All of a sudden at 10pm, my bandwidth magically improves! The real giveaway is in the Azureus Network Status Monitor which is clearly showing the insane rate of TCP resets which Charter is performing on my connections.

My internet provider sucks, can we have FIOS please?

Click here to view the embedded video.

The classic net neutrality diagram for those too lazy to watch:

via iPower

Charter just offered a new package and I upgraded high speed internet to 16Mb down / 2Mb up. It’s also now $44.95, cheaper than the old 10/1. I think this should barely hold me over until FIOS is available in St. Louis.

However Charter is still resetting about 15-25% of P2P traffic according to the Network Status Monitor plugin for Azureus.

-via Blackbery 8800

Cory Doctrow, I much admire your ability to verbally express so many things that fly around my gray matter. Stealing a number of lines, some modified from a 2002 article:

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I’m writing code, architecting information systems, business plans, or interacting with early 20th century technology via hand tools, whether I’m speaking at table to hungry minds or yammering down the phone at some poor techno-wannabe, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

Thus I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.
Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. And using Twitter. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.

Without my electronic blog, tweet trail, gmail search, etc. I would be utterly useless. A portion of my intelligence has been externalized and can never be put back in. Bring on Intelligence Amplification!

Twitter is a way of life. It’s living with a publicity policy. It’s friends, Romans and country people the world over engaged in timely snippet conversations that fit into 140 character chunks.

Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow

Cory: Well, the problem with explicit metadata, as I sum up in the essay, is manifold. But it’s that people lie; they tell you what they think you want to hear. Or, they tell you what they think they believe, even if it’s not what they actually believe. People are dumb, right? They sometimes just have bad classification information. People are lazy, so they misclassify because they can’t be bothered to properly classify. We can’t all agree; everything is miscellaneous, as you say, so we can’t all agree on the best way to classify information, and so on. So, that’s a kind of sampler of the reasons that the idea that we’ll all make it all work is so flawed.

I remember stopping by the booth of a company that made some kind of metadata product at a PC Forum conference, Esther Dyson’s old conference out in the desert in Arizona. They said, “We’ve got this metadata program, and it has this taxonomy that describes the best way to organize all the information in the world, and this is what we’ve deployed, ” and so on. I said, “What do you do if your taxonomy doesn’t agree with someone else’s?” And they said, “Oh, well that’s easy. We have a way of trying a line between those taxonomies. So, if you call it a widget and we call at a what’s-it, we can just make an equivalent between those two and map them over.”

I remember at the moment thinking that there was something missing from that explanation. It was a little while later that I figured out what it was, which is what if you call it a widget and I don’t have a name for it. Or, what if you call it a widget and I disagree that it should be called anything at all? You know, you say that this is the sovereign territory of Serbia-Montenegro, and you say, no, that it’s a suburb of Serbia. They are just a lot of categories of information that we can’t draw lines between in our rival taxonomies.

David: You say it’s a species, and I say it’s, in fact, just an offshoot.

Cory: Right. Or, you say that it’s a genuine religious experience of Numanis and I say that it’s a hallucination triggered by a center of your brain left over from when some distant ancestor of yours discovered that by hallucinating a god figure, he was able to survive longer, catch more antelopes, and therefore have more babies. And so, I want to classify this as hallucination engendered by accident of evolution and you want to classify it as genuine religious experience. I have a feeling that both of us would be slightly peeved if the other’s label were applied to it.