Stephen's Untold Stories

So how many of you have been there?

ZDNet Asia’s Farihan Bahrin reports today that Malaysian mobile operator Maxis has initiated a trial of mobile WiMax in Kuala Lumpur using equipment from Motorola.

“The live trial will be conducted at four sites in downtown Kuala Lumpur, including the Kuala Lumpur City Center (KLCC),” Bahrin writes. “The trial is expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2007. Maxis said it is using the trial to assess WiMax’s traffic channeling capabilities as well as to measure the real-world performance of Motorola’s WiMax equipment.”

“We see mobile WiMAX as an essential and complementary service to our ongoing HSDPA deployment due to its progressive capacity management capabilities for high broadband traffic,” says Nikolai Dobberstein, Maxis’ senior general manager for products and new businesses.

Link to article

Bubbl.us is an online idea mapping site. It’s basically like Inspiration, but in a very slick online interface.

Standardized testing has become even more important for our students. I have seen so many of them struggle with the pressure that is put on them. Here is a great story of a girl and how she is dealing with that.

Natashia Ector starts the last class of the day with her head on her desk.

After two bus rides, a train ride, five classes and a lunch period spent doing homework, the 17-year-old high school sophomore quickly takes her math teacher up on the offer of two minutes of quiet.

But the calm doesn’t last, the classroom perks back up and the work begins anew.

There is no time to waste at the Boston Community Leadership Academy, where the teachers and 10th-graders have mere months left to prepare for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test. The exam will determine which sophomores can graduate and whether the school is meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which mandates that all children be proficient in math and English by 2014.

Last year, more than 90 percent of the schools’ students — nearly all black or Hispanic — passed both the math and English portions of the exam on their first try.

Link to complete article

I spent the day at Renfroe Middle School in Decatur, where I showed the students involved in the Title II-D Wireless Grant how to set up customized search engines using Google Co-op. It’s been a while since I worked with students like that, and I really enjoyed it. The grant teacher is very enthusiastic and she has done a marvelous job with the kids this year. I hope to be able to do more of this type of training in the future.

Thanks for Rick at the Deep Sports South Blog for this one.

I don’t remember ever hearing about this, but it’s one of the neatest things I’ve read recently.

With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.

Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger’s worst nightmare: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.’

Minutes before, while cruising at ten kilometres above the sea, Captain Moody had instructed his first officer to send a Mayday call to ground control in nearby Indonesia. The date was June 24, 1982, and this extraordinary flight has since gone down in aviation history.

Read the rest here.

I went to the Atlanta Thrashers game last night, and their mascot was very entertaining.

That little boy doesn’t look too thrilled.

I can completely relate to this.

Like most addictions my problem started as innocent experimentation. I began dabbling in RSS years ago when it was still a relatively new technology. I told myself that it was a better way to keep up with the news. I rationalized that I’d save hours every day by using RSS to take a more focused approach to online reading and research. A few minutes with my feed reader was supposed to be like an hour or more of surfing the hundreds of the websites that I try to keep up with on a regular basis.

Well, that’s the way it was supposed to be. How was I to know that RSS would turn into the pervasive and addictive social menace that it’s become today?

Here is the rest of the sad story.

Okay, so I finally got around to installing Office 2007. I like what I’ve seen so far, and this is the first post I’ve made using the blogging feature in Word. I have been using Windows Live Writer lately, and that is a good product. I’ll have to see how this compares to that. So far, so good!

I remember seeing a lot of jellyfish at Tybee Island down at the Georgia coast, but I’ve never seen these blue ones.

Huge armadas of toxic bluebottle jellyfish are swamping Australia’s east coast in record numbers, putting the sting on peak beach season.

More than 30,000 people were stung by the translucent blue jellies on this coast last year—more than twice the number of incidents in 2005—according to Australia’s lifeguard group, Surf Life Saving (SLS).

And in a single weekend earlier this month, beachgoers reported more than 1,200 stings, several requiring hospitalization.

Link to article

I haven’t posted any YouTube videos in a while, but I couldn’t resist.

In case you didn’t know, the Super Bowl is February 4th. As a public service, the very cool Deadspin.com has posted a list of facts about some of the players that should save the reporters some time as they search for inane story lines leading up to the game. Here are a few:

• Dallas Clark. Mother died days before he graduated from high school.
• Tony Dungy. Nice guy. Had son who committed suicide. Is friends with everyone in football. Black.
• Marvin Harrison. There is nothing interesting about Marvin Harrison.
• Dan Klecko. His dad played football but never made the Super Bowl. (NY papers, take heed!)
• Peyton Manning. Used to always choke. Finally beat Patriots. Has obvious daddy issues. Little brother resembles “Arrested Development”‘s Buster. Once mooned someone at Tennessee, causing him to briefly resemble a normal human being.
• Ricky Proehl. Still alive. White.
• Jim Sorgi. Nicknamed “String Bean” in college. Never plays. An accident as a player in college made it so he can barely speak.
• Adam Vinatieri. Has played in the Super Bowl before. Is Evel Knievel’s third cousin.

Here is the complete list.

Now this is very nice. Mignon Fogarty has a very cool site and podcast that helps us learn the basics of English grammar. Her podcast has been as high as #2 in iTunes.

Grammar lessons often are associated with high school drudgery — diagramming sentences and memorizing obscure rules in between passing notes in English class — but an Arizona technical writer has turned the seemingly dry subject into a popular podcast.

Mignon Fogarty, the woman behind “Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing,” has been explaining the finer points of commas, colons and split infinitives since July.

