Hockey Twits

Update: 09/24/09 - TheHockeyTwits 2.0 coming soon!

I was talking to a good friend of mine, Jennifer Leggio, you may know her from such things as her social media blog over on ZDnet, or maybe you've come across her on Twitter. Anyway, we're both avid hockey fans, you can probably tell from my Twitter HOW-TO for Islander fans blog(a good read for anyone getting started on Twitter). I bleed orange and blue, Jen on the other hand bleeds teal, she loves those San Jose Sharks.

Jen has had some previous experience with organizing Twitter users together. I thought it would be a great idea to have something in place for hockey fans. So here it is, sorted by general hockey people and then by users who follow specific teams. If you want to be added, or if I got your team wrong, let me know(in comments, via facebook or Twitter) your Twitter name and favorite team and I'll get it sorted out. Eventually this will move to a Wiki, but since those Wiki Twitter lists can get messy pretty fast I wanted to start off with a clean slate.

Enjoy!

Follow all the hockey twits you can take!

Fans of teams by their NHL division:

Atlantic Division Hockey Twits
Northeast Division Hockey Twits
Southeast Division Hockey Twits
Central Division Hockey Twits
Northwest Division Hockey Twits
Pacific Division Hockey Twits

Misc. hockey people or users on Twitter. (let me know your teams!)

Another great tool for hockey tweeting by @icejunkies - http://www.nhlgametag.com/ - !

My Digital TV Wish list

With the move to digital TV postponed from 2/17/09 to 6/12/09, I had a few ideas that should be thrown in to the next release of TV.

TV is great.

TV could be even better.

My Digital TV wish list

1. Commercial / DVR links

I thought about this a while ago, how cool would it be if you were watching something, then a commercial came on for another show you want to catch, instead of searching the guide to setup a recording you could just hit a button on your TiVo/DVR remote to schedule a recording of that program? One word: Rock.

2. Encoded Program ID

But why do you ask? Ever set your DVR for a show like Heroes and end up missing the last little bit because it aired over the last possible minute? I'd love for the TiVo/DVR to just know.

3. More Info PC link

I know, most shows you watch now have a web address somewhere during the credits, or it's even mentioned in the show (like Dirty Jobs). I would like my TV & Computer to be able to communicate over my network... well, I'd like my TV, PDA, Computer, etc. all linked. I think it'd be nice to hit a more info button and get a page full of relevant subject matter. Imagine getting a Microsoft Surface and having a bunch of pages displayed about what you're watching on TV? Awesome.

4. Don't discriminate!

I would like all traditional TV to be broadcast over any medium. I know this is not too likely to happen, but this is a wish list. Whether I'm on my mobile, PC, laptop, or PDA I want to have access to all the content I subscribe to.

5. Online DVR

I think of all the items on my wish list, this can come in to being a lot faster than the others. After all, look at the strides made with Video On Demand. We just have to pipe our DVR data back where it came from for universal storage. I'd like the ability to watch my recorded shows wherever I am, as well as unlimited storage. This kind of ties in with the "Don't Discriminate!" item, though I think if this feature came along by itself it would be celebrated by many!

We have to face it, these innovations won't come around for the general good of the TV viewing public, but these advancements could create huge revenue streams for TV studios. Alas, my marketing background meets my technological aspirations and I feel like I have to justify my wish list!

Innovate back to 1988 - The tale of the old and new digital and VoIP PBX

I got off the phone a little while ago with my cousin who works in the telecomm industry. As you can imagine, if you're so inclined, this is an industry that has scene tremendous growth given it's nature.

I was lucky enough to be part of it for a few years at the tale end of the 90s during the "PC Revolution." Sure, there weren't any "real" switches left by that time, it was mostly digital and the switching was done by way of circuit boards.

I some how struck gold working in telecomm (geek gold that is), Yup, I bet you guessed it. The IP phone. Years before Vonage or your local cable provider was advertising VoIP yours truly had it in his hands. And it was cool! They literally flew off the shelf like hot cakes at an IHOP free pancake day. The flexibility it provided satellite offices or work from people was huge. It was a great innovation and it saved a lot of companies a lot of money on toll charges. The coolest thing was probably setting up an IP handset as a test back to our office in Deer Park, NY. Why was this cool? Because the handset was in Transylvania and it got it's internet connection by way of a dial up connection being proxied through a computer. The voice quality left a lot to be desired, but it connected and just like I dialed an extension to talk to the person in the next office, I could do the same with that phone. Groovy, Innovative, VoIP was and is still a game changer.

