Fun day at the office this morning. After months of watching various contractors dig, bury and pull fiber optic cables from the street, down the alley, up the side of the building and into our office: we’re live on fiber optic. Without any further ado, here are the speed results.

Lisco - local.  This actually tests your speed all the way from the Men’s room.

Speakeasy - Dallas, TX.

We need to work out some router issues. We tried a D-Link, which capped out at 15mb, then swapped in a Linksys WRT54G and that more than doubled our speed. Up to 32mb locally and 13mb to Bush country. However if we set up a laptop in front of the router, with only 100 ft of Cat5e between the fiber box and the browser, we get 95mb locally. I need to do some Flickr upload tests to see how this extra bandwidth locally translates to using the greater Internet.

Ok, so this photo below, uploaded to Flickr in 4 seconds. A task that normally takes sometimes over a minute. Sweet! Now I just need this connection at home.

I have swung between both extremes in the diet world. There was a time when I ate deep fried tacos from Jack in the Box (3 for 99¢) several times a week, and another time when I didn’t go out without a bag of nuts and dried fruit in my pocket to sustain my vegan diet (between periods of fasting of course).

The one thing I’ve noticed in my travels between the worlds of fast food and whole food is that both ends love their substitutes. Country Crock and Velveeta (no that’s not cheese) on one hand, and soy burgers and facon on the other. At one time I was dining with some vegetarian friends and ended up at a restaurant that served mock meats - tofu or seitan shaped into things like shredded pork, shrimp, ribs and meat balls. I remember asking the question why would a vegetarian want meat shaped veggie foods, but no one answered.

What made me run away from bad food (things like margarine, msg, Miracle Whip, and Velveeta) was the desire for the real thing. The desire for the real thing was the same reason that being a vegetarian never worked for me - there is no substitute for the flavor of a juicy piece of meat (wrapped in bacon).

Several years ago I settled into what I call the “real food foodie” diet. I strive to eat things that are made from real ingredients, with little processing (which includes how animals are handled before slaughter) and no chemicals; and of course are prepared well. I think this is popularly know as the “whole food” diet. This diet has worked well for me and, unlike being a vegan in the early 90s, there are a lot of resources in the form of grocery stores and restaurants to support the diet of real food foodies. Natural food stores, while originally catering to vegetarians, are now stocked with all sorts of yummy natural meats (in addition to the imitations that vegetarians love).

Being able to continue my Real Food Foodie diet was priority number one when my family decided to move to a small town. Fairfield became an option when we learned that it was home to Everybody’s, a natural foods grocery store. What I did not know then was that Everybody’s is not like your average natural foods store. Everybody’s caters to the local Maharishi community. So last year when I was hankering for some natural beef hamburgers and went down to Everybodys, I ended up having to ask an employee, “where’s the beef“? I was told there was none to be found at this store, and never would be, natural or otherwise.

I had to settle for frozen turkey burgers. And as any carnivore will tell you, turkey burgers, no matter how tasty they are, are imitations of the real thing.

I know gmail isn’t the Joost of the invite as commodity world; but I have 71 left just in case anyone reading this blog hasn’t gotten the memo yet that everyone will be required to transition over to gmail by 2010.

Caffeine fueled Rudy hate and post 9/11 conspiracies.

Check out this incredible HDR set from Flickr user dimsumranch of the airplane graveyard in the Mojave desert.

Click the fancy button to view my Flickr DNA. I thought it was interesting to see which of my photos have made Flickr Explore and which ones were labeled most interesting.

If you’re a Flickr user and have not checked out Big Huge Labs, go there now and lose about a week checking out all the different tools.

Those white lines at intersections? They are for pedestrians. A pedestrian is a fragile thing on the street - 70% water, and no match for hundreds of pounds of steel and glass.

So when you see someone in the middle of the street, walking between those white lines, you must wait your turn. It’s not a long wait, about 5 seconds (or 10 for those using walkers). But it is a wait that you must make by law (and common sense). So for instance the women in the white Jeep Cherokee that went through the intersection this morning on the square on her way to Revelations who passed within 10″ of me while I was just over halfway across the street . . .

