Roswell Aliens Confirmed

I ran across this which was referred to by slashdot. The story basically discussed a sworn affidavit signed by the press officer at the military base in Roswell. Essentially, he confirmed that it was an alien ship that crashed and that alien bodies were recovered. He claims to have seen the ship and the bodies and that he was instructed to concoct the weather balloon story. Interestingly, the information only came to light after the person died since he forbid the affidavit to be released before his death.

This sounds to be the most concrete confirmation that a UFO did actually crash in Roswell. Of course, this is is also fodder for the conspiracy theory types.

New cellphone technology from T-Mobile

T-Mobile just quietly released a new and interesting technology on their network. They basically created a way to incorporate voice over IP in their phones by enabling calling over WiFi. What the technology essentially is allow your cellphone to connect to the T-Mobile network over WiFi when a WiFi network is in range and then use normal cellular connectivity when WiFi is not available. Let me give an example.

You are talking on the phone to colleague when the call drops a mile from your house because of poor cell coverage in your neighborhood. Once you get home, your cellphone recognizes your home WiFi network and immediately connects to it. You can not make and receive calls normally on your cellphone using only WiFi with no cellular coverage needed! How cool is that? The technology will also supposably allow you to hand off coverage between the two networks and so if you are WiFi and have to leave, the phone will automatically switch to cellular and your call will continue normally.

This is an interesting technology because it helps T-Mobile with the problem of poor coverage. Where I live, their coverage is the worst in general, but I get almost no coverage at my house. This would be a nice way to enable coverage at my house using my existing network. This could also work in my office where coverage is equally spotty.

I am curious to read the reviews of how well this really works. Here is the first hands review that I have seen:

Engadget Mobile Hands On

Las Vegas

I travel periodically to Las Vegas for work. It is amazing how developed the area has become. Hotels and restaurants are everywhere. The other interesting point is that it is actually very expensive. In the old days, it was very cheap to visit Vegas with the food and hotel rooms selling for significant discounts versus other destinations. These days that is not the case. The food is as expensive if not more expensive than found in other destinations. In fact a couple of the restaurants that I ate it had prices that were very similar to restaurants in New York.

This brings me to my final question. Does it make sense to pay a premium to visit Las Vegas? I imagine it might if you are a hardcore gambler, but if that is not your thing then I am not sure it is worth. Sure there is alot to see and do, but in my opinion you can over most of the important things in a long weekend. I travel here for work and the more I come here, the more I realize that there are better places to go on a trip than Vegas.

Blogging

It has been ages since I last posted to the blog. Things just got away from me and I have had no time. I hope to carve out more time in the coming weeks for posting and figured that I would start now.

Digg update

I recently ran across this article on Digg, ironically. It looks like people were so upset by Digg’s actions that they inundated the site with listings for the HD-DVD key. This basically brought the site to its knees and Digg could not delete the posts fast enough. In a post on the Digg Blog, the CEO acknowledged that they had received a cease and desist order, but that they decided to stop deleting the posts. In the end, Digg caved to their users demand. They faced a difficult choice of following the cease and desist and having their site be unusable to due angry posters or post the information anyway and deal with the legal consequences. Clearly, they initially went with the first approach and had no idea how strong the pushback would be. In the end, their users really gave them no choice. It is nice to see consumers/users win one.

Here are a couple of additional articles on the situation:

BBC
Cnet