"Streaming video services like Netflix 'are making this a more in-demand product', said Marc Blakeman, AT&T's vice president for external affairs. 'We're finding a lot more interest'."

Wow, that Netflix thing is seriously a bandwidth hog. Also: everything about the table below is terrible.

http://www.mercurynews.com/tv/ci_29900222/at-t-launches-gigabit-internet-service-san-jose

Lately I've been feeling increasingly stressed at work, for no particular reason I've been able to narrow down. I keep discovering that the stress decreases in particular a) at home, and b) late at night, and especially both at once.

My current hypothesis is communication overload. Maybe I need to have longer stretches with no email and no IM (and maybe no in-person interruptions). That's kinda obvious, but harder than it sounds.

"I wish I did this earlier though. They didn't tell me. They thought it was normal that it disconnected once or twice a day."
– upon switching from a Linksys router to an Airport Extreme

Based on a co-worker's recommendation, I thought I would try playing Stellaris. It's fun, but I keep losing, even though I'm using all the strategies I learned from work:

1) If anything goes wrong, I blow up my entire fleet and try again. This mostly works, but it prints a big ugly "Game Over" sign every time, which is a bug I think. That's not how that works, you should get infinite retries.

2) Shortly after starting the game, I make sure to build one of every possible type of unit. This creates a severe mineral and energy deficit for my empire, and is a management nightmare, but I plan to make it up in volume. The expected returns don't materialize, so I randomly disassemble different units in the hope that the remainder will do better with more wood behind fewer lasers, but that doesn't help either. Afterwards I seem to always have less money than when I started, which definitely does not match my corporate experience.

3) I discovered the "sector administration" feature, which basically lets me delegate operation of my sectors to low-level middle managers who don't share my vision. They just build a bunch of similar looking boring stuff (mines, power plants, farms) instead of cool stuff. But weirdly, now my balance starts increasing! So I build a military and immediately declare war on the biggest, most powerful empire, as a "forcing function" to get my sector governors to improve. Surprisingly, the other empire fights back and my empire is almost immediately destroyed.

So... this seems like a really good idea.

http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=11261610011&ref=b2b_mo_reg_2483420022_469188122

A bunch of people lately have said they are worried about me because I seem less cynical than usual. Don't worry: I'm still cynical on the inside.