BoomFlag

In the United States, the median download speed of a “broadband” internet connection (like the Comcast line I’m using now) is around 6 Mbps, or just under a megabyte per second.

In Japan, the median speed is 78 Mbps, or thirteen times faster than ours. Moreover, they’ve already deployed gigabit (1,000 Mbps) symmetric fiber broadband in some places, and plan to have the entire country running at least that fast by 2011. They’ve successfully tested– though not deployed for commercial use– connections running upwards of 160 Gbps. That’s more than 26,000 times faster than the U.S. median.

Now, Japan is a smallish country and it’s probably easier to deploy fiber all over the place, but considering how heavily the U.S. economy (not to mention most aspects of American business) rely on fast internet, you’d think we’d take a page from their playbook and bump up these speeds a bit.

An awesome (albeit obscure) entry from a contest on Fark. The topic was “It seemed like a good idea at the time”.

I laughed pretty hard at this, which annoyed Laralee who’s trying to get to sleep beside me.

(As an aside, almost all toothpastes contain sodium laurel sulfate, which is what makes it foam when you brush. But it deadens your taste buds to citric acid, which is why drinking orange juice after brushing tastes absolutely terrible.)

“The most difficult thing in the world is to know how to do a thing and to watch someone else do it wrong without comment.”

— Theodore H. White

At Zing we took the afternoon to race go-karts at a nearby track. Loads of fun.

(This isn’t us, but we looked pretty much like this except maybe our overalls weren’t quite as professional.)

I found this awesome family photo:

And now I can’t help but think about how I could get a t-shirt that says

JEFF
The man. The myth.
The legend.

(Oh, and the rest of the ensemble for Laralee and the kids.)

We ran the Longmont Sunrise Stampede today. It’s only two miles, so we finished in around 20 minutes. No biggie, but still a good time.

And it got me out of bed early– we were finished and I’d showered and dressed for the day by the time I would normally just be rolling out of bed!

Thom sent me a link to some old ads (circa 1930). Apparently people were much more blunt back in the Olden Days…

… and honestly, a little creepy. “Tingling pleasantly all over” indeed.

Fark had a Photoshop contest where they asked people to submit music album covers redesigned as advertisements.

This was far and away my favorite.

“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.”

— John Gardner

The summer ultimate league starts next week, which is always a good time. The league draft is Tuesday, and for the sixth time I’ll be a captain. It’s always fun to captain a team, although it means quite a bit more work on and off the field. Last year I grabbed a co-captain for the first time– my friend Michael was gracious enough to help me– and it turned out well. Michael’s a great guy, and it was good to have someone who could help run practices, or just be at the practice when I couldn’t for some reason. Plus I felt like I didn’t have to make all of the decisions (white or dark? pull or receive? this endzone or that one? hard cap in five minutes or ten?).

So this summer I’ll be co-captaining with my longtime friend Brenda, who is not only a stellar ultimate player but also about three metric tons of fun mushed into a small woman’s body. I met her during my first official season in the Boulder league, ten years ago, and I’m really excited to work with her this time around.

One key component– often overlooked when drafting teams for the league– is the ability to write cheers. After every game, each team comes up with an original, spontaneous cheer to yell (or sometimes sing) to the other team. It’s a great way to promote spirit and fun after a hard-fought game, and a grand tradition. And Brenda is without a doubt the best cheer writer this county has ever seen. (I could easily find a hundred people who play in the league who would back me up on that statement.) The stuff she comes up with– mostly hilarious spoofs on well-known songs– is amazing. Since part of the overall scorekeeping for the league is “team spirit” we’ve already got a leg up on the competition.

So bring on those lazy summer nights, playing on nice warm grass as the sun sets over the mountains. I can’t wait.