Mumblemouth

The Neti Pot as seen on Oprah.

pmountanos — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:50:50 +0000

Recently various members of my friends and family ridiculed me for my use of a Neti Pot to help with my sinus congestion from allergies and dust. Imagine their surprise over the recent buzz because of Oprah around a simple device that I’ve been using for quite a while. Funny part is that my cousin called me a while ago asking if I used a Neti Pot. I explained that I did and then he made some comment about Oprah. Here is a bit of info regarding my use of the Neti Pot, some recommendations based on experience and a video demonstration.

I tend to suffer from sinus congestion fairly frequently. Often this is due to mild allergies or environmental conditions such as dust. Sometimes it is due to mild sinus infections. I find that I’m able to get substantial relief by using my Neti Pot and will sometimes get out of bed in the middle of the night to rinse if I can’t sleep due to congestion.

I have a ceramic Neti Pot but I recommend that you get an unbreakable one. You’ll likely find yourself wanting to bring it with you when traveling and not having to worry about it breaking will make that easier. I now have one at my home and one at the home of the people that I most frequently go out of town to visit.

Ceramic Neti Pot Unbreakable Pot

The basic idea behind the neti pot is using a mild saline solution to flush the sinuses. There are several ways to get the right saline solution. I used to just use kosher salt and it works find even if it’s not “pharmaceutical grade”. I then ran across some “pharmaceutical grade” salt intended for the purpose and switched to that for a while. BTW the special salt is actually pretty easy to find if you look for it. I just hadn’t been looking because I was okay with the kosher salt. Recently however, I discovered these NeilMed Sinus Rinse packets.

They have a pre-measured amount of two salts in them for use with 8 oz of water. This makes them great for travel and more convenient than measuring out the salt. I have to admit though, I used to just eyeball out a teaspoon into 8 oz of water so it wasn’t that big a deal when at home.

I just use lukewarm tap water up to the mark that I’ve made in my pot that indicates 8 oz. Then I add whichever option I’m going to use to create the saline solution and I use a little battery powered mixer to be sure that the solution is well mixed. This also helps if I’m adding something beside salt. At various times I put several drops of Echinacea tincture or a single drop of grapefruit seed extract in the saline solution that I use. I generally use one of these if I feel like I’ve got a mild sinus infection. I’ll use them twice a day for about a week. This isn’t medical advice in any way just something that I’ve found helps me. Careful not to overuse any of the ingredients of the saline solution. I put 3 drops of grapefruit seed extract in one night and my nose hurt so much I couldn’t sleep that night.

Once you mix up your solution it’s pretty simple. Lean over a sink, turn your head towards the hand holding the pot and stick the tip of the Neti Pot into the “upper” nostril. Tip the pot up and run about 1/2 of the solution through. Tip the pot back down and then repeat on the other side. Have some tissue nearby because you’ll want to blow your nose.

Wash the pot and set it aside to dry.

Dan Rayburn is mistaken in dismissing AT&T as a Content Delivery Network.

