msb-0074 Dangling over a precipice

msb-0074 Dangling over a precipice

Feedback come first so...

I've been in touch with the people over at "Faces of MS."

I have given permission to use my, uh, smiling contenance, (sounds better than my ugly mug,) on their annual report.

It seems they wanted to run local New Jersey faces rather than using faces from all over the nation.

Hey, whatever... I'm just glad to do my bit.

Maybe they'll ask me to run an ad, which means that I'd run a show called "Faces of MS" and you'll get a show featuring the organizers.

----

To 'Miss Chris' we're all pulling for your husband. (But not on him. Since we all live in different directions, that could get messy. :-)

I got some feed back from Jaime from Alaska.

She finally caught MSB-0072 and she loved the song "Reinstalling Windows". :-)

That's a vindication as far as I'm concerned.

I hope their both enjoying her and her daughter's trip to San Fran.

Now if I could just talk the rest of you people into using iTunes and subscribing to the RSS feed of the podcast... Instead of going to the page over and over again.

(My stats are showing "up". And half of those are coming via subscription. But that could be a transient ... Still ...

Wow! My words are having some effect. [I can't tell you how I've often felt like I was the world's biggest wanker for doing this podcast {and yet I'm "sure" that it is one of the best ways for disseminating talk and tunes to everybody with MS.}])

I'll soon have pictures of my new cat to put in my images to sell on items on my store.

She's a Maine Coon cat and big. You'll probably hear more about her as she's a rescue cat and I firmly believe in rescuing animals.

She's got a divine purr and we already get along great.

I let her sleep and she lets me type.

The link to the store is on the webpage at MSBPodcast.com.

Maybe you could use a "hoodie?" (I know that its getting cold out there 'cause its getting cold in my s.o.h.o., [and I wish they'd turn the heat on already. {I'm an "owner" of this friggin' condo and Lee sits on on the board, so you think that I'd be informed. But, no...}] :-)

----

For Suzy and Friday's Child, I'm going to quote myself here.

"You don't need an iPod. (which is also the title of a song by "Uncle Seth" which you encountered on msb-0068 Memes, Words, Phrases and Sentences.)

That's only good if you want to carry the show around.

You don't even need iTunes (though you can get it for free at http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/ )

Its not the only podcatcher out there. (There's also iPodder at http://www.ipodder.org/directory/4/ipodderSoftware )

Its just that its extremely convenient to use iTunes.

If you had it, you could just open a web page on my podcast (at http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=120932170
) and say yes to all the questions until you see my late, great cat Wiki and then simply subscribe.

Its the easiest way really."

----

I know I'm now committed to blogging and podcasting once a week but I gotta tell you, I miss doing it twice a week. Okay, it shouldn't seem like so much but I miss it.

Podcasting, even with this shaky voice and lousy reading ability, just feels so great.

I enjoy digging up tunes for you on the PMN (Podsafe Music Network) and unashamedly venting whatever things were bugging me, (and from the email feedback I was getting it must have been bugging some of you too, [I still wonder how that lady got my podcast or my email address {The Luddites are all over the place.} I'm surprised she didn't write me by a quill pen plucked straight from a duck's arse.])

Well, I'm commited that its once a week.

I do wish some of you would record messages on the Odeo voicemail.

----

It seems we dangle over a lot of precipices.

We're all dangling over the same precipice, insecurity, but MS adds to the height we must fall.

Its not just job insecurity, and some of us are a bit beyond that, but its about our health and our health care.

There is something specially worry-some about the future.

Its very vexing to goto bed at night and not be sure that we're going to wake up with the same capabilities in the morning.

The reason that we're not sure compounds the worry.

With MS, stress is definitely a factor.

I think that my last attack was due to a prolonged period of stress. (Now, I no longer give a shit and everything seems to be stable with my nervous system... [Would that I had learned to stop worrying earlier, {but hindsight is always 20/20.}])

We stress about our level of disability, which can lead to an exacerbation and an exacerbation can lead to an unpredictable level of disability, which caused stress in the first place. (Sort of a "No Win" "death spiral" kind of situation.)

That's why I recommend "Tai Chi" or some form of exercise requiring concentration to every MSer.

It gets you to focus on something other than the stressful uncertainty and gets us to try things that can acually help us.

The very attemp is bound to ease our stress and any success is bound to help our attitudes.

----

Kim Jong Il; someome else who's dangling over a precipice.

Boy is he sorry he ever held the nuclear tests. He let the cat out of the friggin' bag. Now he wants to get back to the negotiating table.

Some diplomats from China went over there and probably explained to him what I said was his problem now, in much more diplomatic terms, but in a very real way. He can't use it and now he doesn't dare sell it.

Until he gets off the self-serving, paranoid "imperialist war mongering Americans" ranting, gets his head out of his ass, and gets North Korea's economy aligned with the rest of the planet's, he is now at a very real risk of getting his ass atomized if anything nuclear happens to anyone, anywhere.

And he's not Muslim...

There's 80 times as many Muslims as there are North Koreans.

----

The information on which we all rely, the health-care providers, doctors and health researchers that we use directly and indirectly, is dangling over a real precipice.

PBS had something about "Net neutrality" (yesterday as I write this,) and I whole-hearedly recommend that you go there (at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/index.html ) and check it out.

It made it abundantly clear what the phone companies and the cable companies, who have been charging you for fibre to the home and have been getting huge tax subsidies to bring you fibre to the home besides, for the past twenty or so years, have "not" been doing for the past twenty or so years; bringing you fibre to the home.

The development of RSS may be great for simplifying syndication, meaning that you can pick up new episodes of things automagically and downloading them in the background at the system's convenience, but the power of the iTunes music store and the real power of podcasting is that it is able to thrive in a bandwidth deprived region (and if you're in the United States, you are in a bandwidth deprived region of the world.)

The telcos and the cablecos have had it illegally sweet for over 20 years and they are now pulling a fast one in Washington by re-defining their roles as common carriers into several levels of private carriers.

They want to charge their customers are both ends of a connection.

By 'promissing' the customers different things at either end they will be able to choke off any packets from a specific source, just like China is censoring the web and the internet.

What is at stake is your right to get information on anything and everything. By effectively being able to choke off the on ramps from servers, they will be able to bring you some packets at dial-up speed while bringing you some other packets at broadband speed.

Since the information economy belongs to the swift, they will be able to effectively kill off, say Yahoo, at the expense, literally, of say MSN or Google. The swift will be those who are able to
pay the most.

What this means is that start-ups will have to have very deep pockets indeed and when you're starting up anything the last thing you have is deep pockets. There will be no more Googles.

The true power of the combination of RSS and podcasting is that we are relatively immune to this attempt to choke off the information flow at our consuming end.

Though the lower over all bandwidth ultimately means a real cap of the amount of information we can take in.

86,400 seconds per day is an obsolute. At 56kbps that maxes out at 604,800 bytes.

So much for downloading multi-gigabyte movies over the phone lines. Even at broadband speed, its a lenghty stretch.

That leaves the producer or server end. Imagine that the internet cloud is now able to choke off how much information it is willing to take. You can't scale up for increaces of popularity by just getting another line into it, you're also going to have to buy service at the speed you need.

That's going to cost a lot more and that cost is going to get passed on to you.

I find it amusing, in a wry, disgusting way kind of amusing, that my rant on Osama last week, about his ending up king of an mole hill instead, of letting people climb the same mountain, applies to the telcos and the cablecos as well.

I just might head back to Canada because of the ramifications of net neutrality.