Blogs

One of the reasons I like Bill Simmons (aka The Sports Guy) is that he thinks about things differently than I do. Sometimes I think he’s just kooky, but this eye-opening article really got me thinking…

I took a little break from blogging over the holidays, but am back in the saddle again. The flurry of press and activity at the end of 2006 continued straight through the holidays. If the number of eco conferences in 2007 is a leading indicator, attention to datacenter power will continue to grow as a topic through the new year. Here’s a few tidbits from over the holidays: Project Blackbox…relentless.

Lessig’s last (and mis-titled) regular column in Wired has a good start, but stops just short of the right conclusion. What’s required right now is not legal restraint of the incumbent network providers (although some of that may be in order), its the legal protection of the muni and other grass roots efforts. What you see in just about every case (take Phillie, for example), is that the incumbents are not responding with technical lock-in, they are responding with legal lock-out.

By far the biggest hit at our family this weekend was the Nintendo Wii. The kids are playing with it constantly…alone, against each other, against parents, you name it. Christmas Day people were racing into the family room to see Grandpa take on someone in bowling or golf. If you haven’t tried on yet - do it. It’s the next generation of UI. I downloaded the trial of Opera, and with some tweaks it will be a reasonable browser environment.

Hope everyone has a healthy and happy 2007. Cheers!

Everyone likes to write summaries for the past year, but given the way 2006 went I’ve decided to talk about some of the things that didn’t happen. No direct terrorist attacks against the US. This was probably part luck, part good planning, and part lots of people doing their part to keep the country safe. The number of people who’d like to inflict mortal damage against America certainly hasn’t decreased, but we’ve still been able to keep terror at bay for another year.

Yesterday the President signed the bill “H.R 5646”: H.R. 5646, which directs the Environmental Protection Agency to study the energy consumption of Federal and private computer data centers Our Washington team worked hard, along with others in our industry, to get this through the House over the summer, and then through the Senate this fall. We were interested in this bill for a number of reasons: It helps to raise awareness to the growing issue of datacenter energy consumption The EPA has a strong history of facilitating the energy discussion between producers and consumers.

The Onion: Al Gore Caught Warming Globe To Increase Box Office Profits

Tim’s review of email clients is right on from my point of view, with one small exception: Spotlight search has been working great for me. I just switched back to the Mac Mail app from Thunderbird due to the lack of decent search, slow response on a number of functions, and lack of Emacs key bindings (I spent an hour hacking around and have some working, but couldn’t get most of the esc/alt keystrokes to work correctly.

One of my favorite sayings in business is that you only have to beat the competition. This fact is great news for the Celtics, who at 9-13 (.409) are tied for the lead of the Atlantic Division in the Eastern Conference. Phillie, at 5-17 is only 4 games out.