Loading ...so, oddly enough, i’m still very busy at work, even though i’m not supposed to be…after the big convention and all. oh well.
so they finally found spalding gray’s body the other day. that’s a damn shame about him, i liked his shit a lot. Monologist, that’s the gig for me too, it’s not stand up really, it’s not spoken word, it’s just telling stories, and commenting on them. i’d be good at that i think. Any way, if you don’t know who he was, rent swimming to cambodia, it’s really good. i’m not even sure why/how i have seen it, i know that for some brief period in say 1988 cinemax was runnign it all the time (during the day, when they don’t show the soft core smut). well anyway, enough of that.
Chatted with richy the quebe and Mr. B in madrid on richard’s super high tech online meeting/chat software, perhaps more amusing than 3 people with philosophy backgrounds trying to figure out technology, is the 3.4 second lag between when one person says something and the others see/hear it. too funny.
man, could life be more sterotypical? i mean come on….this could only happen in america, and only by a person that looks like this
other than that not much else is new. i have friday off, and i’m going to refinance my mortgage, so soon you ask? yeah sure why not. in the there is no out of pocket costs for me, and they project we’ll save 75 bucks a month. i mean i could use that for booze or something…or another trip to home depot… or or or…. oh sure i bet it’s not the best possible rate for us, i mean, we could pay some points and get it even lower, but hell it wouldnt’ really be worth it, overall. other than that. well i’m just coasting.
21 responses so far ↓
1 Don // Mar 10, 2004 at 9:48 am
I’m so glad you posted about that WT lady trying to pay with a million dollar bill at WalMart. That’s GREAT! There are so many good stories in the news today to make fun of. Now with no blog of my own to regurgitate the top stories in the news, I’ll have to pass along all these wacky stories to you so that you can post them up for comments from the masses!
Or, maybe it’s all a waste of time. I guess since you and I both have Yahoo as our homepage, we see the same freaky stories each day. Hopefully all of your readers don’t… so it’s news to them.
2 Natty // Mar 10, 2004 at 10:09 am
What happened to Don’s blog?
3 jefke // Mar 10, 2004 at 10:14 am
Donkitchen.com has been taken down, i dunno co-worker don is being tight lipped about it, i think it had something to do with the depp fans or something. but at any rate it’s gone. another damn shame.
4 Wawa // Mar 10, 2004 at 10:14 am
Don turned into Nelson from the Simpsons!
I thought that was a guy who tried to pass off the $1 million dollar bill.
5 Natty // Mar 10, 2004 at 10:23 am
I checked out the new link on jefke’s site- the scaredy cat stalker one. I’m surprised that Jefke has not mentioned anything about tater tot recipes (taco taters, sloppy tots, turkey bean tater tot casserole). She has links to the Ore Ida site. Keep in mind that Jefke came home last night with two big bags of Ore Ida frozen potato products cuz, as he said, “I had a coupon!” There was notable joy in his voice, which is not a common thing for him.
6 B // Mar 10, 2004 at 12:52 pm
There was a time lag with the web cam, but also, internet traffic occasionally introduced some gaps as well. This got me wondering: did our conversation become more and more disjointed from real time as we went along? That is, on top of the delay as your message reached my computer, every time the connection was temporarily interrupted, it must have added three or four seconds to the wait. Nothing seemed to be skipped or deleted, so those few seconds must have been added to the usual time lag. So, after one net jam, we were five seconds apart; after two stoppages, we were seven seconds apart. By the end, we must have been several minutes out of whack.
That is truly a virtual reality.
It reminds me of the musical art experiment performed by David Fridmann of the Flaming Lips. He released a 5cd album (’Zaireeka’) where all the cds (with differing content) were meant to be played at the same time. For this, of course, you need five cd players, but in today’s hi-tech world (dvd playerys, computers, discmen) getting it set up is not so difficult. The surprising result is the discovery that every cd player plays at a slightly different rate. If you start all the machines simultaneously, by the end of the 50 minutes, they can be over three minutes apart.
Did you know that you never hear the same music twice?
7 jefke // Mar 10, 2004 at 1:39 pm
wow, that’s crazy when you think about, did you send up being ahead of me, or behind me as the lag builds up? this type of shit, and then tivo, with the ability to start a tv show 9 min late and then catch up to real time by skipping commercials is really starting to mess with my mind.
though i have to say, that near the end, i could very faintly hear my voice as it was received on your end, so, unless there was a fold in space and time, you were getting my words after i spoken them, not before. but i cannot be sure,
where is charles wallace when we need him?