She recently weighed in on a dispute over apostrophes that divided the U.S. Supreme Court. Grammar wasn’t the issue in the 5-4 decision, but Justice Clarence Thomas referred to “Kansas’ statute” in the majority opinion, while Justice David Souter wrote about “Kansas’s statute” in the minority.

Fogarty said both men were correct, but that she preferred leaving off the extra s.

“Justice Thomas’ name ends with an s, so you might guess that he is more familiar with the issue,” she told her audience.

Link to article

Link to Grammar Girl

I recently switched to DirecTV, and I am glad I did now. It looks like it will be the only way I’ll be able to subscribe to the MLB Extra Innings package. Combine this with their exclusive deal for the NFL Sunday Ticket, and DirecTV is (for better or worse) becoming a “must have” for sports lovers.

Major League Baseball is close to announcing a deal that will place its Extra Innings package of out-of-market games exclusively on DirecTV, which will also become the only carrier of a long-planned 24-hour baseball channel.

Extra Innings has been available to 75 million cable households and the two satellite services, DirecTV and the Dish Network. But the new agreement will take it off cable and Dish because DirecTV has agreed to pay $700 million over seven years, according to three executives briefed on the details of the contract but not authorized to speak about them publicly.

InDemand, which has distributed Extra Innings to the cable television industry since 2002, made an estimated $70 million bid to renew its rights, more than triple what it has been paying. Part of its offer included the right to carry the new baseball channel, but not exclusively.

The baseball channel is scheduled to start in 2009.

Link to article

This is the first time I’ve seen anything quite like this. The Dallas Mavericks of the NBA have set up a Wiki for fans to add thoughts and pictures from the games. This is yet another example of forward thinking by Mavericks’ owner, Mark Cuban.

Link to Mavswiki

Looks like there have been some problems in Fort Wayne. I hope they get things ironed out. It sounds like they need more access points.

Six months ago the city announced it would spend a little less than $60,000 to install and maintain 15 wireless “hot spots” covering 11 city blocks in downtown’s business district. From July 1 through Jan. 1, the spots have been hit 1,602 times, according to the city. The city does not track unique users, or the number of different people using the hot spots. It doesn’t track demographic information, either.

Each hit has cost the city about $37, but officials hope to have one or more sponsors pick up the tab after the first year.

To keep the hot spots running after the first year will cost about $28,000 annually. Clifford Clark, the city’s chief information officer, said if no sponsor can be secured the city will consider keeping the system anyway.

Officials last year tagged it as a plus for spurring downtown revitalization.

“I definitely think it is something worthwhile having,” said Clark, who has been pleased with the response to it, because he expected only about 1,000 hits so far.

“Having an opportunity in a city the size of Fort Wayne really raises the visibility of what we offer.”

Andrew Mitchell is tech savvy. The 27-year-old is interested in downtown and, many times, work brings him there. So when the city set up the hot spots last year he tried it.

“I guess I would give it, being generous, I would give it a ‘B-,’” Mitchell said. “I think it was a good first shot.”

City officials were clear at the outset the system was for casual use and might not work inside many buildings. Mitchell, a graduate architect with Martin Riley Mock who has used the service about eight times, said he had to sit near a window in a local coffee shop to get access and has had no success above any building’s second floor.

Link to article

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More cool stuff from NASA. Jupiter has always been my favorite planet. I know most people like Saturn because of the rings, but Jupiter has that great big spot.

Just a year after it was dispatched on the first mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on the doorstep of the solar system’s largest planet — about to swing past Jupiter and pick up even more speed on its voyage toward the unexplored regions of the planetary frontier.

The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons will make its closest pass to Jupiter on Feb. 28, threading its path through an “aim point” 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from the center of Jupiter. Jupiter’s gravity will accelerate New Horizons away from the Sun by an additional 9,000 miles per hour — half the speed of a space shuttle in orbit — pushing it past 52,000 mph and hurling it toward a pass through the Pluto system in July 2015.

Link to full article

Interesting map which shows where the most IP addresses are registered.

Link to site

Just quick list. I’ve been hoping that this technology will make a real breakthrough for a while now.

• Sprint sees ‘open’ model for WiMax
• Shrinking devices key to Intel WiMax vision
• A better understanding of WiMax
• WiMax in Iran

Have any of you had any experience with WiMax yet?

I love his ideas about wearing suits.

After I sold MicroSolutions I decided that I never would wear a suit again. I was able to hold true to that while I was making a lot of money trading stocks for the next 5 years, but then Todd and I started AudioNet which would morph into Broadcast.com.

With our new business, I decided that I would have to wear a suit, but would modify the rule so that I would only wear a suit when someone I was selling to was wearing a suit. If they were selling to me, I didn’t care if they were wearing a tux. I was going to go comfortable and not wear a suit.

When Broadcast.com was sold, the suit went out the window completely. I vowed to never wear one again other than weddings and funerals, and only then because it wasn’t worth the hassle to deal with people asking why you didn’t wear a suit. I’m certain the people getting married dint care, and I don’t think anyone is going to be looking down at me wondering why I showed up at their funeral without a suit. Suits make no sense whatsoever.

Why am I such a suit hater ? I’m not a suit hater, I just could never think of any good reason for any sane person to wear a suit in the first place.

Exactly what purpose does a suit serve ? Why in the world are so many people required to wear a suit to work ? Do the clothes make the man or woman in the western world today ? Does wearing a tie make us work harder or smarter ? Is this a conspiracy by the clothing, fabric or dry cleaning industry to take our money ?

Or are we all just lemmings following a standard we all know makes zero sense, but we follow because we are afraid not to?

Read the Rest Here