Dan Wilson’s Blog

A new height in man’s accomplishment with bacon.

That would be a bacon matrix weave.

Andrew Sullivan on Drudge:

Nancy Pelosi is handing out a trillion dollars’ worth of STD-ridden condoms to illegal immigrants for gay sex while the earth enters a new ice age. Did I miss anything?

You can always visit dwilson.us/blog, or if you must, this site is pretty funny. And it gives you something else to refresh.

I foresee a perfect storm for sucky, slow internets. As newspapers continue to die, the remaining ones and other web publishers will want to squeeze every last ad dollar out of their sites. What was once a site with a top banner will soon have ads in every last corner. These ads will also become more rich in nature: less text, more images, videos, and interactive Flash ads. Add to this a bandwidth drain, caused by these richer ads, as well as more people sitting at home surfing the internets since they can’t afford to go out anymore with a crappy economy. Then comes what I think will be the worst part. Also due to the bad economy, and ever slowing growth, online ad serving companies will skimp on infrastructure upgrades, causing pages to load dial-up-slow as they hang waiting to load an ad. The Denver Post did this for weeks. Also add to it that consumers in general will not be upgrading their hardware, or buying slow netbooks (yesterday’s technology, today!) that can’t handle a web page with four simultaneous Flash ads at once, and the internets becomes unusable for many. Expect future rantings on Flash, and its dark role on the internets.

Perhaps overly grim. However, I would recommend immediately switching to Firefox, and install Adblock Plus and Flashblock.

Colorado lawmakers fight over how to tax driving for road and bridge repairs. Interesting. My vote is gas tax, registration cost based on miles driven, and no toll roads. Why the support for taxes? Two reasons: Our roads here is Colorado suck. Its amazing when you travel to other states, how well kept they seem (even snowy states). Example in point. Second reason: here is a picture of my car from this week. I have had it 5 years as of this April.

I know nothing of Battlestar Galactica, so potential spoiler alert? But, this is just awful. I would watch the whole thing, but the 1:15 mark onward will do.

Via The Daily Dish

This year’s Super Bowl will be one of the most boring on record. One of two things will happen:

1. The Cardinals will solve the Pittsburgh defense, and it will be a blowout.
2. They will not, and it will be a low scoring, endless 3-and-out-athon, that make the commercials the only thing keeping people from leaving the party.

My money is on option 2, with a Pittsburgh win. Something like 12-10. And Roethlisberger will set new records for quarterback suckiness in the Super Bowl. Maybe 14-34, 0TDs, 3 ints, 130 yds.

I changed all the hosting of dwilson.us, Liquid Mongoose, and Stealth Project A from Yahoo Web Hosting to a new provider – Eapps. After much work, I think everything is as it was, but if y’all find anything out of place, missing, or acting funny please drop me a line. Ofcourse if it is my email that is acting up…

According to cnet, Blu-ray will succeed for 9 reasons. CrunchGear disagrees. Money quote:

3. Blu-ray isn’t going to be replaced by another disc format anytime soon.
No, it’s not going to be replaced by another disc format, but it’s already being replaced by another storage format. Hard drives are cheaper per gig, more convenient, and already in half the devices we own. The optical drive is on its way out; a new disc format would be like a new extra-long-play VHS tape in 2000.

I predicted back in 2003ish, while working for an optical media storage company, that there was room for one more optical media format before the ether took over. Some of my co-workers thought that was off the mark, but in retrospect I may have been too generous.

Digital downloads can and will be evolutionary. Physical formats must be revolutionary. Otherwise they are not compelling enough for consumers. VHS was revolutionary, a format that could rented from a video rental store and taken home and watched with ease. It had a 10 year run before being challenged by DVD, and survived another 10 years before officially dying late last year. DVD was revolutionary over VHS because it went from analog to digital, was superior in sound and video quality, had menus and extras (that some people cared about), and didn’t require rewinding. Now looking at Blu-ray vs. DVD, and all you have is an evolution in sound and video quality. There is also the issue of timing. Most people got their VCRs in the 80s or 90s, then their DVD players in the 2000s. Most of these appliances aren’t 5 years old. Although consumer electronic manufacturers and movie studios would love us to upgrade our hardware and movie collections every five years, the vast majority of consumers do not.