8 B // Mar 10, 2004 at 2:12 pm
jefke, if we have discovered how to hear someone’s words BEFORE he speaks them, then we have indeed discovered the greatest invention of all time. The truth is, all three of us were drifting farther and farther apart as time wore on. Let us say the delay was constant: 3 seconds. Every info traffic jam added, say, 2 seconds. So you would have to wait 8 full seconds to get my first reply. The jam after that would add 2 more seconds, thus making you wait 10 seconds. And so on to infinity.
The amazing thing is that you couldn’t tell. Sure, the delay was obvious. But the fact that, near the end, I was probably interacting with an image that was over two minutes old wasn’t any different from the first image that was only a couple seconds old. The delay can only be noticed between your actual speech and the receipt of sound in your headphones. You can never notice the delay taking place before you speak.
If you add in the factor that the time delay was different between me and you as it was for you and Richard, we can confidently say that we never interacted at all.
9 rcg // Mar 10, 2004 at 2:54 pm
I don’t know what the fuck you two are talking about. The latency is not cumulative.
If the stream can’t keep up with its content it just drops it, and picks up wherever it can. Latency is just the dely from client-to-server-to-client.
Latency *is* cumulative in a feedback loop, which is what happens if one client’s mic picks up the audio and re-broadcasts it. Capisco?
Think of those 24/7 webcams. If latency were cumulative, they would be days out of whack after about a year’s running (hours would seem like days…).
In your world, God has a webcam somewhere, where you can see what the universe was like 5 billion years ago. (Ooh. It’s called deep space.)
Next time, there’s a little widget on that page that you can click to bring up the current latency.
10 rcg // Mar 10, 2004 at 2:59 pm
God’s webcam… it’s the Hubble telescope.
http://www.rcgratton.com/hubble.jpg
11 B // Mar 10, 2004 at 3:36 pm
So you might say that my logic was correct but my observation of the phenomenon was innacurate. I was right that a cumulative latency would imply an infinite drift. I was wrong, however, to say that “nothing seemed to be skipped or deleted.” If a stream “just drops” the bits that don’t keep up, why did our images remain so coherent? If I randomly snipped out various bits of a taped voice message, for example, it would become garble. Does the software somehow artificially reconstruct the data to give it coherent form?
This ability to fool our natural perception - to get us to see what is not there - remains a source of amazement to me.
As for the Hubble pic, why is NASA located at the Big Bang and the Origin Of The Universe? That seems rather arrogant, if you ask me.
12 Don // Mar 10, 2004 at 4:05 pm
The DEPP fans are trying to kill me! I can’t say too much on here, because they seemed to have tracked me down here. Jefke, be careful, they know you posted on my site, and now they know where you are.
These fuckers are CRAZY!
13 jefke // Mar 10, 2004 at 4:41 pm
no one said anything about my wrinkle in time reference. hmm. too abstract?
richard is obviously right, but what he says is no fun, i like the idea that either brendan or i were truly 15 mins off somehow.
the fact remains if it’s good enough for gay porn it’s good enough for me
14 Don // Mar 10, 2004 at 4:48 pm
The more weird part is wondering who got the 2 second packets that you didn’t get. They ended up somewhere!
15 Natty // Mar 10, 2004 at 5:10 pm
The above Brendan and Jefke posts are what happens when philosophy people try to go all scientific and mathematic. They spin needless circles around their own heads. Of the three of you’s philosophy guys, Richard seems far and away the most able-bodied/minded when it comes to math and science stuff. Having experienced the web chat thing myself, I was amused to see how complicated you two wanted to make a simple delay. And yes, you can hear your own words as they finally make it to the listener, just fainter. Now, as I was saying, tater tot casserole…
16 rcg // Mar 10, 2004 at 7:58 pm
Right. B:
When the stream drops data nothing goes black. The last received video frame simply persists. If latency builds, the video gets choppy. However, between the size of our stream and the speed of the glorious interwe, I’d not expect much more than a half-second glitch at worst. If you look carefully at the video next time, you’ll occasionally see precisely that happen.
Mind you, because the video in the image is pretty much static, it is a bit hard to see such glitches, except when jefke moves his camera in a failed attempt to show us “the wall”.
Next. Audio. Audio drops on a much more granular level. I guess the frequency ranges between 5-12 KHz, meaning little tiny bits of audio are sampled and sent 5 to 12 thousand times a second. On a CD sound is at 44.1 or 48K… I don’t remember.
You may recall the helium effect. Our voices occasionally shifted up in pitch. I suspect this is a side-effect of dealing with increasing latency.
In sum, the fine minds behind streaming media have engineered the technology precisely to prevent cumulative drift, taking the stream as a priority over temporal continuity.
