Snowday

We have about three feet of snow on the upstairs deck. It's only snowed about 8-10 inches but we're at the end of this U-shaped wind tunnel of buildings.

I took Frisket out at 7:30. The normal walk to Cranberry's and back is about 20 minutes, plus or minus waiting time. Was more like 45 minutes today, nothing had been shovelled and somebody just had the need to drill her head into snowbanks every few steps.

Les XX Jeux Olympique d'Torino

The Olympic Games are back...I don't plan to watch any events except by accident. When you're in the thick of the Games it seems like there's nothing else going on in the world. It's been six years since my last Games and it's just...eh, there's more interesting things to do. At least in Sydney the TV coverage was a little more balanced (Aussie focussed but not to the exclusion of all other sports/nations). If you're looking for the schedule of TV coverage on NBC in the U.S., MSNBC has posted it Winter Olympics TV Schedule.

One point of interest: NBC appears to have partnered with Sun Microsystems for the nbcolympics.com web site. This is there third technology partner in as many Olympic Games (admittedly I don't know who they partnered with for Athens).

I find it curious, from a web geek perspective, that they redirect to "index.html". Just an oddity. Although they are using Apache, they are forcing replies using HTTP/1.0 which is a silly thing to do with a high-traffic website. They also have requests set to expire immediately and not cache, another silly thing.

They are responding to requests to encode the response in a compressed payload, using gzip instead of deflate, though only from nbcolympics.com and not their CDN edgesuite.net.

NYT: The Lowdown on Sweet?

In The Lowdown on Sweet?, an article describing an Italian researcher's findings that aspartame (aka Nutrasweet) can cause cancer in rats we read: In an analysis of 166 articles published in medical journals from 1980 to 1985, Dr. Ralph G. Walton, a professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine found that all 74 studies that were financed by the industry attested to sweetener's safety. Of the 92 independently funded articles, 84 identified adverse health effects.

The food industry is claiming that the study is flawed because the research team allowed the rats used in the study to live longer (to their natural lifespams) rather than a two year standard used in the U.S. to study toxic effects.

In other unrelated news, it has been a year since I ceased drinking diet soda. Also, unrelated I'm sure, the psoriasis which I've had in my hands for the last several years abated dramatically over the course of the past year. With the winter weather it has returned but not as severely as it had in past years.