OneMind

Last summer, I ran some Internet speed tests to try to determine why me online performance seemed so doggedly slow. I discovered, among other things, that upload speed was capped by Comcast at 360Kbps, which was discouraging. But my download speeds were pretty mediocre to downright poor. I traced the bulk of the problem — I thought at least — to the fact that I’m running through an Airport Extreme hub rather than directly connected to my Internet modem.

Today, we got Comcast’s new higher-speed service called Blast. It’s rated at 16Mbps up and 2Mbps down. So I re-ran the tests over at Speed.Net and found huge improvement.

Just testing my OS X box to a San Jose server, I got a download speed of 16990 and an upload speed of 1170. Switching to a San Francisco-based server gave me an upload speed of 18394 and a download transfer rate of 1194. That represents a 3-10x improvement over my earlier speed tests on the same hardware. And Comcast says they’re upgrading the physical modem on Friday and that should increase my performance even more.

This is much nicer. I can’t figure out, though, why the download speeds are at or above the rated levels even through the Airport Extreme when that piece of hardware seemed to be the problem last time.

Oh, well. Mystery upon mystery wrapped in a puzzle and stuffed into an enigma. Or something.

Dear Ralph Nader,

I’m one of a tiny minority of Americans who know that you weren’t always an a**hole (see Marty Kaplan’s column at Huffington Post for context). I was even more than a little sympathetic to your first run at the White House.

But there is no question in any reasonable person’s mind that if you didn’t outright cost Al Gore the Presidency and therefore pave the way for the worst president in our nation’s history, you at least played a major role in that outcome. And the fact that you express surprise that people think that shows how out of touch with reality and perhaps mentally challenged you have become in the days since you were my personal hero as a pro-consumer crusader.

Now you’ve announced that you’re going to take another Quixotic run at the Presidency, though you’ve yet to sort out which party you might represent or exactly how you’ll pull off this supremely stupid idea. You are either unbelievably egotistical or more incredibly dumb.

Ralph, I’m begging you as a one-time hero worshipper and long-time fan: get out now. Announce that you were suffering from a Senior Moment when you made that ridiculous announcement. Because, Ralph, not only can you not win, you can only have one effect on the race: to hand Bush III (aka John McCain) the White House. And if you do that again, history will vilify and pillory you such that all of your great work protecting American consumers from the excesses of BigCo will go swirling down the same drain as this country’s future under a mental pigmy. You should care more for America than that. Hell, you should care more for yourself than that.

Get out, Ralph. You’ve had your shots. Time to pull your head out of your butt and support a candidate with a real chance of pulling this country up by its bootstraps from the muck and the mire of CheneyBush.

Wow. This is a very interesting set of large-scale images depicting huge statistics that otherwise have no meaning to most of us. Very cleverly and artistically done by Chris Jordan.

This has to be one of the niftiest pranks I’ve ever seen or heard of. The video is really fun to watch and the idea is so good I can imagine seeing it reproduced all over the country in coming weeks.

A nice, empty, comedic moment in the midst of the chaos.

Check it out.

Thanks to my friend Vicky for the pointage.

Former Ambassador Joseph. C. Wilson IV, in an op-ed piece in the Baltimore Sun, questions the strength of Sen. Barack Obama based essentially on one encounter the Democratic presidential candidate had with the presumptive GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain in February, 2006.

In this encounter, as Wilson presents it, a “wrathful” McCain accused Obama of being “disingenuous”. Obama’s reply, which Wilson characterized as “meek” was, “The fact that you have no questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you.” As a result of this exchange, Wilson declares McCain as “insultingly dismissive” (correct) but “successful in intimidating his inexperienced colleague.”

Mr. Wilson tells us a lot more about his own combative and confrontational character in his assessment of this exchange than he does about Sen. Obama. He says Obama “failed to stand his ground” but what Obama really did was to refuse to take the bait of a bully into a personal mud wrestling match. Sen. Obama’s stock went up 20 points in my mind as I read Wilson’s piece. I find Obama’s response measured, calm and respectful.

If we are to end the cycle of violence in which the world continually finds itself, someone must be willing to respond to violence with love and respect and with an attempt to focus on the real issues and causes involved rather than the knee-jerk reaction we’ve seen from the Right in so many confrontations and engagements over the past decades. At some point in the past few weeks, in one of the myriad Democratic presidential debates, I recall hearing Obama saying something to the effect that we need not just to end the Iraq war but we need to end the mentality that got is into that war in the first place. Amen, brother. Preach it.

The bully McCain attacks and Obama chooses not to raise the volume, the rhetoric and the level of anger and noise but to respond calmly, accurately and in a measured way, and Wilson finds that problematic? I find McCain to be an unstable, angry person who is not qualified to be put into a position of having his finger on The Button. I find Obama to be a reasonable, intelligent, hope-filled man whose character is sterling and just what we need in these angry and frightened times.

I have not been following the details of video over the Web the last year or so because my projects have moved me in other directions. But I’ve decided that for 2008 I am going to spend more of my time and energy in creating my own products on audio and video rather than on written and published content. I have a broadcast quality voice and I can create at least short to medium length content faster by developing a bullet outline and then just talking from it than I can by writing (though I’m a very fast writer as well).

This past week I had an opportunity to delve into how to get video to play nice with Web visitors and I was frankly surprised at how little progress has been made in that arena since I last visited it. With the emergence of YouTube, Google Video, Miro and other such video outlets that appear to make the dissemination of video a relative piece of cake for even the average consumer, I was not prepared for the host of issues awaiting me as I tried to publish a training video on the Web.

