ZDNet had an interesting article questioning how the Internet would hold up to the Olympic streaming demands. Since all of the video will be using unicast technologies, it is a real question.

The Dallas News tells us that police had to free 26 cheer leaders from an elevator at the University of Texas Jester Hall. Wow.

I have to assume that this was a cheer leader camp or such, and that the girls (where were the guys?) must have been really bored. Still, 26 is a pretty impressive number. I don’t think I’ve seen 26 clowns in a funny car before–maybe 15. So hey, that’s an idea. Next time switch and put 15, the recommended max for the elevator, clowns in the elevator and 26 cheer leaders in the funny car.

The end of the article is almost as funny as the rest of it. A Ms. Weldon, the director of communications for the UT Police Department, said that the sign says that there should be no more than 15 passengers or 3,000 pounds. I highly doubt that even 26 14-17 year old girls managed to tip the scales over 3,000 pounds. I rather think that the doors didn’t open because they detected too much pressure and stayed closed for safety reasons. I was in a situation like that once. In high school I was doing some volunteer work. One of the guys with me thought it would be funny to pull on the elevator doors as we descended. The elevator stopped in between floors and locked up.

The moral of the story–don’t be a dumbass, especially in an elevator.

I remember Julie Wainwright from the old days, the pre-dot-com bubble days. The sock puppet was pure marketing genius at the time. Then it flopped.

She’s back with her website called SmartNow. She has a fascinating blog entry about some of the mistakes she made at/after the time and what she’s learned.

People always say–well at least successful people frequently say–to learn from failures, and that success generally is the last step after a string of failures. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame says that the more spectacular the failure, the more attention you get, which can be good in its own right. Julie didn’t get that benefit. People laughed at her and she had to fight depression.

I’m not going to take anything away from Julie’s post. Go read it.

In my continuing research on the semantic web, I make it a priority to catch everything going by that affects the monetization of the web.  Harris Interactive performed a poll asking people about their attitude towards targeted advertising on the web.  After a few questions, the interviewer told the user about new FCC privacy regulations.  The results were somewhat surprising.

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Everyone seems to be talking about the semantic web these days.  Not wanting to appear a fool, I’ve been listening to it for some time without talking about it yet.  The time to talk is about here.

Like many, I have too many feeds, too many things to watch.  My aggregater needs aggregating.  I can’t find what I want, I’ve read behind others who want one too, so I’ve begun to build it.   In the next week or two, I’ll be introducing my attempt to make the web more manageable.  Stay tuned.

In today’s DOTD report, I have two separate cases of police officers totally lacking in brains. In the first case, I believe it was caused by a lack of blood flow to the brain, and in the second case, it was caused by too much blood flow.

Case 1: A drunk girl comes into the police station, clearly with beer goggles on and tries to have a little fun.

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There are two levels of Darwin Awards in my mind–those who win them because they did/caused the action resulting in the subject’s removal from the gene pool, and those who were accomplices or victims of the Darwin-inducing incident. In this case we have both. Filed under Dumbass of the Day.

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Today’s Dumbass of the Day award goes to an unnamed man in Durban, South Africa. Jeff Wicks reports that the would-be thief attempted to climb over a wall protected by sharp spikes. During the attempt, both feet became impaled. When police found him in the morning, he was hanging upside down, still impaled on one foot.

This has fail written over it in so many ways.

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I’ve been reading Feld Thoughts for some time. I try to keep tabs on the VC and startup community, even though I’m no longer in the start up grind. I definitely have the entrepreneurial attitude, but nickel diving isn’t my thing.

I was reading his blog entry today about his efforts to sponsor a bathroom. He has a fascination with bathrooms–but I’m not going there.

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This won’t be popular.  As usual, I was listing to NPR’s Morning Edition today.  They had an article about long term housing for the homeless in New Orleans.  It was nice and warm feeling, especially the part about the blind man who used to live in a house with friends, but now lives in a nursing home.

What disturbed me was another part that was intended to be warm and fuzzy.  They told of a success story of Tyronne Smith, an artist that because homeless after Katrina and lived under a bridge.  Now he had a 3-bedroom apartment that he only pays $80 per month.  He is overwhelmed to have a roof again, he isn’t so depressed, he’s painting again, and he even sold a few paintings at two shows at which he exhibited.  Great, right?

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