Brandon Live!

In case you were wondering.

• It takes 10-15 seconds for a (standard def) video from Xbox Live to be ready to play.
• I frequently download files at about 2 MB/sec from good servers.
• Orb is amazing with 15mbps upload
• Same goes for Remote Desktop
• Bit Torrents aren’t choked by stupid Comcrap throttling software
• My connection doesn’t drop momentarily every few minutes like it did with Comcrap, kicking Trillian off of AIM and causing lag in Halo.
• Sure, it’s not even been a week, but the service has been operational 100% of that time.  No middle of the night service interruptions so far.

I just received an e-mail from Karen Anderson, the assistant organizer for the Seattle Weblogger Meetups, delivering the news that Anita Rowland (who organized those meet-ups) died of cancer today.

She is the second blogger I remember from geek dinners at Crossroads Mall to pass away in less than a week.  Robert Scoble even linked to a rather saddening photo from one of those dinners with both Marc and Anita in it.

You didn’t have to even meet Anita to know her name and that she was a pillar of the Seattle blogging community.  I only wish I’d taken better advantage of her monthly meet-ups. 

My thoughts and sympathies are with her husband Jack, Riley, and the rest of her family.

It was with great shock and sadness this evening that I read of Marc Orchant’s death.  I didn’t know Marc well, or even that he was being hospitalized because of a heart attack.  I first met him at the “MSN Search Champs V2” event back in 2005.  Over those few days he made a great and lasting impression.  I fondly remember geeking out with him at one of Scoble’s “geek dinner” events at the Crossroads Mall in Bellevue, talking about nifty uses for Tablet PCs.  I looked forward to the next time our paths would cross, and am deeply saddened that they never will again.

Even though I only met Marc a few times, I didn’t need more than that to know he was a good man.  My deepest condolences to Marc’s family.  He will be missed.

Judging by this new error message in iTunes 7.5 (which I didn’t even notice had changed the first dozen times I clicked OK to it), it seems like a 64-bit version of iTunes is on the way.  Sadly I can’t do as the message says as the 64-bit installer is nowhere to be found on Apple’ site.  While a 64-bit version in of itself isn’t much to write home about (the 32-bit version of iTunes works fine, including iPod support), it appears that iPhone and iPod Touch support will be included with it.

It’s a real shame that the iPhone launched without a 64-bit driver.  Even worse, 6 months later and it’s still nowhere to be found.  At least this is a sign of hope, though, when compared with the previous error (seen below).  Then I can finally sync with my desktop instead of my laptop.