These days a lot of PBX's are based solely on IP. Phone techs now get to fight QoS battles and less than perfect firewall installations.

So why am I puckering up to VoIP? I'm not, I wanted to set the mood. Like I wrote above, I was talking to my cousin earlier and he told me about a call he had. He happened to be on the phone with a sales engineer at a prominent PBX manufacturer. For whatever the reason he was calling, he came across a funny little discovery. This particular company stuck to their guns throughout their transition to IP telephony. Sure, you can install their enterprise level VoIP solutions and hand out IP handsets to all your work at homers or satelite offices, but the new systems are entirely based on IP. Every handset gets an IP address, yum!

Think of all the possibilities, and while engineers are hard at work bringing the next greatest innovation to fruition I found my cousin's discovery not something I could just overlook.

It seems while designing this total IP based PBX, they chose to emulate their "CPU" from their digital PBXs in to software to run the new IP based phone system. Of course I don't expect any company looking to make a profit to entirely recode something that's proven and that works. In my opinion they took it a little too far, all the VoIP data is broken back down in to time slots for the "CPU" to handle. (Think Token Ring)

What puzzles my mind, is a company that spent millions of dollars on innovation for the VoIP transport, most likely spent a good portion of that marrying the new tech to the old tech.

I think this serves as an analogy for far too many things to list here, and I am guilty as well.

Of course, I've gone to great distances on some projects to figure things out, and in the process of figuring something out I discovered my original goal could be updated by the success I've had developing something new to complete part of the project.

I think at some level this is a natural part of IT's evolution. Especially when a not so data-centric industry is forced in to adopting a standard like VoIP, and using it with a developed tried and true technology. I just hope the innovaters are insightful enough to see that in the mist of all their hard work and development, they're leaving technology chips on the table so to speak. I'm sure by now someone has said something and future implementations will be able to leverage the great technology they already put in place.

Working on something? Take a minute to see the overall benefit of your work, you may have discovered something worthwhile.

Twitter for Islander Fans (A Twitter HOW-TO)

I think it's kind of funny trying to bridge the gap between a Web 1.0 technology like a forum for hockey fans to something like twitter. For me, it's not really a transition, just something to augment pure NY Islander fan fare. I wrote this for an Islander Message board I'm a part of, so there may be some unfitting pieces here... enjoy.

An Islander's fan guide to using Twitter for Islander fun and expanding the reach of NYIslandersCountry.

This is long, I'm sorry but I tried to cover every step if you wanted to get on to Twitter and hookup with the other Islander fans around and spread the word from here.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. (*Wiki)

Twitter is good for a lot things, you can connect with people who have similar interest and news spreads pretty fast depending who you're following. For the purpose of this post I'm just sticking to it's benefit as an Islander fan (the way I use it), you can google plenty of info on Twitter if you want.

Step 1. Signup for Twitter (https://twitter.com/signup) - I haven't gotten any spam from signing up, just notifications of new people following my post or direct messages.

Step 2. Download a program called TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/)

There are other programs that interface with Twitter, you can browse them here (https://twitter.com/downloads). TweetDeck is what I use for Islander tweets so I'll go with it here.

Step 3. Open TweetDeck and login with your Twitter account.

(don't like the "tweet" sounds coming from TweetDeck, click on the wrench in the upper right and you can adjust it's settings)

Step 4. Click on the Search button at the top of TweetDeck, it's the magnifying glass.

Step 5. Where it says "What are you searching for" Type in #Isles

TweetDeck will create a column for all users who post using the #Isles hashtag (a way to set a topic in a post)

Step 6. Option 1. Follow Islander fans! When you see people post in the #Isles column, you can hover your mouse over their picture, 4 buttons will pop-up. The button in the lower right is for Other Actions. Click on that and on the menu that is displayed you'll have a selection to "Follow" this will let you see the users tweets in your All Friends column - even if they don't tag their tweets with #Isles (good if you think someone is cool, you can un follow them if you don't like what they post and only see their tweets when they use the #Isles hashtag)

Step 6. Option 2. Reply to other users, Move the mouse over the persons picture and click the left pointing arrow, TweetDeck will auto fill the TweetBox with the reply information. And if you're replying from within the #Isles column, it will auto-add the #Isles tag to your tweet so other Islander fans searching on Twitter can find your posts.

Cool, so that's all well and good for keeping up with Islander fans, but how to spread the IslanderCountry love? Easy!

Come across a great read here at IslanderCountry and want to share?
Awesome, that's a big part of twitter.

