Turtles all the way down

…back.

About 8 months ago I leg-pressed a little too much and the pressure was more than my lower back could take. The herniated discs that I’ve been dealing with the for last few years haven’t left me alone since. This was exacerbated by lugging about tons of books for school.

In the past, any back pain flare-ups usually just worked their way out within a few days. This one was lasting for months.

After doing what I could to take the load of every day activities off my back, I began thinking there was something else that I was doing (or not doing) that could be why the pain was not subsiding. The most likely culprits were too much sitting in one position, an uncomfortable new chair at work, and/or my regular workout.

Starting last weekend, I stopped doing leg presses and abdominal twists altogether, and dropped the weight of all of my lifts by about 30%. I’ve noticed the difference already. I’m still feeling some back discomfort but the pain is largely gone. I’ve also began getting up and walking around after every 30 minutes of sitting, and have ordered a new chair for the office.

The hardest part of this was to drop the weights down. For several years I’ve been working under the theory that you need to lift as close to your maximum as possible to receive the most benefits. I would shoot for 4-8 reps of 80-90% of my max.

But after last weekend’s trips to the gym, I found that doing 12-20 reps of less weight allowed me to focus more on form. As a result, I was sore in places I haven’t been sore in for quite a while. This leads me to believe that the “lift heavy” approach of blasting out a small number of reps can cause you to avoid working certain muscle groups. As long as you keep doing the reps to failure, you should get a pretty good benefit to the lifting.

With school starting again, my goal for the next few months is to just maintain muscle mass, and shed a few extra pounds. I’ll work on strengthening over the summer. If my back continues to improve, I’ll probably alternate heavy lifting with what I’m doing now.

Hello…Pheedo?!?!

Since January 1st, Pheedo, a service I use for RSS ads, had only credited me with one click. Up until then, I was being credited with clicks and views each day. I emailed their support people, and magically, that same day, I started getting credited again.

This is good, but…no response from the support line. Not even an, “Is it working now?” or, “Oops…” And, it would have been nice if they had admitted that they erroneously lost my credit for the first half of January and offered me some sort of restitution. After all, I did carry their ads.

I’m willing to deal with Pheedo as they seem to be otherwise reputable and are a nice alternative to Feedburner / Google, but they need to run a tighter ship to maintain credibility. My new approach with them will be, if something goes wrong, complain loudly and frequently.

And for something completely different, I cannot understand why Google allows you to have different passwords for each of their services. For a while I had separate passwords for iGoogle, Reader, Gmail and Adsense. I unified them all today because Firefox kept getting them confused with one another in Firefox’s saved password file.

Yahoo got the whole single sign-on concept down years ago. What is taking Google so long? Is OpenID the answer?

I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

So, real simple…for Christmas 2008 I want to be able to pay no more than $50 a month and download as much music as I want, from any artists that I want. Yes, I want flat-rate, all-you-can-eat, just like my Internet service and TV service. Furthermore, I want at least half of that money to go to the artists.

At least part of this is being seriously proposed by the Songwriters Association of Canada, for far less than I had even hoped for.

The Songwriters Association of Canada is proposing a $5-a-month licensing fee on every wireless and Internet account in the country, in exchange for unlimited access to all recorded music.

The deal would put $1 billion annually in the pockets of artists, publishers and record labels, according to the songwriters group. The money would be distributed to artists based on how frequently their music is swapped on-line; the more downloads, the more money the people responsible for the music would accrue. Big Champagne, a Los Angeles-based Internet monitoring service, says it can track file-swapping accurately enough to ensure that artists big and small would be compensated.

But there is one small catch…

Of course, it would require all the music labels to cooperate and make their vast back catalogs available on the Internet without any sort of copying restrictions. For this reason alone, it’s almost impossible to imagine this proposal ever gaining traction. The labels haven’t exhibited any sort of vision in dealing with the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital revolution; instead they agree only on their contempt of file-sharing.

If the downloads and file sharing of fringe artists can be tracked at least accurately enough for them to be compensated, then maybe this proposal has legs. Even if it doesn’t, at least there is movement in the right direction.

Apparently some people’s position on the political spectrum is highly relative.

When I hang around with conservatives, they tell me I’m a liberal. When I hang around with liberals, they tell me I’m a conservative. But does that in itself make me a moderate? I don’t think so. I have a few viewpoints that fall squarely into one camp or the other.

I won’t bore you with what they are.

The point is, in this endless season of campaigning, remember that people are not just red or blue. People are multi-dimensional and can put together their positions in combinations that are non-conventional but still valid.