What’s your hurry?

Nevermind that you’re being highly impatient and inconsiderate, but you put my walking bag of water and bones in danger. You effectively block me from site of other drivers and signal to everyone at that intersection that there are no pedestrians in the cross walk.

It’s bizarre to see this behavior almost every time I cross the street in this town. A small quiet town with really no reason to hurry anywhere. Yet it happens nearly every time I cross the street on the square. Even when I’m with my 3yr old.

When it happens I feel like Dustin Hoffman’s character Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy - I want to bang on the hood, and then spread our my arms and yell, “Hey! I’m walking here!”

What comes to mind when you think of getting a massage?

I’ve been breaking in my new TV with the BBC’s Planet Earth on HD-DVD. It’s jaw dropping. It’s simply the best nature series ever produced.

The animals and locations aren’t just repeats from past nature shows either - half of the content is stuff I’ve never seen or knew about. The cinematography is unreal. It was actually hard to pay attention to the narration because I was continually trying to figure out just how they got their shots. The series is filled with great time lapse sequences. Like fungus growing out of an ants head. Ewwwww.

This series does not flinch from what is the average day in any part of the natural world - eating each other. That’s pretty much all plants and animals do - eat each other. When there not eating each other, they’re trying to find each other (to eat).

We humans have it really good (really really really good). I can commute to work and never worry about being snatched out from the crowd by a 20 ft eagle or a 30 ft badger. Watching this series is beautiful, but really it’s one horrible death scene after another. And some are as fascinating as they are gruesome.

For instance. There’s this large cave somewhere that is home to millions of bats. The bats go out each night, feast on insects, come back to their bat cave and spend the entire day hanging from the ceiling, sleeping and pooping. This covers the entire floor of their cave with a deep layer of bat poop. Living on/in the bat poop are several million cock roaches that do nothing but procreate and eat bat poop. Bats sometimes fall from the ceiling and into the (their) poop and get stuck, and devoured by the cock roaches.

The next time I’m having a bad day I’m going to think of those bats that fall in the poop cave.

The last TV I bought was a 27″ ProScan from BestBuy in 1995. I remember thinking how huge it was. The “old” CRT design meant it was basically a 27″ cube. I had to remove it from the box in the parking lot and ask someone to help be fit it into the back of my old Volvo. I lived in Capitol Hill, Seattle at the time and I had to double park in front of my studio apartment on Broadway and have a friend help me get it out out of the car, which took a lot longer that getting it in. Fitting it through my back seat door was kinda like one of those Fisher Price square peg round hole type of puzzles. Expect the peg was a 70lb TV.

That TV was primarily used for video games, even after I moved in with my future wife (she loved Busta-a-Move). Then came Netflix in 2000 and we canceled our cable TV, which we have not had since. So for the past twelve years that TV has served largely as a monitor for DVD players.

I’ve watched all these beautiful flat screens go up in size and down in price over the past several years, hoping my 27″ would break and give me an excuse to go buy one. But with a frequency of 3-4 movies a week, I’m just not putting the mileage on it to wear it down.

So I asked my wife to kindly look the other way and I went shopping online for a flat screen. I started at 32″, was certain I needed a 42″ and then literally minutes before I pressed the buy button I swapped out the 46″ for a 52″. It took about 2 weeks to arrive at my house and during that time I started sweating that I’d bought too much TV.

I got home the other night to find my BFTV (Big Fracking TV) unpacked and sitting on the floor. It looked a little too big. But I dared not acknowledge that while my wife was staring at me with the, “what were you thinking” look. My wife, whom I love so much, helped me attach the BFTV to the wall and sat patiently while I hooked up the wiring.

We sat back and started our first movie on the BFTV - The Fountain. About a minute into the movie I realized that 52″ was not too big, but awesomely big, and I turned to my wife with a grin, “ok this is cool”. She agreed, proving once again why I married her.