Forget the SuperBowl, the America’s Cup is on
Tonight, right now is the eve of the 33rd America’s Cup. Now two years late, this race is a culmination of 2 years of legal battles between Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli over the rules, venue, boats and every other aspect you can imagine. What it’s resulted in however is something spectacular for sailing and engineering nerds. What should have been a long contest between 20 countries match racing by elimination in 20 boats, is instead only a two boat race, 3 races only with the only rules becoming a sailing boat, 90 feet long, no limit on budget.
And what we have are two monsters BMW Oracle’s solid wing sail trimaran, and Alighi’s giant wave piercing catamaran. These boats were built at a cost of 500 million dollars to race for one week.
No one’s ever match raced boats this huge and fast before. These boats may go 40 knots downwind. No one knows what’s going to happen, all the ordinary match racing tactics go out the window. The boats are different enough that it could be a blow-out or a blow-up, gear failure is not unlikely.
There is no television coverage of the Americas Cup in North America, but there are plenty of places to watch the coverage online.
Throughout the week, also have an eye on the epic sailing blog Sailing Anarchy
Either way, first gun is at 10am Valencia time or 4am EST (ouch) on Monday, race two is on Wednesday, race three on Friday. We’re going to be brewing strong coffee and putting up the race on the big screen right at 4am, you know if you’re in the neighbourhood.
Got your ticket yet for PowerPoint Karaoke? [updated]
This Friday, my good friend Jay Goldman and I are organizing Toronto’s first PowerPoint Karaoke event. It’s going to be awesome. From the official description:
The Stage is Yours, the Slides Aren’t
PowerPoint Karaoke brings presentations from the conference room to the karaoke stage in an entertaining and competitive event. In PowerPoint Karaoke, contestants deliver PowerPoint presentations in a karaoke-styled venue. But there’s a twist: Presenters see the randomly chosen slides for the first time when they’re presenting. Presentations are on the clock and off the cuff.
PowerPoint Karaoke was invented in 2005 when a group of German artists combined Schadenfreude with Stagenfrighte to create an underground sensation that has since swept the world.
For your entertainment, 8 fearless speakers will be pitting their wits against decks of diabolically out of context slideware to tell you about important topics of our times. Presentations are 5 min each. We’ll have two heats of 4 presentations with the winners facing off for a final showdown. There may be fabulous prizes like a free beer (they’ll need it) or an ironic trophy. At least that is the plan so far.
This event is happening as culmination of the Toronto’s Participation in World Socical Media Week. We’ll also be pooling revenues from this event with the (sold out) CaseCamp Toronto this week for donation to Sick Kids Hospital (details).
After the tweets were out the bag last week, PowerPoint Karaoke is now almost sold-out as well. But I just put up another block of free tickets, well “free” with a $25 or more donation to sick kids.
LINK:Get your tickets for PowerPoint Karaoke Toronto here
UPDATE 1
PowerPoint Karaoke is SOLD OUT. And so far, you have raised $800 for the CaseCamp Sick Kids CCU Project – you guys rock!
UPDATE 2
Thanks to the awesome folks at Microsoft Office Canada ( @MSOfficeCanada on twitter) and to Crumpler.ca for donating the grand prizes for tonight’s event.
Here is the presenter lineup. Doors open at 8, presentations at 8:30pm sharp:
Heat 1 Bretton MacLean Rachael Segal Satish Kanwar Alain Lepofsky Heat 2 Liz Radzick Misha Glouberman JonathanLaba Saul Colt Finals: ?? vs ??
In Which Tom attempts to bond two DSL lines into single home internet pipe of great power like Voltron
It really only did take about nine minutes to actually set up. Two DSL lines, one internet connection. Not counting a few later hours of mild swearing and voodoo rituals to get it to work right on all the computers in the house. And not counting the few days it took for the Bell tech to setup the extra line, and the indefinite project to figure out how to tidy up all those boxes and wires. But it works! and it’s not that hard.
The goal was this, how to turn two regular off-brand 5MBit down/0.8MBit up DSL connections into one single 10/1.6MB super-pipe using a trick called multi-linkPPP (MLPPP).
There are a few side-effects of using MLPPP, the one being that Bell (who provides the last mile for all indie-ISPs) cannot, for some obscure technical reason, throttle, inspect, cap, “traffic shape” or otherwise abuse packets sent over MLPPP.
