I like reading Doc. Sometimes he writes stuff that just completely nails it. He's got a way of peering through the leaves and rooting out exactly what matters most. That's what happens when marketing guys get technology.

Today he wrote something completely awesome - its my favorite-est Doc piece ever.

Doc Searls Weblog: Dancing on fire:

...it's getting me high, just from the driving energy of the song. Beats thinking about death, which comes easy when you're 61 with a fever, a gut, and a history of exercise that consists mostly of getting dressed. But music helps. Music is the best evidence of immortality that we have.

See, music is my passion. I love it. Not necessarily the words, but what the music evokes. Sometimes its the words, sometimes its the melody, sometimes the beat. Sometimes, the best times, its the space between the notes - the anti-music - that means the most to me.

I really like Doc's post today because he takes us on a mental trip sparked by music. This is exactly what great music is supposed to do, and I'm thankful that Doc was able to share this with us.

My first attempt at blogging: OpenSRS - The Alternative Domain Registrar Service

Hah. I had totally forgotten about this. No permalinks, no comments, no trackbacks - but this is definitely a blog circa 1999. Neat.

This is certainly one of the earliest examples of corporate blogging that I'm aware of.

Got off the plane at 6:30 or so this morning, coming in from Vancouver.

7 years ago, I was flying in from Uruguay, via Chicago. Got off the plane shortly after 9 to the news that a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. Quickly I learned that the plane was much bigger, that it wasn't really a crash and that it had happened again. With a bunch of my colleagues in the air, going home from the same meeting, many flying into New York, I was immediately sick to my stomach.

The airport was pretty quiet this morning, but that could just be a coincidence.

I think I've figured out what was wrong with the network.

For some reason, a long time ago, I turned on IPV6 for each of the network interfaces on my Macbook Pro - both wired and wireless.

Turning off IPv6 for each interface fixed the data rate issue I was seeing.

I guess that because my old Linksys didn't support IPV6, the issue didn't present itself until another IPv6 capable device started chattering on the network (the Airport Extreme supports IPv6). Turning off all IPv6 support immediately fixed the issue.

I've since re-upgraded the firmware on each of the Airport Express' and the Airport Extreme, turned back on Wide Channel support, upped the multicast rate, etc. And each step of the way, the network performance was awesome.

I'm sitting here now listening to Led Zeppelin over Airtunes and I'm still getting approximately 5mbps down and 500kbps up.

Awesome!

I'm stumped.

I just installed an Airport Extreme base station (802.11n w/ GigE) and three Airport Express base stations (802.11n).

The three AExpresses are simply running Airtunes and do not extend, repeat or bridge the network.

The problem I'm seeing is that data rates are terrible. I'm getting a good signal, and theoretically, everything should work fine, but data rates are just rotten and I can't figure out why.

The weird thing is that the data rates are good enough to run Airtunes without any stutter or gapping in the music. If the network was screwed up, then I would assume that all data transmission would be equally bad.

I'm using a MacBook Pro w/ an "N" enabled built-in Airport card for my observations. The data rates are equally poor whether I'm sitting in front of the Extreme or in another part of the house and noise on the network seems to be within acceptable levels throughout the house.

I've tried moving back to the 7.3.1 firmware for all the devices, but the problem persists.

I've tried different channels, changing to a pure "N" configuration, moving to 5ghz and toggeled both Interference Robustness and Wide Channels, all to no avail.

Data rates when I'm tethered are awesome, so this isn't a WAN issue.

I should also note that my Linksys G router always performed flawlessly, so I'm skeptical that the environment might be a source of interference.

I'm stumped.

Does anyone have any ideas? I really don't want to call Apple on this one - I think it would be too painful!

...I've been doing a lot of blogging, just not here.

Check here, here and soon, here.

Of course, friendfeed has the full "firehose".

Gotta say, iTunes + iPhone Remote + Airport Express rocks hard.

Ross: Hey - wouldn't it be cool to be able to make it easy for our customers to share this data with their MSN Messenger contacts?

Developers: Yah, that would be cool.

Ross: Microsoft has this cool API that we can use and some pretty sweet controls that mean we don't even have to worry about UI!

Developers: Awesome! Yay Microsoft!

So I go to the website where Microsoft has this all laid out and I notice that they have a sample app on the page that lets me "view your Windows Live Messenger contacts' online status and easily share what you're viewing with them, sign in with your Windows Live ID."

"Bingo!" I thinks to myself. "I can use this to send the developers a link to this page so they can see the user experience first hand. Yay Microsoft!"

So click the link and fill in the identity information it asks for, and I get this great message as a response:

Be-yoo-ti-ful! That instills a *ton* of confidence in me, I am totally stoked in integrate this into my app now.

Two words Microsoft: Epic Fail.

And people wonder why Microsoft is continually playing catchup in the online space.

Good thing Google and Y! have a similar APIs.