College Apps. Liz is making great progress on these. But a lot of work. I’ve been helping on the mechanics and the process. I’ve been exposed a lot to all the online application processes. A quick review:

• the Common App site and forms get high marks. This is the application that 200+ private schools accept. High marks for posting edittable PDF forms so that you can type in the key data before giving to the school (for instance the school report form). Also high marks for having a form that can accomodate semesters or trimesters well.
• the Pomona app and Stanford app on Embark are reasonable. Reasonably clear forms.
• the Caltech app, Pepperdine, and UW apps are all on applyweb but don’t just go to the website, you need to route there through the college sites. Applyweb is a little more confusing than Embark in my estimation. Caltech doesn’t let you advance to later parts of the form until you have submitted the first part which is a downer. UW requires that you transcribe your complete transcript into a standard form on their app, this is a lot of work that is painful.
• U of California gets an incomplete so far. The online version for 2003 is not yet available. PDF forms are available for download. Like UW, you have to transcribe your transcript into their form – a lot of work.

For all the apps you will need the Acrobat reader, a high speed connection, and a good laser printer (I recommend color). I also recommend the full Acrobat product so you can overlay text on the forms, this allows you to complete the forms with a very professional look.

Thanks Ignition. I was talking to my dad the other morning:

Dad: “thanks for the nice flowers.” John: “huh?” Dad: “you know, the nice flowers you sent from Ignition to the hospital.” John: “news to me, dad. I work with some pretty nice people tho.”

Thanks so much. Meant a lot to Dad and Mom.

Extra PCs. I have 4 PCs in my house that see regular use. Because I keep upgrading these, I am starting to accumulate a pile of old PCs that are not really doing anything. I have 3 right now that are just rusting away. They don’t have enough storage by modern standards to store much. I’ve tried to use them as print servers but a) using windows nt server as just a print server is overkill and more management hassle than i want, and b) using linux as a print server with windows clients seems to be more of a config hassle than I have time to deal with. I need to find some other uses that require modest compute cycles, and for which I can find low-hassle maintenance-free software.

College Football RSS Feed. Was contacted by Andrew Koper – a michigan fan, boo – looking for a college football rankings rss feed. A great idea, i’d include on my page. Google and Syndic8 don’t seem to turn anything up. The feed only changes once a week, it would be easy to handcraft one. I might do so this weekend…

Reardon. A little dated but – congrats thomas – Openwave Announces New Executive Appointments.

Personal Music Streaming. Wow I’ve been looking for this…MP3Mystic :: Easy to set up, flexable, free personal streaming music server. Rob Bennett uses Edna for the same purpose and is happy with it.

Izymail. Trying out Izymail – outlook access to hotmail. I have found the native outlook access to hotmail increasingly unreliable and so am looking for alternatives. so far this seems to work…

Digital Audio Player. Another nice audio solution for Halloween – nice – CF Sound Player

Dad News. Making great progress. Plans to check out today and be home this afternoon! Thanks much to all the well wishers.

Ebizjets. One of my partners succumbed and is now an ebizjets member. Very interesting idea. I wonder if the prices will go down – today’s WSJ discussed a glut of business jets. Resale prices have certainly dropped. The claim in the article is that fractional rates won’t drop, implying that the economics were driven by operating costs (which haven’t dropped), not capital costs. I wonder tho.

New Transport Protocols. We saw a company this week pitching a new protocol for a certain internet application. A protocol that is a replacement for a very widely used internet protocol today – something that is regularly emitted by most clients and regularly consumed by most servers.

We asked ourselves – does the world really need a new protocol? It is really hard to bring out a new protocol to displace an entrenched one. Tcpip was invented for low speed serial links with a lot of latency, and then was further tuned for 10mbit csma/cd ethernet, and was further tuned for today’s gigabit switched ethernet. It is not perfect for today’s low latency, low loss, switched fabrics. But it is good enough and so things like ISO died along the way. Heck we can’t even get to IPv6.

Even for fundamentally new media, like wireless (well kind of new, just ignore aloha for the sake of this argument), ip is probably going to win and overwhelm things like bluetooth.

The established base of economic activity around existing popular protocols is so great, it is hard for a new entrant to break in. Even if the new entrant is twice as fast, who cares? That is just 18 months of moore’s law.

So I am eternally doubtful about new protocols. A new protocol is going to have to be dramatically better – 10x plus – or solve a big problem that the existing protocol just can’t be bent to solve.

The cost to distribute a new protocol to hundreds of millions of end nodes and servers is just huge. Very very hard to get a new protocol distributed that is just a replacement for an existing one.

Dad update. He continues to do well. Physically making good strides. Is up occasionally today, and is eating solid food (though, as his roommate says, everything tastes like dirt). He is not feeling the most settled today, painkillers and anesthetics are taking their toll, but he looks better and is getting better.

Travel to Cleveland. Haven’t been on a redeye in years. I used to travel 4-5 days a week including redeyes, early mornings, middays, etc. My most extreme travel was maybe my 24 hoiur trip to paris for a dressing down by a client. I left cleveland and was back in 24 hours, and saw about 4 minutes of paris.

The newly remodelled northwest facility in dtw is great. Very spacious. A marked difference from my last trip here. I used to travel thru here weekly back when I was consulting for gm, standard tube of canada, ontario paper, and other midwest clients.

But of course my most memorable detroit airport moment was the night Liz was born. I was on a consulting assignment for standard tube of canada in woodstock ontario. A colleague and I were driving to detroit the night of november 19 to interview some automotive customers the following day. Between london and detroit we hit black ice and spun into the ditch, thankfully we were not hurt nor was the car damaged. We were towed out later and got to detroit around 2am. I spoke with C and all was fine, she was due in a week.

A half hour later the phone rang. C’s water had broken. She was heading for the hospital. I scrambled out of bed and got a cab to detroit city airport. Before leaving I called ahead to a charter operator and had them get a pilot out of bed. He met me at the airport and we left detroit in a little 4 seater and hopped across the lake to cleveland.

Getting a cab at 4am in cleveland was hard. After repeated calls with greater desparation on each call, the taxi dispatcher came out personally and took me to the hospital. I arrived a few minutes after 5 and at 529 Liz arrived. and she let the world know she was here, she was talking from the word go.

Dad. I just saw dad in the icu. He is doing great, they are moving him out of intensive care in the next hour. He looks good, is awake and lucid, and is anxious to get all the tubes out. Mom is doing great too.

The surgery was very successful. They were able to do a valve repair with a cosgrove ring and did not need to replace the valve which is great news. And they performed a maze procedure to correct his arhythmia as well. So very good news.

The cleveland clinic has quite an amazing heartcare facility. According to signs in the hall it is the number one rated heart facility in the country. There are a huge number of foreign patients coming and going here, they have translators on staff. My father’s doctor, dr cosgrove, invented the ring that was implanted in my father – the cosgrove ring. I certainly feel that we are in good hands here.

Cleveland Clinic TV Stations. I’m flipping channels at the guest house here. A saudi network, abu dhabi, kuwait, indian, another arabic channel, a turkish channel? Very interesting spread, indicates a lot about the customer base. Why no european, no spanish language, no asian? Where do these people go for cardiac care?