Monthly bandwidth caps are another tool the major ISP’s use to manage the dangerous risk of network congestion competition with their other digital services or lines of business. With dual Teksavvy connections I’ve discovered I now have silly-high (400GB) monthly bandwith cap. Not sure even what to do with that, but maybe I’ll think of something entertaining.
One last relevant side effect to mention is that with this setup your monthly bill gets doubled too. Combined with the requirement for two phone lines, two DSL lines and a customized router, you might think hey, that’s a pretty crazy way to try and keep up with Moore’s law. You’d right. By some accounts, Teksavvy is the only “major” ISP on the planet to offer MLPPP. It’s also a sad story to go through such trouble for a 10MB connection when Bell/Rogers are technically capable of easily providing a much faster connection through a single account. And lets ignore that 10MB is only 10% of the speed of the every day and generally dirt-cheap broadband you’d find places like Sweden, Japan or Korea.
The jury is very much out on whether, for practical purposes, a 10Mbit Voltron connection from Teksavvy is really better than a 16 or 20 MBit “ultra” offering from Bell or Rogers. It’s certainly no cheaper (each Teksavvy line is about $37/month). But pay no attention to creeping thoughts of rationality, the important thing is, it’s twice as fast as what you had before!
Besides, if you want the fastest pipe you can get from a friendly indie ISP, whether for practical or philosophical reasons, you just have to buy more than one. Crude and amazingly inefficient as that may be. But also kinda fun.
Because it’s hard to find elsewhere on the web, here are all the step-by-step instructions.
1. Call Teksavvy, tell them you want to order not one but two DSL lines and ask them to enable something called “MLPPP” on one of the lines. They will know what you are talking about. It doesn’t matter which line has MLPPP enabled, but it will charge you an extra $4/month on that line.
2. While waiting for your DSL to be set up, head to the store to pick worlds most hackable router, the venerable Linksys WRT54GL. You will have to flash the router’s bios. For those unfamiliar, this is a lot easier than it sounds, it is literally a one click procedure to effectively replace the routers operating system with this much better one that also supports MLPPP. If only upgrading the OS on regular computers were so easy. Or if this still terrifies you, you can buy a pre-configured WRT54GL straight from Teksavvy.
3. When the Bell tech comes to your house to provision your DSL, beg, bribe or if necessary pay ($100 is the official rate) the tech to replace one of your regular jacks with a two-line phone jack, if you don’t have such a thing already (and so you can plug in your two DSL routers conveniently side by side). Or if you are particularly handy, do the wiring yourself in advance.
4. Watch guspaz’s awesome youtube video on how to setup up bonded multilink (MLPP) DSL connection in 9 minutes or less:
5. If anything doesn’t work straight away, I can recommend gradual elevating levels of swearing and pejorative gesticulations. Of course while doing this, you might also quietly double-check that all the cables are actually plugged in, and securely plugged in, to where you think are plugged in. (a combination of these two approaches seemed to work for me)
Alternate setups:
Another ISP Acanac claims to be supporting MLPPP soon. If that qualified for their excellent $18/mo for 1 year plan, that would make dual connections pretty affordable.
Here is another asus router they say works if you want to try it.
Alternative energy thought of the day
Deep thought of the day: Say you were feeling green. Or lets say you’re just stuck with an unwieldy hydro bill every year and having exhausted any easy options for saving energy, you’re looking for other ways to offset what you draw from the grid. Why go to the trouble of putting solar panels on your roof if you were able to invest a comparable amount in some distant large-scale (and lets assume more efficient) alternative energy project, and use those dividends to subsidize your own electricity bill?
Who wants to start a fundable or CommunityLend social lending platform for such projects? Does that exist? or what would be the practical, regulatory or taxation considerations required to make that make sense?
Some jurisdictions (like Ontario) have promised some massive long term subsidies on feed-in rates for alternative energy. While there are a lot of projects underway, my friends in the industry tell me that, unlike in Europe, it is still challenging to find institutional financing in North America despite the revenue-side guarantees. A lot of home or condo owners might well enjoy both the income and warm&fuzzies of “owning” their own personal solar/wind/etc. project but don’t have the ability, roofspace, or ability to do it on their own.
img source: weekly vector/Shepard Fairey
The new economics of music publishing
My good friend Graeme recently started a new band with a bunch of his more musically talented friends called the Nobodies. Caught them live last night and they’re pretty awesome. The nobodies just had their first CD professionally produced and mixed.