pmountanos — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:35:10 +0000

Dan Rayburn has some interesting thoughts on Akamai being downgraded because of competitive concerns over AT&T. Not to put too fine a point on it but if Dan hasn’t found AT&T in the CDN business he hasn’t been looking in the right places. When I was responsible for which CDNs to use on the Nine Systems overlay solution there were several months where we utilized over 80TB of delivery from AT&T’s ICDS (Internet Content Delivery Service) product. The majority of this was in streaming services. During 2004 and 2005 we used over 20TB of CDN service from AT&T pretty much every month and it was generally much more than that. We also had to compete against them in large accounts. They certainly had shortcomings but it would be unwise to think that they can’t deliver content. They also have a large sales and marketing infrastructure and are able to leverage their existing relationships with many corporations who also need CDN services in addition to their other services. If AT&T decides to actually make such a move and puts the resources behind it I would worry more about them than I would about Level 3. Though I don’t really think that either is that big a threat to Akamai and I agree that the downgrade was unwarranted. Nor do I think that it would be wise for AT&T to pick up LimeLight. Frankly I don’t think that Limelight has enough compelling, proprietary technology to make it worth it and AT&T certainly doesn’t need the network capacity. They have existing peering relationship with basically everyone. Thus, it’s not as though they’re going to be blocked in delivering content to end users. What they should do is pick up a smaller company that has the expertise that they’re missing. Specifically around creating value added applications to enable their customers to be more successful. Things like Digital Right Management, Commerce, Content Management, Reporting and Syndication. I can think of a couple. The delivery itself is a commodity business these days and margins are being driven ever downward. The value added apps are likely to be the best way to maintain reasonable margins. Akamai had a great opportunity to do this with the acquisition of Nine Systems but frankly I think that they squandered it because it didn’t fit the model that they were used to.
As a disclosure I do own shares of Akamai, which probably aren’t helped by the above.

Our Non-Fiction book club picks

pmountanos — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 02:24:10 +0000

This one is really for the members of our book club but it will tell others a very little bit of what I’ll be reading over the next year.

Opera wants to take away your Internet Explorer

pmountanos — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:10:21 +0000

Okay maybe that’s an overstatement, but then again maybe not. Opera has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft over Internet Explorer bundling and (this is the part that I like) for holding back web developers from making cross browser programs “by not following accepted web standards” Their argument seems to be that developers are choosing to code to ensure that their work renders in Internet Explorer since Internet Explorer is the dominant browser.
Arguing that bundling Internet Explorer limits choice is somewhat ironic to me. People are free to choose their own browser which they can conveniently download by using that bundled version of Internet Explorer. Clearly Opera doesn’t want MS to ship without a browser because finding Opera would be that much (much much) harder. So, they seem to want MS to ship with multiple browsers. If it ships with an MS OS then end user perception will be that MS is responsible for quality. This is different than giving the user the ability to choose different search providers. This would be an installed app situation. Not something that is done lightly.
I’ve tried Firefox and Opera. Frankly I found the integration with video sites to be lacking in both. I expect that Opera will say that this is because the sites are being coded to IE. Are they saying that IE should only support web standards? If coding to IE provides the best user experience then code to IE. I want the best user experience. As a test I loaded MTV.com in both IE7 and Opera 9.24. I’ll take the IE 7 experience any day. Here is what they looked like. Click the thumbnails to see the larger images.

IE7

Opera

Developers are free to (and do) make recommendations to their users along the lines of “This site is best viewed with…. and a link to download a browser. They’re also free to do a browser detect and redirect users to a “This site is not supported on your browser” or “Here is the poor experience IE version of our site” if they so choose. If enough end users show their displeasure by downloading those other browsers and the balance shifts away from IE then MS would undoubtedly take notice. Running to the courts is sooo last century. Compete in the marketplace with a more compelling product.
Should IE support web standards? Sure. Should MS be forced to support web standards? I don’t think so. Consumer adoption should drive product development. Should IE be limited to only support web standards. Of course not.

Limiting products to only support web standards would lead to less compelling user experiences and less rapid development of new types of experiences and business opportunities.

Read this book. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore

pmountanos — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 08:10:13 +0000

I read this a while back but saw it on the bookshelf the other day. It’s one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Obviously it’s irreverent but even if you’re a “believer” you would have to have had your sense of humor surgically removed not to enjoy this book.

Technorati Profile

The future of Digital Media is in the hands of?…..

pmountanos — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 21:03:15 +0000

I still keep in touch with my friends from the content delivery space. I was chatting with one of them the other night when the subject of new business came up. I loved this mini rant. I’ve removed their ID for obvious reasons.

