The Massage

So, I started my last week this Tuesday, and I still have my massage coupon they gave out to all the new employees/interns at the beginning of the summer. It's an otherwise $80 massage. (Although they subsidize it to $20 for employees - yay!) I'd never had a real massage before, so it was a new experience for me. It was pretty sweet. She managed to stretch me in a really weird way I've nto felt before. Just enough so that I felt two inches taller, but without really pulling on anything, just pulling the muscles along the legs the right way. The whole thing was 45 minutes, but seriously felt like 20. I was so relaxed, when she was done and waiting outside, I just lay there for a few minutes before I could even look at the time. I finally managed to sit up, and whoo! So woozy. I was a bit euphoric as I walked out, tipped her, then made my way back to my desk. My cube mates said I looked quite funny. I did notice myself being really slow to respond and such. It was really nice and relaxing. I'll have to do these things again.

The Crash aka The Lame Weekend

So... my computer broke this last Saturday. I let a process run away with memory, use up all my paging file, so the computer froze. I turned it off, but when I turned it back on, it couldn't find a bootable disk. Uh oh. I had had this problem a few (three?) times before, and fixed it easily enough. Except this time I couldn't do my usual thing. I couldn't attach another XP drive and boot to it because I didn't have one. In this past this has fixed the problem, which I think was a problem with the NTFS log file (it's a journaling system, so if the journal was corrupted, it would need fixing). Since I didn't have a drive, I tried to find someone who did. The closest I came was Lee, who was kind enough to drive over a Windows XP cd so I could run rescue disk. Yay! After 6 hours of chkdsk on Sunday, I finally tried various combinations of fixboot and fixmbr. Still, the BIOS wouldn't boot to the hard disk. I finally tried to tell it to manually boot from the drive, and voila! Success. Quite odd. I still don't have it recognizing the drive and auto-booting, but it will successfully boot if I tell it to manually. Quite odd. Maybe the drive/partition isn't marked as bootable or something. I'll fiddle with it more once I get to Seattle and have my other machine to help out.

So, the moral of the story is, Alden had a lame weekend. Ross was gone on Saturday and Monday, though he did hang out with me while I tried to fix it on Sunday. None of the nVidians were around for fun and games, so I didn't get any social activity. Garrett's moved out, so I can't hang with him. I spent Saturday and Monday playing Oblivion. It was fun, but I'm leaving, and I'd rather hang with cool people than play games. Sunday I fixed my computer, but mostly waited and watched, like, 10 episodes of Deep Space Nine. Fun, but a bit much for one day. It's not like a new Sci Fi show, I've seen these before, and they're entertaining and enjoyable, but not really fantastically fascinating.

The Next Internet

So we had a guy come to Google to talk about a new way to think about networking. The existing implementation and structure of the Internet is sufficient, but not well-suited to most of the use of the internet today. The problem is that the Internet is all about connecting point A to point B. Then they talk, share data, whatever. But most of the time you just have a few publishers (web sites) sharing the same data with thousands and millions of users. This results in a lot of redundant bits being thrown all across the Internet, sometimes routers can be servicing thousands of users, and all of them are getting the same data. That's a huge waste of potential bandwidth.

He drew a clever analogy with the original internet. Originally, the internet was built on top of the phone lines. The phone network was all about creating a circuit. It wasn't about a phone-call, it was about constructing this circuit across large backbones. Phone numbers weren't addresses, they were the programming to connect one wire to another. When the original networking people started sending computer bits over the phone wires, everyone was up in arms! This wasn't how communication is to be done! Everyone knew that communication was about circuit building. It was ridiculous to build this ad-hoc, failure-prone, best-effort network. That couldn't go anywhere!

Similarly, the new revolution today should be about data. People should just be able to specify what data the want, and it shows up. They don't care about where it comes from. The only reason to care about data's origin is because that's how the security model is based. No, I don't "trust Microsoft", but I do want to know that this is the update which Microsoft has published, and not some hacked version. Interestingly the best work going on in this field is peer-to-peer services. Bit Torrent is pretty good, but still not good enough. We shouldn't need to depend on trackers.

The internet is about data now. That doesn't make the two-way communication TCP/IP layer it was built upon obselete, it just shouldn't be the focus of research or advancement. It's done it's duty, now we shouldn't care. Just like we don't care what on top of which physical medium IP is overlaid.

You can watch the video here.

And now, for another use of the Internet, IM