The great thing, Graeme tells me, about starting a band with seven people in it, is that it’s a lot better deal to produce and put out an album. You can split the whole cost of it seven ways.
Things you can learn from Google on how to redesign your industry for the web
Have you ever heard Google’s [VP of Product Design] Marissa Mayer talk about product design? Great stuff. From a recent interview with Michael Arrington at this year’s Le Web. Pay attention to this question (about 12min in) about google news and redesigning journalism.
If we invented news today as a delivery channel for journalism, through the web from scratch, what would that look like? and we like to ask questions like that, what would [ a product google wave, google news] look like if you invented it from scratch for the web. I think it would look very different.
Of course this the right question to be asking. Asking this question is how google manages to disruptively up-end industry after industry on the web with products that are actually pretty simple but work just-right for the web. But so often we don’t.
In the real world it’s not what I hear often enough from companies or industries looking to make the jump to the web, or to social media, to mobile or [insert disruptive new channel of moment here].
What I hear most often is, how can we take all our existing business model and dump ourselves unceremoniously on this channel. Or, lets think of how we keep on doing what were doing but sprinkle some of that magic web/mobile/social pixie dust on things and call it a day.
Which is fine, I suppose, if you want a quick win you can sell your boss today, and if you don’t mind if google/amzon/apple/netflix/some startup/file sharing/the-web-in-general might completely blows up your whole industry sometime tomorrow afternoon.
But if you don’t want to get steamrolled, what Marissa is asking you to think about, and really think hard about is this:
Ask not how your business fits on the web, ask instead, if your business were really made for the web, what business would you be in?
And a moment later gem:
I basically think whenever a media changes over to a new delivery vehicle, it puts pressure on the atomic unit of consumption. It happened with iTunes with the album moving to the song. It happened with YouTube with long-form standards of video to short-form. Now it’s happening with news. People can come in and read one story from the source and then move on. That’s the atomic unit.
When music went to a web there was much consternation that people would buy singles instead of albums. When newspapers go to the web editors are shocked that surfers want to read articles, not sections, not whole bundles of sections.
But this is a great insight. When the medium changes so does the atomic unit of consumption. There are certain economies of scope and scale when bundling a whole bunch of more/less unrelated newspaper sections into one printed package, delivered with one swing of the arm of the paper boy. And from a demand perspective, there’s effective cross correlation of demand, someone in the household will buy the weekend paper for the sports, someone else for the style section. In the totally personalized digital world, that kind of paper-world content-bundling doesn’t make any sense.
When it comes to a new medium you can either let these behaviour changes surprise you, or think of how to take advantage.
For example, atomicity can work both ways. I could see a shift of atomic unit (book) to a bundle (this book and others by this same author) being a win for e-book publishing. When you don’t have to print it, and when shelf space isn’t limited why not generate all sorts of bundle offers. Chances are if I want to read an author, I might want to read all of that author’s books. In the digital space, a publisher that does this really well is Valve the video game publisher. Their orange box being a famous and spectacularly successful example of bundling a hot current title for, just a little bit more, a whole pile of new and old content from the archives. When it’s all digital, it can be just as easy carry home an armload as a single item from the store.
Tom’s End of 2009 indie music mix
Just under the wire for 2009, I bring you my last of my 2009 music mixes. As always, this is a sort of autobiographical best-of mix featuring the songs that made the biggest rotation in my itunes since the last 6 months or so when I last published a mix. Some great tunes on here. But not only that, this mix also features redoubtably one the best lyrics of the year “back up – because the laser beam gets so hot”. Who hasn’t always wanted to say that?
Pictured here Air Heart performing at the Gladstone Nuit Blanche 2009. One MC, one DJ and one PS2 voice-amp controller.
Track listing:
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Note, I downmixed these mp3s slightly to save on file/bandwidth size. If you like em, you should go support the artists by buying the originals in their full glory from itunes/emusic/band-website etc.
but meanwhile, enjoy!
DOWNLOAD as one big-ass zip file of individual files
DOWNLOAD as one single 84 minute mixed-together-fancy mp3 file
This post made possible by: itunes, winamp, emusic, last.fm, mixmeister fusion, cool edit, textpad, notepad, google spreadsheets, filezilla, photoshop, firefox and microsoft windows7
Thomas Purves
is a technology designer, futurist and sometimes entrepreneur living in the great city of Toronto. Thomas not currently available for hire (though you are always welcome to try).