Read on if you want the gory details but I’m sparing you here in case you don’t. Just trust me: it’s not a lot better now than it was two or three years ago.

I started out by capturing a screencast using Ambrosia Software’s wonderful SnapZProX screen capture utility. It saves in Apple’s QuickTime format and there are players available for all browsers on all platforms so that seemed to me like a good choice. I recorded my script in a studio, used QuickTime Pro to combine the audio and video and produced a really decent video product. To be sure, it can and will one day benefit from better production values particularly on the title screen but it’s eminently usable and professional-looking and sounding.

I saved it in 1024×768 format forgetting that in a Web browser on a system set to that most common screen resolution, part of the video would be chopped by the browser chrome. Minor miscalculation. I fixed that and then had the client review it.

They loved the video but were not happy that it didn’t display well on their in-house laptops. It seemed, they said, that I needed two sizes, one for desktops and one for laptops. At that point, I made a mistake by deciding that what I needed to do was to generecize the solution and create a video the user could play at any of several different user-selectable sizes. As I investigated that, I was advised by two of my colleagues who do a lot of video that I needed to switch from QT to a Flash FLV format, which, apparently is what YouTube and Google Video use.

I spent many hours trying to figure out the best way to convert a QT to an FLV. My graphics person used Flash MX to do it but the sound didn’t import and we couldn’t figure out why. Plus, as it turned out, FLV files need a player in SWF format that determines their capabilities, including whether they would be resizable or not by the user.

I finally found a product called Video2SWF from Vertical Moon Software that, for $45, purported to solve this problem. It did indeed generate the FLV and a SWF player (I could choose one of a dozen or so it included) but the resulting movie was poor quality and, alas, still not resizable.

In the process of that little adventure, I discovered that Adobe’s claim that 97% of the Web browsers on the planet support Flash is true but only if you allow them to include all versions of Flash. Only the most recent players can play the FLV format, so it would be necessary for my users to download Flash unless I could solve that problem with a custom Web player of some sort. Yeesh.

I ended up going back to QuickTime — which, as far as I can tell, has almost as broad an installation base as the latest Flash players — and just offering the user a choice of two sizes.

But, really, I feel sure this isn’t as hard as it turned out to be, that somewhere I’ve missed something obvious. But I did ask experts, I did post questions on a couple of discussion boards (and did not get answers, by the way), and did try to investigate what technology is really behind YouTube and its imitators.

If you have advice about how better to address this problem, I’m all ears. I have another five or 10 of these things to do in coming months and I really don’t want to continue with QT as the format if that’s a mistake.

This has been an extremely busy week, so much so that I haven’t been able to squeeze out time for my blog. I’ve spent hours and hours this week trying to get video to play over the Web well for all modern browsers and common screen sizes. What a chore. I’m going to blog that separately.

It feels strange not to have written for several days. I don’t particularly like being away from my writing. I haven’t been writing anything except audio scripts for the training videos I’m recording for a client and one lesson on the “Sermon on the Mount” I delivered in church last Sunday.

Hopefully that big project is out of the way now and I can resume more or less daily reportage here. There certainly is enough going on that is worthy of comment.

I will be offering a four-hour workshop entitled “Who Do You Think You Are?” on Saturday, Feb. 23, from 10 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at Unity of Monterey Bay. This workshop, subtitled “Harnessing the Unlimited Power of I AM”, will explore the ways in which how we think and talk about ourselves directly affects not only how others perceive us but also what we get out of life.

Based on my book, I AM: Words and a Meditation, this interactive workshop will provide you with a number of ways of exploring your inner monolog and “re-languaging” to bring your inner and outer talk into alignment with your purpose.

The fee for the course is $45, which includes a copy of a new version of my book, re-titled Who Do You Think You Are? and significantly revised, as well as a CD of 50 one-minute meditations to help you deepen your inner experience of your Self. A light lunch is also included in the fee.

Unity of Monterey Bay is located at 601 Madison in Monterey. Click here for a map.

Please RSVP to onemind at danshafer dot com (typed as an email address) or by phone to 831-531-4679 so we can be sure to have enough materials and food on hand.

Jean-Louis Gassee, when he was VP of product development at Apple Computer, used to love to say, “God is in the details.” (Yeah, I know he didn’t originate that quotation; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe did.) I always knew instinctively that he was right. Today brought me another bit of evidence.

I normally use Firefox as my browser. But last night before I turned in, I was exploring Sun Labs’ Lively Kernel project, which runs best in Safari 3, so I fired up that browser. (It would be my browser of choice but I rely on some Firefox plug-ins and I still run into the occasional site that doesn’t render properly in Safari.) This morning as I went to check my email, Safari was already open, so I just used it to log into my Google Mail account.

As I worked on my mail, I was struck by the subtle, almost undetectable sense that this experience was somehow crisper and cleaner and more “elegant” than my gMail experience in Firefox. As that notion crept into my consciousness, it occurred to me to wonder why I felt that way. So I opened the two browsers to the mail page side by side. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love my 24-inch iMac?)

The only difference between the two displays as far as I could tell was the buttons in the browser. Safari renders the buttons as round-cornered rectangles with clear outlines. Firefox renders the buttons as rectangles with slight drop-shadows. Somehow, the round-cornered buttons stand out more crisply. Also, Safari uses a slightly cleaner font on the buttons. The net result is that the page looks and feels more like an application than a Web page.

Check out this video, with which the annual Season for Non-Violence launched last week. You can learn more about SNV at the Association for Global New Thought Web site.