ScottKoon.com

Here is a pretty interesting article from Wired News about a recent project at MIT where cell phones were used to document and predict the lives of 100 MIT faculty and staff.

“Given enough data, Eagle’s algorithms were able to predict what people — especially professors and Media Lab employees — would do next and be right up to 85 percent of the time.”

“Using data gleaned from cell-phone towers and calling information, the system is able to predict, for example, whether someone will go out for the evening based on the volume of calls they made to friends.”

Link

Since Scott doesn’t update his blog I’ll do it for him by leaving comments.

MARCH WESTIN WINS AGAIN!

Yes folks, the March Westin softball team evened up its record at 7-7 by defeating Chestnutt Ridge Blue. It wasn’t much of a game, in fact March Westin won by forfeit. Yes, C.R.B didn’t have enough people show for a game. Perhaps they had heard that Scott Koon was making his return to team M.W., maybe it was the appearance of Jeff Mick that made this team go into hiding. Anyhow, March Westin wins and has now won two in a row.

Next up for March Westin is a double header on Saturday, July 23rd against the Shockers and Koval Supply.

Posted by: Nick on Jul 22, 05 | 12:19 pm

The U.S. Congress signed off on a provision Tuesday to extend daylight savings time hours by two months. It would begin on the first weekend in March, and end the last weekend in November.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-daylight20.html

http://moon.google.com/

I want to hear everyone’s comments on this article (which as far as I can tell is real).

SCIENTISTS have created eerie zombie dogs, reanimating the canines after several hours of clinical death in attempts to develop suspended animation for humans.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15739502-13762,00.html

Fox has officially announced the direct-to-DVD title Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story Unrated.

http://tvshowsondvd.com/newsitem.cfm?NewsID=3618

Here is a surprisingly well done promo video from msnsportsnet for the WVU Basketball program. Based on the 2004-2005 season.

http://www.msnsportsnet.com/MBB_2005.wax

I don’t know if any of you have noticed or not but the availability of my website has been hit and miss for the past couple weeks.

I was already aware of the reasoning for this (overwhelming popularity for Leo Laporte’s various websites and VizaWeb’s lack of preparation for the amazingly huge flux of visitors); but I received official communication from VizaWeb updating me on the status of their servers and their lack of tech support, which normally is outstanding I might add.

Just for the record, here is a copy of the email sent to me:

Dear Jeffrey,

Over the past couple weeks many of you have requested support from VizaWeb via email, support tickets, or phone calls and have not received a response in a timely manner or no response at all unfortunately. I would like to first take this opportunity to sincerely apologize for that lack of support. It is my hope to explain to everyone what has been going on lately and what changes we are making in order to hopefully start to restore the confidence everyone once had in VizaWeb as we move into the second half of 2005.

As most everyone knows, many of our clients and new business comes from the incredible relationship we have with Leo Laporte. For those of you that do not know Leo, he is The Tech Guy on KFI AM 640, host of Call for Help on G4TechTV, Canada and HOW TO Channel, Australia and also the co-host of This Week in Tech (TWiT). His recommendation of our services has led to a tremendous growth here at VizaWeb that was greater than any of us had imagined. We went from a smaller host of about 1000 domains about 1 year ago when we started hosting the Leoville network to just over 5000 domains today. We owe a lot to Leo’s faith in us and want to thank him for all that he has done.

That extreme growth has played a part in some of the support problems our clients have been encountering lately. We were severely understaffed until last week and our technicians were working round the clock to keep somewhat afloat. We have hired more technicians and they are in the training process now. Many of you will see their faces in tickets, emails, or even on the phone very soon. It is my hope to restore consistent phone service starting tomorrow. We have also had some internet backbone access issues from our support office in the Twin Cities that was limiting our abilities to work tickets speedily as we were all trying to work from dialup connections and GPRS through the cellular network. The ISP has repaired the fiber optic node and we are hopefully (knock on wood) not going to see those issues anymore.

The last part of the issue has been our server’s reliability. There was a bug introduced in the latest stable version of cPanel that caused auditd to jam up while it was logging services. This service has been disabled on the servers that it was affecting and service was returned to normal.

Many of you know that we run our network out of The Planet’s datacenter. While this has worked very well for us in the past, it is now time that we grow and our network architecture needs to grow with us. We will soon be setting up a new clustering system that uses load balancing servers, redundant web servers, and network attached storage to host websites. There is redundancy in every level of the cluster so if one of the web servers crash, it would not affect anyone from viewing their site. We will be setting up this network within the next couple weeks and will begin implementation shortly there after. There will be extensive planning for the move and all customers will be kept informed during the entire process.

Lastly, I want to let everyone know that VizaWeb is committed to gaining everyone’s confidence back to where it once was. We will be more visible online and over the phone as we add more and more technicians to our growing staff. I take a lot of pride in my company and what we have accomplished in our relatively short history. I want to thank every one of our clients, personally if I get the opportunity, for sticking with us during this time and I know you will all be very excited with the new features and network that we will be implementing soon. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to respond to this e-mail. The phones may still be a little busy today, but I hope to have all calls being answered by a technician, billing, or sales representative very soon.

Thank you,
Rick Mueller
President and Co-Founder
VizaWeb Inc.