From dslreports.com:

Time Warner Cable may be exploring the possibility of implementing overage charges for its RoadRunner cable broadband service. According to excerpts from a leaked internal memo posted to our forums, the company will be testing a usage-based system in the Beaumont, Texas market. The system is aimed at gaining additional revenue from “5% of subscribers who utilize over half of the total network bandwidth.” The trial will determine whether it’s practical to deploy such a system nationally.

The memo claims new customers in the Beaumont market will be placed on metered billing plans where overage charges will apply. Those customers will be given a special website allowing users to track their bandwidth consumption and upgrade to faster tiers if they consistently use more bandwidth than allowed for their tier. Existing customers will be able to track consumption, but will remain on flat-rate billing.

It is rumored that Comcast has also conducted such tests, but never implemented the system because they were afraid of consumer backlash. We recently spoke to several ISPs and an industry analyst, all of whom shared those same concerns. ISPs are under pressure from investors to gain more revenue from higher-consumption users, but have had great success marketing the “all you can eat” business model to consumers.

Ok, fine, but I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: the vast majority of users don’t relate what applications they run to the amount of bandwidth they use. A better solution would be to implement traffic shaping for high-usage users, and to let them know about it.

For example, “If you use more than X megabits per month, we’ll limit you during peak hours to no more than Y megabits per second.”

This will be a reasonable if the goal is to allocate bandwidth more fairly. If the goal is to get more revenue out of heavy users…just charge them a higher flat rate.

My semi-educated guess here is that an overage system may lose money for the ISP due to lost customers and an increased need for people to staff complaint lines and customer service phone banks.

Someone, who will remain anonymous but who is a law school graduate, told me this recently.

The purpose of law school is not to teach the law. What they teach in classes is not that hard, so classes are made artificially difficult by teaching cases instead of rules, requiring memorization on exams, and basing grades on three-hour essays.

The real purpose of law school is to rank a class of students for prospective employers.

I’ll keep this in mind as fall semester’s grades begin to roll in.

My source has a good point. The exam-based classes spend 14 weeks teaching cases and then you take an exam where you need to recite rules. The exams are closed book, which tests your ability to memorize, ability to type, writing skill (with limited time to revise), willingness to put time into law school, and social engineering (talking other people out of copies of old exams and exam answers).

On the other hand, I learned a lot in my first semester. A lot. Tons. By putting my notes in outline form, I got to know the course material quite thoroughly.

The jury is still out.

A colleague pointed this out and just about made my day.

A child adoption proceeding is conducted in the form of a television game show and online media event, wherein couples compete against each other to win legal custody of the child. Adoptive parents are selected using a vote-by-phone and/or Internet voting scheme, together with 24-hour surveillance of the prospective parents, which enables television viewers and Internet users to inspect prospective parent-contestants in detail before voting for the winning parents. The present invention overcomes inequities of state-run or private adoption agencies, permitting a fairer selection process while providing greater time and access to observe a pool of prospective parents.

And of course no one would purposely vote for the worst parents, like they currently vote for the worst singers on American Idol, right? Right?

Don’t forget to look at who the inventor is…

In the so-unreal-it’s-funny department, Wired.com writes:

[T]he NSA developed a mind-boggling, but still incomplete, plan to eavesdrop on the internet in order to protect it.

That’s quite a packet sniffer we’re talking about. And more database servers than Google, Yahoo and Microsoft together own. And software to parse through it all to detect threats. In near-real-time.

Right.

Major music label EMI has a new boss who is looking to change things around. Consider these statistics:

* Record companies lose money on 85 per cent of new artists, even before overheads
* More than 30 per cent of EMI’s artists have not produced an album. Many never will
* 200 of the 14,000 artists EMI deals with each year account for more than half its sales
* 7 per cent of EMI’s digital contracts account for 80 per cent of its digital revenues

Today, in for artists that are presumably distributed via CDs, 1.4% account for 50% of sales. Will that tail flatten if EMI goes all-digital? Hard to say. One thing is for sure - EMI runs a very inefficient business:

* Its marketing expenditure has been running about £60m over budget
* EMI scraps about 20 per cent of CDs produced, at an annual cost of £25m
* EMI spends £70m a year subsidising artists who will never make it any money.

They could do a lot with an extra £155m.

A brilliant movie comes out of Hollywood? I don’t get out to see too many movies in the theaters, so take this for what it’s worth, but There Will Be Blood is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a gritty story where all of the main characters are flawed in some way or another. Daniel Day-Lewis is phenomenal as always and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood provides an edgy soundtrack. Highly recommended and a solid A.