Brandon Live!

Check it out.

Freakin’ amazing.

If you haven’t heard about it yet, or seen the TED presentation, do yourself a favor and go watch the video.  There’s a high-ish resolution MP4 you can download here.

I absolutely cannot wait until this is released to the public.

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.

Facebook is now, in my mind, a more formidable force than Google.  They get it.  They aren’t lobbing things at the wall to see what sticks, they know exactly where the web is going. 

In case you missed it, they announced “The Platform” today at their f8 conference. 

There are already 30+ applications right out of the gate.  There’s Twitter integration, there’s the “Causes” application (I’ve already created a “cause” for Tusubira using it), there’s Box, Feedburner, and more.

Color me impressed.

In an act of rarely seen internet unity, they cried “09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0″.

What does it mean?  Those numbers stand for freedom. 

I’ve been a bit of a slacker blogger lately, but not without good reason.  One of several things taking up my time is Tusubira - the non-profit organization that I’ve been working with for a while now, and the related trip to Uganda that I’ll be taking at the end of this summer.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, fellow MS blogger Sanaz Ahari made a post earlier this month linking to a video I’d not seen before, with some incredibly interesting data about the distribution of wealth, health, and technology over the last 30 or so years between and within countries from all around the world.  It’s not the shortest video ever, and if you’re used to watching 30 second news blurbs you might not get much out of this as it’s a bit longer than your average NBC world news segment.  But the data presented is so compelling, and the presentation so engaging, that I had to share it.

Start++ has a new home!

I know, I know… the Wiki just went up a few days ago. Well, rather than let people get too used to that, I decided to go ahead and set up a real website for Start++ and any other little tools I end up throwing together (I mean, diligently coding to the highest standard of quality!) later on down the road.

It’s just up and stumbling on Community Server, which seems to be working out pretty well so far.

BrandonTools.com

A couple weeks ago Chris and Scoble showed me in-person what all the fuss with Twitter was about. I’d heard it talked about, but was too busy to even bother finding out what it was. After a quick demonstration, I decided not to sign-up as it just seemed like a goofy way to waste time (which isn’t something I need more of at the moment).

However, tonight I was hanging out with some of the MVPs (mostly the young, hip Windows Live ones) and finally decided to sign-up. With MVPs looking over my shoulder, the sight of the words “Welcome back, Robert Scoble!” proved to be an irresistable temptation.

Anyway, I’m on Twitter now. It’s pretty much the Facebook “status” feature, ripped out and offered as a standalone service. The real difference is the network of people. Facebook has my friends from high school, college, and most of my 20-something friends all on board. But Twitter has… the entire blogosphere. Or maybe that’s just Scoble’s Twitter followers.

Yesterday was easily the most beautiful day of 2007 so far.  It felt (and looked) quite a bit like summer.  Eager to not let it go to waste, a few of us slipped out in the afternoon to make a quick flight around the east side, the falls, and some mountains near the pass.

That’s the path we took.

Check out photos from our flight