Step 1. In the What Are You Doing? box, put a brief description of the post (You only have 140 characters per post, and it's not fluid so you can't run on between tweets).

Step 2. Put the URL to the post in the Shorten URL box and click the shorten button to the right. This will create a short URL instead of a long one and will save space on the 140 character count.

Step 3. Don't forget to tag the tweet with the #Isles hashtag! This is big in bringing people who follow #Isles on twitter back to the great material here on IslanderCountry.

Hope someone finds this interesting, Us people at #Isles are lacking in a bit of Islander support on Twitter, if you have any questions feel free to PM me.

Twitter people good for the Islanders (& hockey)
http://twitter.com/nhl_nyi (this is an automated bot from the NHL or NYI that sends out game updates, currently it doesn't use the #Isles hashtag)

http://twitter.com/7thwoman
http://twitter.com/PatrickStephens
http://twitter.com/thefredelement (me)
http://twitter.com/dani3boyz
http://twitter.com/Lighthousehocky
http://twitter.com/mrpants
http://twitter.com/motherpucker
http://twitter.com/nhldigest

There's a ton of other hockey people on, you can do your searching at http://search.twitter.com/

update: Visit Hockey Twits for a list of hockey users on twitter, separated by teams and including team hash tags!

(feel free to re-post)

The Nvidia ION platform gets Microsoft Approval for Vista

Woohoo, score one for those juicy Windows 7 netbooks that I'm sure all us geeks are dying to get our hands on. Netbooks are nice, cheap hardware, out dated software - just perfect for getting online and facebooking 'til your hearts content. OK, so a linux powered netbook isn't really so bad is it? Not at all, great with power and it can really exploit that limited hardware.

So, at the present we get Microsoft certifying the Nvidia ION platform on Vista, which is simply an Intel Atom processor with an Nvidia GPU (the 9400M).

This was certified on Vista Home Premium, which is all well and good, but running Vista on a netbook is like getting a root canal trying to check your email. I shudder to think at running Aero on an Atom processor with 512MB of RAM.

This is much needed innovation and will help Microsoft get on top of Netbook industry. Windows 7 and Vista are nice and compatible unlike Vista and Windows XP. With the XP like memory footprint of Windows 7, this will help establish Windows 7 as a great netbook operating system.

Now all that's left is to get rid of that pesky licensing fee.

The Passion(less) PC Hardware Evolution

Where, oh where to begin.

August, 1994

It's the middle of the summer and I'm about a month away from my first year of high school. Super Nintendo was all the rage providing mind numbing hours of entertainment. As I walked out the front door of my house with my cousin, he says, "Wow, you got a computer!" I said, "I did? Huh, what?" To the right of me on the floor were several boxes - one containing a Packard Bell 486DX2 at 50Mhz with 4MB of stock ram and a 420MB hard drive! Don't forget about the killer apps - Packard Bell Explorer running on Windows 3.11 on top of Dos 6.22 - now that's hardcore, two hardcore for one hand even.

Pay attention kids, this is where I got my "chops"

Even back in the day running Doom on a 486 w/4MB of RAM was taxing on the machine. I couldn't play it if Windows loaded, I'd have to exit out or use an old school shft+F2. Aside from my desire to play the best video game of all time - The PacBell (like they tended to do) kept crapping out, problems here and there. It really threw me in to the fire. Anyway, my quest to play Doom without booting again led me to wanting to understand memory, how does the PC control this ram? And what the hell, why is 640K so important! Conventional memory is right, this is a computer we're talking about here, with a word like "conventional" seemingly putting a hammer down on everything. So I read, I read everything that came with the PC, including the MS-DOS book. With a fundamental understanding I went to work.. c:\edit config.sys! My first step in to a new world. One where I could identify with a seldom few in the real world, I felt more of a connection with Dade from Hackers than most of my classmates. The first year was intense, experimenting with Windows3.11 shell manangers, a ton of "memory tweakers", finally having the nerve to take a screw driver to the PacBell (had to wait til no one was home, if my Dad saw me fondling the warranty sticker on a $2,500.00 PC I'd be in deep shit) and it lended a bigger, brighter, better understanding as to what this software was manipulating.

Beautiful, sexy, sleek, Made in Taiwan HARDWARE!

