Writer’s Block!!

Yep, I’m still here… and I’ve got a raging case of writer’s block. I have a couple of ideas going back and forth in my mind, though, so hopefully this instance will go away soon. In the meantime, enjoy these sites and stories:

The BBC is reporting that that scientists are on the cusp of reading brainwaves and translating them into speech. It seems that one Eric Ramsay was left paralyzed after an automobile accident eight years ago. Scientists at Boston University have been scanning the part of Eric’s brain that deals with speech, and they feel that they can accurately guess the sounds Eric is thinking of 80% of the time. The next step is to convert those waves into speech. It’s truly an amazing age, folks!

If you’re in IT, you might enjoy the humor at Worse Than Failure. It’s chock full of real life stories of IT disasters. However, a lot of the stories involve stupid programming (complete with code samples), so if you don’t know JavaScript or C++, the humor might be lost on you.

Papa John’s now accepts orders sent via text message! If you already have a papajohns.com account, just enable the SMS ordering option, then select up to 4 “favorite orders”. When you want to order a pizza, just text FAVx (where x s the favorite order number) to 4PAPA. Check out Papa’s SMS FAQ page for more.

Is anyone else put off by the NFL’s campaign to get NFL Network on basic cable networks? I mean, sure… I signed up for their “NFL Action Network” or whatever they call it, mainly because I want the NFL Network on my cable in the worst possible way. At the same time, I almost have to hold my nose while signing up, since the NFL is a monopoly that has an exclusive agreement with Dish Network to deliver the NFL Sunday Ticket. Pot… kettle… black. ESPN columnist Gregg Easterbrook has a great (if lengthy) article about how the Sunday Ticket came to be. Come to find out, it’s even more complex than what I initially thought. The NFL is the last great “television event” there is, and while most TV shows pull in 8-10 million viewers each week, most NFL games get double that. Advertisers pay huge money for the games, since they know that millions of people from every demographic are watching. Local broadcast networks would lose their minds if Sunday Ticket was available on their local cable network, since that’s millions of advertising dollars down the drain. And the last time Sunday Ticket was up for renewal (and could have jumped to cable), the number of cable customers with digital cable was in the single digits. So even if the NFL wanted Sunday Ticket on cable, most cable operators simply didn’t have the bandwidth to support it back then… unlike now. It’s a fascinating read, although as I said, the article does seem to go on and on…

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