Yesterday's Pittsburgh Steelers game against the New York Jets was a typical Steelers playoff game (very aggravating). I've been a Steelers fan since I was old enough to know what football was. Having gone through the Bradshaw (and company) glory days, it has been very difficult to watch the Steelers struggle in the last 4-5 playoff appearances. Watching those games has been very aggravating because what they typically do is change their winning game play that they used throughout the season and come up way short in the playoffs.

I can't say that I picked up on that in yesterdays game as it is usually very obvious. They just got burned big with 2 interceptions and an uncharacteristic fumble by the BUS. However, after given their second chance the Steelers 2-3 last drives were what they are good at - just muscling their way up the field without making mistakes.

Hopefully this game woke them up or we'll see a repeat of the last bunch of playoff appearances. And I won't be happy whatsoever.

Ok, I must not be getting something here. Why in my life time would I ever pay a monthly service fee to access my own video, photos etc from my own computer??? Just maybe I'd pay for software to do this which is likely available from a number of vendors.

Am I missing something here??? Someone, please buy me a clue.

Apparently this was in CNet's CES 2005 Top 10 next big thing awards.

Wow, look at the exciting press release. Is anyone really interested in this? If so, let me know. I can probably duplicate the software and company in about a week and my stuff wouldn't require Windows Media Center PC either. It would likely work with any version of Windows, Linux or MAC OSX.

Well, its time for a Rogers Internet update. Seems since my last entry (back in September) things have been working pretty smoothly with the new modem. No major outages or problems since.

However, I've noticed some degradation in the past week or so and I am concerned that this is going to lead to another year of bad times with Rogers. Looking at the graph for the last 3 hours (it is very similar over the last week or so), I'm seeing 9% packet loss (that just sucks) and an average ping time of 120ms to the first router. Normally I would see something in the range 100ms less than this. We're going to start to approach modem ping times which would be really bad.

So, crossing our fingers but my prediction is that you'll see me posting here with a really bad connection very soon.

Tyler is right on the money here:

Countries in Europe and Asia are already heading in this direction, as is the United States. Canada should be leading in this, not following. A good start would be to buy a whole load of these fuel-cell car kits and distribute them to high schools, requiring science teachers to use these kits as part of formal learning plans (source: Tyler Hamilton)

Missed this over the holidays:

Judge Awards ISP $1 Billion in damages (source Network World Fusion)

I typically use computer gaming industry analogies or examples when talking about the computer technology industry. Lets face it, the gaming industry really pushes technology to its limits, has grueling development schedules etc. etc.

Here is an interesting story from one of the founding member of probably one of the most successful gaming companies (Id Software) and games (Doom) of all time when he decided that he would leave Id and start up his own gaming company.

At the time it seemed there was no way this new company could go wrong. Early on, I don't think anyone following the gaming industry would have thought that their first game (Diakatana) would not be an instant hit.

I believe this is the first time he has talked about this pubicly and it is no surprise that it looks to me like the killer of this thing was really corporate politics!! Usually one of the top reasons technology companies fail.

Looks like VMWare is making good use of RSS as you can see here. You can create a custom feed with the type of news from them that you want (articles, events, news releases, success stories, vmware products).

Looks like they are using technology from www.simplefeed.com (website simply says they are in stealth mode). Maybe they should partner with SimpleFilter.

Its a huge day for Seinfeld and U2 today.

I'm talking of course about Seinfeld seasons 1-3 on DVD and U2's latest CD.

Seinfeld without a doubt one of the greatest sitcoms of all times and U2 without a doubt one of the greatest bands of all times.

Seinfeld Season 1&2 DVD is here -  

Seinfeld Season 3 DVD is here -  

U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb is here -

And for those who don't know, the co-genius behind Seinfeld is Larry David. You can find his latest sitcom here: Curb Your Enthusiasm - The Complete First Three Seasons - absolutely hilarious stuff. I've been waiting a long time for the next season to air as there is nothing on TV that comes remotely close to this comedy.

I've always considered challenge / response spam. I typically turf any challenge's I get and give up trying to send that person an email.

While so-called challenge-response anti-spam systems have grown in popularity, they still seem like the wrong approach to spam. If you think about it, they basically assume all mail is spam, until someone proves otherwise. That sounds like they have a serious false-positive problem. All email is considered spam. For some, that's fine, but it can lead to other problems. Seriously overhyped challenge-response startup Mailblocks is discovering just some of those problems. It turns out that major ISPs, including AOL and Earthlink, are automatically treating Mailblocks' challenges as spam. In some ways, it's only fair. Mailblocks considers all mail spam until proven otherwise, so why shouldn't other ISPs consider their mail spam? Of course, what this means is that anyone who sends a mailblocks user an email from one of these ISPs doesn't know that his or her message hasn't been received and assumes it has been. Meanwhile, Mailblocks users have no idea that the person has emailed them either. Of course, what's most amusing about all of this is that Mailblocks is owned by AOL. Yes, that's right, AOL is blocking its own challenge-response emails as spam. (source: TechDirt)

You gotta love how intelligent those AOL folks are!!!

I have received a number of requests for information on how these text-to-speech blog posts have been put together.

Basically I'm using the voices from NeoSpeech and the software TextAloud from NextUp.com. You can actually purchase both through NextUp.

Previous to that, I was playing around with Babel Technologies but I think NeoSpeech is much better. Both of these however beat AT&T Natural Voices hands down. I only mention that because from what I've heard Natural Voices is supposed to be excellent but I wouldn't bother with it after hearing these ones.