The League for Coastside Protection has been graphing commute times (due to the CalTrans sensors in the road – see this blog entry.) Here are the archives for June and July to date. The interesting thing looking at this data is just how erratic the commute times are. Great to be able to view this all due to networked sensors. But still a pain in the neck for those of us living through the chaos.

CalTrans continues the repairs on the slide and seems to be ontrack for a late September finish. Check the updates section for the latest progress.

July 13 Morning Commute

July 13 Evening Commute

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Smugglers in the Philippines have been caught attempting to smuggle 1 peso coins out of the country for their metal content vs. their face value.

Interesting world we live in….copper prices have gone up by 75% this year. Now, where did I put that big bottle of pennies the bank won’t count….

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I don’t know about you, but I think 100:1 odds of death for an occupation aren’t great. That’s what the most recent space shuttle crew has been informed of to quantify the risk they’re signing up to in the next planned launch (STS-121).

Consider other occupational statistics:

• Stay out of the forest: 118 fatalities per 100,000 for timber cutters
• Stay off the street: 20 percent of the 6588 fatal work injuries happened on the road
• Stay above ground: 23.5 deaths in mining for every 100,000 workers in 2002
• Stay on dry land: 103 in every 100,000 fishermen died while working

They missed space shuttle crew where there have been 14 deaths out of 703 opportunities in 114 missions.

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Mike Davis recently showed me a cool mashup of the Sun Knowledge Connection with his Google homepage. Way cool. Also, Software Update moved to a new provider over the weekend which included an upgrade to Solaris 10, T2000s, and some new switches. The punchline? The performance has improved 3x and the cost has dropped by 50%. Amazing. If service providers aren’t using this technology, they’re bad at math.

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Here in the US football is played with an oblong ball that is only, on special occasion, kicked. However, right now the rest of the world is crazy for football (soccer) played with a round ball that is primarily kicked. The ultimate event is well underway, the FIFA 2006 World Cup.

Since the US team is in, and some of our colleagues are “worldly” caring about the event a bunch, we decided to have a little challenge using the BBC’s World Cup DAQ game. This is a market economy where one competes by buying and selling shares in teams, angling for special bonuses (dividends if you will,) and hoping for an outcome of the highest percentage gain in a week. Thus we’ve assembled a league. What’s at stake? Pride.

The thing I wasn’t prepared for is how sticky this is. We’ve got people who’ve never participated in such an event and are typically non-sporting buying up shares of Poland because of win bonuses and wondering if that’s the right selection of if Costa Rica will recover from the thrashing Ecuador provided this week.

If you ever doubt the network is the computer and that fact fuels the participation age, try one of these online events. It’ll cure you of that doubt in a heartbeat. Meantime, go Poland! (and US team, I hope you can beat Italy!)

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