(my friend)Today I met with a top Internet holding company, a hundred companies in their stable. Also met with a digital video workflow company, a top magazine publisher, and a Chinese broadband company. Yesterday I met with the former head of digital at a cable conglomerate, who is starting a new co for online video. Of all the people I talked to at all of these companies, not a single one has looked at a video from online on a regular TV, and not one has purchased or even downloaded a video to look at on a PC or a handheld (except a YouTube video on an iPhone, though none of them owned a video capable phone apart from the cable guy who had a Samsung Blackjack).

(my friend)They’re all going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread for online consumers of video, none of them ever used such a service nor expect to until their own kick-ass whatever works.

(my friend)Harrumph.

Why my new Sony Vaio blows chunks

pmountanos — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:26:04 +0000

Recently I upgraded my primary laptop from Dell Latitude D410 to a Sony Vaio AR690U. I knew going in that I was going to give up the great battery life that I enjoyed with the Latitude but hoped that I’d love the rest of the machine so much that I could overlook that. I was wrong. The Vaio simply feels cheap and poorly designed. The keyboard is unusually loud. The flip down panel that provides access to the display outputs feels like it’s going to break off and I’m just waiting for the pullout cover for the ethernet port to snap. It’s got a latch for the cover that sticks regularly and often catches my wrist after having inadvertently flipped up. The on/off switch for the wireless interface is right in front and easy to accidentally hit. The power button is right where you would put your thumb when picking this beast up. The battery doesn’t feel securely mounted. I finally managed to get the 4GB of RAM out of our vendor. The fine print on the spec sheet implies that there might be some issue with the system seeing more that 3GB of RAM. I’ll clear that up. Windows (Vista Ultimate in this case) can’t see more than 3GB of RAM in this system. It’s actually not Windows’ fault. It has to do with the chipset and motherboard. On top of all this the wireless interface is flaky when moving on and off AC despite going through the power settings to override any battery saving behavior around wireless. Oh, and Sony didn’t bother to ship or make available for download the NVRotate utility that the NVIDIA 8600M GT can utilize. Asus provided it to my friend who recently got one of their high end machines. (NVIDIA says to get it from the manufacturer) I’d be darn jealous of that Asus except that I at least have a Blueray drive and his battery life is even worse than mine since they don’t make an extended battery for it. Performance wise it’s about what you’d expect from the spec. Though the memory performance does keep it down to to a 4.8 overall on the Vista performance measurement tool. My beef isn’t with the performance. For this much money in this day you would just think that they would have put out a solid feeling product. Maybe I’ll put Vista on a MacBook Pro for my next machine.

I wish that I could say “Only in Texas”

pmountanos — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:39:34 +0000

This story caught my eye this morning. I wish that I could say that I thought that only in Texas would Intelligent Design or Creationism have this kind of traction. However, I’m sure that I would be wrong.

Hydrogen as a solid for fuel cells

pmountanos — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:38:58 +0000

Brandon Wirtz made a comment about exploding hydrogen tanks for fuel cell use in in cars in his blog at http://www.xyhd.tv/2007/12/rants-and-tangents/stop-drilling-for-oil-in-the-us-or-prepare-for-a-methanol-economy/ However the research shown at http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/23/south-koreans-make-hydrogen-solid-for-a-brighter-fuel-cell-futur/ indicates to me that by the time we get any kind of real alternative fuel infrastructure in place I won’t be any more worried about a hydrogen tank than I currently am about sitting on 30 gallons of gas.

Would they rather have a Nuclear Power Plant?

pmountanos — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:37:06 +0000

More fun from news.com. This time it’s a story on the suggestion from a Stanford team for a wind farm off the coast of Cape Mendocino. Apparently there is some concern that locals would object to ruining the view. I’ve spent time up there. Sure, it’s pretty but trade offs have to be made. How about sharing a carbon credit with the county. With a carbon trading market the revenue could be used to reduce property taxes, increase services or promote economic development or tourism. If they still won’t go for it ask them if they’d rather have a nuclear plant instead.