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?

Chester Avenue. I’m riding down Chester from downtown to the cleveland clinic. Man has it changed in 15 years. It used to be scary. It is becoming gentrified. A bunch of new houses, new condos, really nice construction.

Seattle Sports. Man it seems like a bad time to be a fan in this town. Mariners are fun but can’t quite get over the top, and my understanding of the new labor deal is that the Mariners will need to give up cash to others, thereby affecting Mariners competitiveness over the next 5 years. The Sonics seem unable to get or retain top talent, and the current management has a history of less-than-great deals. I have a hard time getting excited about the Seahawks, Holmgren just seems like a poseur to me. My favorite college sport, basketball, is not a game the Huskies excel at, and there is no arena in town that is large enough to host anything but first-round NCAA games. The football Huskies are a bright spot, tho last weekend was painful. But I am not feeling generally optimistic.

Offline. Going offline for most of week. Dad is at the Cleveland Clinic undergoing treatment for MVP. Good luck Dad!

From Lockergnome. OneClickPlay looks like a great utility to use with winamp – creating playlists is a major pain. It would be cool if this would create play lists based on search criteria across all my media “all songs by Prince, Rick James, or of type FUNK”.

This is interesting – Q315237 - High Rate of Collisions on 100-MB Networks.

And a good source of desktop wallpaper.

Real Beverly Hillbillies. Hey all you relatives in Ohio will want to check this out…. :)

Outage. Off the web most of yesterday, as was our office at Ignition. Routing problem at Conxion. Surprising how hard it was to find – you would think that they could have discovered the problem in less than 8-10 hours.

Surprising how useless I am without the net for a day. No email. No shopping. No research. I just kept running “ping 206.204.4.6” all day long, trying to see my DNS server…

Groove Usage. Ray notes that 25% of Groove users use it to sync their own files across multiple locations. The home/work sync problem is a huge one that, with broadband homes, ought to be solveable. Groove is a way but very heavyweight for the intended purpose. There has to be a solution that is much lighter that plugs into Windows and native Windows apps in a cleaner way. I’ve tried setting up my own VPN server at home but that is not worth the hassle. The WinXP remote desktop stuff is so unintuitive, it is not a good solution. I just want to be able to access any of my work or home files from any location without installing whole new app (like Groove) and without paying some service fee to store the files up in the cloud – I already have tons of storage, thank you.

Outward Bound event. Liz and I think we’ll go to the Seattle Black Tie Benefit for Outward Bound – looks like a lot of fun, more fun than a normal auction event. Interesting to read the corporate sponsorship list – Endeavour Capital looks interesting, a very different kind of investment firm than is Ignition, but very similar values – I suppose some of the principals there are Outward Bound alums.

Azure Capital. Dinner with Mike Kwatinetz and others of Azure Capital tonight – I knew of Mike while at Microsoft but this will be first in-person meeting. Really like some of their investments – hope we can work together.

Treadmills. Looking for a good one for home use. Need to get that daily exercise going!

Some models that get good press – Precor M9.55, the True Fitness lineup, the Landice Roadrunner with built in 6CD player, the Smooth lineup, the rest of the Landice lineup.

Good review sites include Advanced Fitness Treadmill Reviews, TreadmillDoctor, and the About.com Treadmill site.