Still, there is the fixed matter of roughly 1 to 2 seconds absolute latency. But that delay is independent of the drops.
I deeply admire Johnny Depp.
17 jefke // Mar 10, 2004 at 10:09 pm
don’t forget packet routing. the beauty of voice of IP (internet protocol) is the packetization of the data that is the digitization of the voice, file, image, smut, html, whatever… it’s a lot like the whole televisication of the chocolate and kid in willy wonka (isn’t depp gonna be mr wonka in the remake?) anyway…each packet has a unique id, and i can get routed one of a million ways, sometimes they get all out of order as some take the fast lane and some get behind old man drivers like me. the client on the other side, in this case our individual PCs then reassemble the packets in the proper order.
there’s that and you and I were on Adsl, b, which means our upstream speed is much slower than our down stream. all in all, i wasn’t so bad.
i still think though that you got off the connection a full 3 mins before me, and somehow i was just catching up. i mean for gods sake you were 6 hours in the future and all.
18 J Sargent // Mar 11, 2004 at 7:50 am
Interesting thought about having 3 philosophy graduates trying to figure out technology. Thankfully I am better at technology then I was at philosophy.
I have one of those nifty Cisco IP phones in my office. It works cool - it has wav files of dial tones and the number beeping and all that. In fact it even has some funny ring sounds (d’oh by homer, and my favorite, the Austin Powers ring). It works pretty well actually, and similar to the way your webcam chat thing works, except I have an IP connection to a SIP gateway, which then ties into the PBX. It works properly 90% of the time with no lag (we have a very fast ethernet network and fiber connections between the building and the SIP gateways which plug into the PBX) so I don’t have any of the artifacts that you have. I just get kicked off VRU systems, which is frustrating.
I also have a “soft phone” to use when I am at home. Basically, I plug in the USB “handset” and the I VPN into my company and use the soft client to initiate a session. This works pretty poorly. The cable connection can handle it, but my pc has to encrypt/decrypt the packets, and I also have to deal with the VPN gateway into the company, and then be routed to the SIP gateway and then to the PBX. Long ass path to take really. Anyway - when it works its an engineering marvel, but more often than not I can only hear and nobody can hear me talk. Maybe that is a feature and not a bug. “They” assure me that they are working on it, but I don’t think that this is ready for primetime yet.
Third, Time Warner Cable here in Raleigh-Durham is offering VoIP services to replace your home phone for 39.99$ month - unlimited North America calling. I have heard that it is not terrible, and you can keep your number. I asked to be a customer, but I live too far out in the sticks for now (although that *shouldn’t* matter)
Lastly, I see that Unreal Tournament 2004 includes a VoIP system so you can talk to your teammates while fraggin’ your enemy. I am the worlds worst gamer, but I do enjoy whippin’ some ass once in a great while - I say that we ought to get a philosophy frag session on and see who the king of the geeks is. My vote is for don-the-coworker (while I don’t think that he is a philopshy gratuate, based on his Depp death threats I bet that he can strafe like a mutha).
JS
19 jefke // Mar 11, 2004 at 8:39 am
i had the vonage VOIP service for about 8 months last year when i was working out of our apartment, all in all it was a very kick ass service. I was runnind DSL with only 128k upstreat (well about 108 in reality) but even so, there was a bit of lag and apparenlty i sounded like i was on a cell phone, but in the end for the price it was very kick ass. We were in an old building so to run another line to the NID to get a second phone line would have been 700 bucks or something, so in my case vonage was perfect. I’d imagine it would be totally kick ass with a cable modem.
but enough of this talk, sarge obviously wins the networking techno babble battle. well played sir.
20 Natty // Mar 11, 2004 at 4:41 pm
What are you talking about? Vonage sucked!! it was worse than two people trying to talk on a cell phone. People only heard half of what I said and no one could talk at the same time, not to mention that I missed a lot of the conversation due to them cutting out. I honestly don’t know how you did not run into these problems, Jefke. I hate Vonage and I’m glad we no longer have it.
21 J Sargent // Mar 11, 2004 at 10:08 pm
Woohoo!!! My networking career HAS resulted in recognition of some sort! And all this time I just thought it was a job. I can’t believe that I won!
I want to thank all the people who made this possible - all the little people who showed me how TCP/IP works, how to admin a network and how to secure it building internet firewalls. I also want to ….
Ya - when my cablemodem is on, its ON, but sometimes it flakes out and drops the signal. Since I live in a pretty low-density area (well its pretty low now, but getting bigger) I just don’t have lots of neighbors using the bandwidth. Well not right now that is. I suspect that if I could drop the VPN overhead my softphone would be better. Alas someday.