laptop’s hard drive.
2. Your upload bandwidth is faster than your good friend Phil’s download bandwidth.

   ….and the final way you know your Internet connection is too freakin’ fast…..

3. The CPU in your Linksys WRT54GL router is not able to fully utilize the entire pipe as it is CPU bound!

Verizon FIOS 20Mbps/20Mbps all on a piece of glass about the size of a thick human hair. Yeah, baby.

My buddy Theoretical Ken just posted what might be the most useful blog post I have ever come across! How to tie your shoes so they don’t come undone, YET are easy to undo when you want to take them off!

Yes, you can do a double knot, but that is a pain to get undone. This simple modification on how to tie your shoes is easy to teach to a kid (Jake got it the first time) and easy for them to undo too.

This will be very useful to me when I go running with gators on top of my boots/shoes. It is such a pain to have to re-tie laces when they are under a gator.

My life is now complete. Come get me lord ;-)

Yahoo! has been losing exec’s faster than, well, AOL used to. If you have been following the Terry Semel firing and the failed MSFT take over news, you know that Yahoo has really lost a lot of talent lately. Techcrunch.com had an article on a site that makes the resignation easier for people still there. And it is rather funny.

Don’t forget to hit SUBMIT for the great subject line :-)

http://yahoorezinr.com/

Check this out!

“It’s like Deja Vu all over again.” - Y.B.

There has been a lot of talk lately from the cable broadband providers (Comast, TW Cable, etc) that they are looking to implement bandwidth caps on their cable internet customers. Some will begin capping your download to 5GB a month in the fall, which is a VERY small amount of data when you consider your download pipe is around 10Mbps! That means you would hit the cap in about a half a day if you were downloading at the max speed. So much for unlimited internet for $50/month.

The cable companies have been saying caps are needed because of a very small percentage of people using 80% of the bandwidth. And we have been led to believe these evil people are also breaking the law as it is mostly P2P traffic (bit torrent, etc) and music/video steeling.

But me thinks the caps are for a little different reason….

Basically, if you look at what the major TV networks are doing lately, you start to realize that you can watch shows online more conveniently than ever. If you have a computer hooked up to a TV, you can simply visit abc.com or nbc.com, etc and stream the show you want to watch. And even smaller cable only stations are doing streaming shows too. And it’s free (ad supported).

And you can also stream and download movies from iTunes, Netflix, and many others. And there are more and more set-top boxes available now to allow you to stream or download movies and watch them.

Well, as you might guess, our Cable companies don’t like this and are scared we might actually ditch their Cable TV service and just subscribe to their internet service….which of course we will. So what do they do to preempt becoming a dumb pipe provider? Implement bandwidth caps to make the whole thing useless.

Yet more companies in the long list of companies that have tried to stop technology from moving forward instead of seeing the trend and adapting. Cell phone companies will be next. No one wants voice connections. They want data so they can do voice, video and data how they want.

Now, if Cable operators instead embraced the coming age of IPTV, they might be able to become more efficient at providing massive amounts of bandwidth, while charging more for it, and being more profitable. But the issue, I suspect, is that they have so much invested in the old system which is highly profitable. So even though they have other revenue streams (VOIP and Internet data), they want to keep everything. Sounds like a company I used to work for.

Steve and Erin are some of our closest friends. Rylan hired both of them when she worked at AOL back in the 1990’s. They have an awesome house down on Lake Anna in Virginia and invite all the friends down for a weekend every year.

This year we had a blast swimming and tubing and water skiing and eating and drinking. Kids of all ages had fun and got along really well. And this year they did the downstairs so they now have more bedrooms (no more sleeping in a tent in 90° heat!) and a great game room with ping pong, fuse ball and air hockey.

I took a number of pictures and will put them up later today. But I really liked these of Jake and Anna

I bought a pair of Audio Engine A5 speakers and they arrived today. I like music a lot and I enjoy good quality sound. I have tried a number of things to find something reasonably small with a self contained (self-powered) amplifier that sounded great. While there may be some competitors out there with good sounding boxes which I have not heard, I can attest that these are fantastic speakers. $280 shipped from Provantage.com.

They build quality is excellent and I also like a few thoughtful features included on these. They have a 120VAC outlet on the back which could be used to power an Airport Express. They also have a USB port on the top (power only) which could be used to charge an iPod. Very nice design.

Only thing I would have wished for is a cloth cover over the drivers for a little “kid finger” protection. But my kids are old enough and these aren’t that expensive that the risk is that high.

A few weeks ago, I borrowed a robotic DVD/CD duplication machine (made by Primera Technologies) from one of my clients. As of the first of the year, Primera released some software that would allow the machine to be used for CD ripping (instead of burning). I thought this was great and I could finally rip the rest of my 4000 CDs into iTunes. Over a period of 2 weeks or so, I ripped everything at a fairly high bit rate. Great! I was almost done….well, not quite.

So over the years, my wife and I have purchased music online, ripped books on tape, and accumulated a fairly large library of music that was in addition to our tangible CD collection. So now that I had the CD’s ripped, I needed to combine the libraries somehow. I knew that some of the music in our current iTunes library had been ripped from our CD collection originally so I could not just combine them straight away. So what I had was a big mess of stuff which if I just consolidated them in iTunes, would result in many duplicate songs.

What I did was a multi-step process which I think could be streamlined if I had some more time and/or was a bit stronger in Unix. But here it is if it helps someone with the same issue. One note: I thought about trying to use iTunes and the library file structure for this, but I could not find a way to do it due to the issue I had on my hands. I was trying to stay away from duplicate songs which iTunes does a poor job of managing unless you are actively ripping a CD where itunes does warn you. Too bad they don’t have this for moving files around.

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In March, I had the privilege of supporting Davy Crockett in the Moab 100 race. At the race, I met Jarom Thurston of Payson, an ultra-running friend of Davy’s and who was also running in that race.

I happened to get an email from Jarom the other day announcing that he would be running the Bad Water Ultra Marathon. In the email he alerted me to a show about the Bad Water race coming up on the History Channel next week (6/9 at 8pm EST).

Anyway, I have paced and even run sections of 100 mile races several times with Davy Crockett. I know running 100 miles is an unbelievable challenge. But running 135 miles is just crazy, until you understand a few more things about Bad Water. Then you understand how beyond crazy it really is…

1) Bad Water’s starting line is 280 feet below sea level. Yup, that would be the Bad Water in Death Valley NP.

2) The race takes place July 14-16th this year. Temperatures can be as high as 120° or more in the shade that time of year!

3) The race finishes in CA on Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the continental US. Finish altitutude is 8,360. Total elevation change for the race is 13,000 feet of ascent and 4,700 feet of descent.

4) The fastest runners finish in 27 hours. But most of the “mortals” take 40 to 60 hours!

Check out Jarom’s site for details of the Brazil 135 race that he ran recently. He did very well considering the conditions. I wish Jarom the best of luck in Bad Water. I would love to be there with him!