Which brings me to digital downloads. They are the revolution to the DVD, but they will evolve to replace the format over time, without a clearly defined date of launch, and of arriving. For now, they are on devices like the XBOX 360, TiVo, and cable set top boxes, through services like Netflix, Amazon, and Microsoft. Soon they will be built into more TVs and receivers, and there will be more Roku-like set top boxes, or perhaps even HDMI dongles that receive streaming HD content over wireless.

Blu-ray is and will always be stuck in the delivery dilemma, and that is the lack of on-demand. If I want to watch an HD movie with Blu-ray, I must go get the disc, or it must be brought to me. If that is the future, then iTunes’ success must be quite the anomoly.

Why do devices still have a stop button? The nuances between the stop and pause button are long gone and irrelevent. When you think about, it is only needed when the device is playing a tape, and only because there was so much going on mechanically. Tapes are gone. Dead.

I don’t see its relevency for optical media anymore. If you want the disc to stop spinning, you would just turn off the whole device. One could make the argument that for portable, battery powered DVD players, a stop button is good for saving battery life. I would argue these devices should have enough built in flash memory that all pauses should be able to spin down and spin back up the disc without disrupting the video.

Which brings us to the present-day and not-to-distant future of flash-based and downloadable and streaming content. Here there is no discernible difference between pause and stop. Unless stop returns the content back to a starting position upon playing again. Which would just piss people off. Think audio books.

So, in conclusion, do not buy any device that has a stop button. They didn’t think seriously about design, they just remembered what buttons their old VCRs had.

Somewhere, hundreds of small startups are now incapable of development.

Although TechCrunch can’t stop raving about every single little service and startup that is built around Twitter, the service’s downtime proves that it and its whole ecosystem isn’t feasible.

Could you imagine if MySQL went down. Not the site, the database on which thousands of LAMP applications are built. The would be the end of that platform. Everyone would migrate off of it, and it would die a quick and painful death. Period.

Here’s to a 2009 of celebrating Twitter and its ecosystem as the best and most amazing service on the Internet.

My mother called my home work station Mission Control the first time she saw it, and the name has always stuck with me. Regardless, it puts your home computing experience to shame (except maybe for this guy). Oh, and if you were curious if it was also fast, that would be a yes.

Embrace the jealousy.

This is what happens when too many men inhabit an office.

– Post From My iPhone

It cost me a lot of sleep over the last 3 nights, and there is still much work to be done, but I proudly present the new dwilson.us home page!

http://dwilson.us

15th & Champa, 5:47pm

Because I am all about the numbers…

Let’s look at offensive and defensive rankings of the teams represented in the AFC and NFC Championship Games for the last five years:

*Rank based on yards per game

10.9 – Average offensive rank

22 – Worst offensive ranking (T – ’08 Steelers, ’05 Panthers)

8.8 – Average defensive rank

21 – Worst defensive ranking (’06 Colts)

So all of these numbers seem to support the cliché that defense wins championships. So if Shanny wanted to win championships, how has his D stacked up post-Elway:

The Broncos D stacked up above average for Conference Championship contenders – until 2005. This last season was the final nail in the coffin.

It’s actually, finally happened. The Cardinals have beaten the Eagles, 32-25, to advance to the Super Bowl.

Great roundup of what 2008 brought us downtown, and what to look forward to in 2009.

Ken is also doing a roundup of his top ten things to make downtown a better place. Interesting perspective so far.

I don’t think I have a link to it anywhere, so here it is. I made dwilson.us/learn as a way for youngsters to get to experiment with the basic elements of the web: html, css, javascript. Pass along to anyone aspiring to learn these.