So this was cool - I was a kid, around 7 or 8 years old, who would rip apart old VCRs and TVs, trying to figure out how things work. Most memorable: An unshielded power supply can zap you! The PC hardware was something new and exciting! Besides that, it was really quite limiting. All this fun stuff to do on a PC, and this, this hardware was what I came to admire and despise simultaneously. But, it was fun! Setting up memory hacks, staying up in to the wee hours of the morning just trying everything and anything I can think of - remember, there was no google codebase, no fancey internet forums to ask for help. It was a list of files and DOS commands and goold old fashion tinkering.

And it was great! I loved it, every minute of it. I was so stoked every day coming home from school to get back on the PC, to a) play Doom and b) see what else I could do with it! It was about the hardware, it was about exploiting every drop of performance out of it that I could. It was a competition, starting with myself and then moving to random DALnet IRC channels, it was passion and fun. More than a pastime but struggling to be a life style (remember this is before geeks were cool!) The good ole' PacBell saw it's share of hardware failures, one in the IDE controller on the soundblaster (remember when that was the norm!?!). I actually had a tech show up to my house, he couldn't fix it, had to call some PacBell support center, while he was on hold I fixed it. (Just used a different IDE controller card the guy had - I don't know why he was a tech, then again this is PacBell) The guy on the phone wanted to talk to me, so in my enthusiam I said sure - he offered me a job! Talk about an ego boost, unfortunately, or fortunately rather I think there was some labor laws preventing a 14 year old relocating for work.

Around one summer later I spent about a week downloading floppy images of Slackware 95, you can fill in the blanks from there.

I know as a productivity tools, PCs should just work, forget all the M$ this or Apple that for a minute, when you rely on tools to work to make money - they should work. I'm kind of glad they do, but I'll tell you, I miss it.

I miss the binge sessions, I miss ripping through DOS prompts, I miss win.ini (honorable mention: creditmaster4!, Shhhh). For the adventure you have to get a little bigger and better now, it's not built in to the box, you can go chase whatever dreams you want on the web, whether it's making a million bucks or hacking the sh!t out of some poor financial institution's lousy network with last century infrastructre. That's all good, but call me old fashioned - I almost miss that 486...

Why FiOS Why? Have you learned from Cable companies?

Verizon's FiOS is sweet! Admittedly I'm not an early adopter by any means, but recently I took the plunge and I don't regret I did. After reading pretty extensively on dslreports.com I felt good about ordering up some fiber. I know, I know most cable companies in fact do use fiber themselves to a local break out where they bring coax to your house. Still for an infrastructure geek like myself, the closer the fiber the better! 1Gbit right to my dwelling, how can you beat that?

You can't, but you can screw up the fundamentals. Allow me to introduce you to MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance). MoCA is a foundation dedicated to enabling ethernet data over existing coax. This is a sweet cost saving idea, why not leverage existing cabling to complete a $23 Billion dollar investment? I'll tell you why - cause you just spent $23 billion bucks and you're building a bottle neck in to this shiny new fiber optic system at the end users house. Verizon's MoCA use enables set top boxes (cable boxes, or STBs) to get their network data over coax, but in most cases it doesn't end there. The installer will most of the time (especially if you ordered FiOS Tv) use coax from the ONT (optical network terminal, where the fiber terminates on the side of your house) to your router.

How it works:

Verizon brings fiber optic to your house, to your ONT, which "converts" your fiber in to several outputs, currently used are coax, ethernet and voice. (there's an unused video connection too) Usually your ethernet port is ignored (and turned off), while your TV stations and data network are sent on the coax. So quick point here, coming out of your router is the following traffic on your coax: internet data, lan data, tv stations. Of course they are all at different frequencies on the copper pipe as to not interfere with each other.

Ok, lets review shall we? What's the transfer speed of fiber at it's current spec? 1Gbit, What's the transfer speed of Cat5e at it's current spec? 1Gbit, What's the transfer speed of MoCA at spec 1.1? 175Mbits. I know, I know, current implementation of FiOS, including VOD (which is streamed IPTV, over your data network to your STB) doesn't approach 1Gbit of data. Not even close, so why do I blog?

Because it's stupid, they develop a literal speed of light network and build a potential bottle neck right in to it... Have they learned nothing from cable companies? The ever pushing of DOCSIS which is resulting in more and more compressed (and usually crappier looking) data. Now you CAN get your data installed over the Ethernet port on the ONT, no problem, but if you're not using a MoCA device (such as a NIM100, or an Actiontec router) your STB won't be able to get guide info or video on demand (VOD). Oh, did I forget to mention the FiOS STBs have an ethernet port on them! That isn't enabled!

sigh. Does Verizon really think in the lifetime of the fiber they've hung that we won't be up to 1Gbit speeds?