I realize that I’ve lost some blogging energy and haven’t posted much lately, and what there is has perhaps very little interest to most. I’m working on some things that will hopefully be more entertaining to you. But there are gutters to clean — again — and leaves to rake, and guests are coming over today then we’re all going out to dinner.
3 comments November 1st, 2008
I just received the notice below from my Web hosting service. If you’re reading this, then you’re unaffected, and you don’t care. If you aren’t reading this you should be worried!
Connectivity Between Cogent (Our Bandwidth provider) and Sprint
If you are having issues connecting to your website, or any other website hosted by IPOWER, this alert will provide some information to you.
Yesterday, 30th October, 2008, a press release was put out notifying the industry that Sprint-Nextel had severed its internet connection to Cogent (the provider of bandwidth for IPOWER), resulting in the inability of Sprint-Nextel’s customers to connect to any website that gains bandwidth from Cogent.
As our datacenters utilize Cogent to provide bandwidth, unfortunately, our customers are affected.
We’ve been in contact with our provider, who says they are attempting to work with Sprint to resolve this issue.
Our Network Operations team has begun investigating a way to get around this block, to get our customers back viewing their websites. However, it is uncertain at this time, if that will be possible.
For more details on what happened, and why, the press release can be found here: http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&tab=wn&ned=us&q=cogent+sprint&btnG=Search+News
We appreciate your patience while we try to resolve this. While we would love to assist you, there’s little to nothing we can do in this situation, aside from relay the message to our provider that our customers are having issues. Please remain patient, and we will provide more information when it becomes available.
- 10/31/08 at 10:11 ET
Add comment October 31st, 2008
I had a funny thought while driving in today from PT (physical therapy — I love PT!), about Obama. Pundits — the ones who like him — have commented on his steady nerves and his rich sounding voice. Both of these characteristics were, in the past, promoted as benefits of smoking. I’m thinking of Nat King Cole, who was a heavy smoker. In my radio days I knew that announcers were encouraged to start smoking because of the effect it had of lowering their voice.
I’d heard some months ago that Obama was trying to quit smoking. If Obama is still smoking cigarettes, I can’t imagine he would be able to quit once he’s dealing with the demands of being President. If Obama isn’t already feeling the debilitating effects of smoking, he will as he gets into his fifties, whether it be shortness of breath or a morning cough.
8 comments October 31st, 2008
DIVX — not to be confused with DivX — was Circuit City’s proprietary pay-per-view DVD playback system. The developers of DIVX started a company called Cinea that was later acquired by Dolby Labs. The DIVX technology was applied to a product called S-View, which was sold to the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences in an effort to reduce video piracy, especially the screener copies of movies nominated for Academy Awards that hadn’t yet been released on home video.
S-View discs required a custom player that was connected, as were DIVX players, to a central server for verification prior to playback. Regular DVDs also worked on the players, which were sent for free to Academy members who vote on the Oscars™. The hardware was made by KiSS Technology of Denmark, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems.
So far, so good, but it was up to each movie studio to decide whether or not to use the special DVDs. After a promising start, resistance to Cinea grew within the industry, as explained in this article, and only a few studios joined the program. Eventually S-View was dropped, and Cinea concentrated on other digital security projects.
Without any announcement or notice from Dolby that I can find, Cinea as an entity is apparently now gone. If you go to Cinea’s address you’re directed to the Dolby Labs home page. And with the end of Cinea I assume we have seen the last of what began as DIVX.
Add comment October 30th, 2008
Obama didn’t hesitate on The Daily Show to refer to his infomercial as being exactly that. I think he made the right decision not having Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates in it.
1 comment October 30th, 2008