Ruth Mills: 1910 - 2008

This morning in Ohio, we lost an amazing intelligent and kind woman, my grandmother Ruth "Grandma Ruse" Mills. She led an amazing and long life that began in a house without a telephone and spanned two world wars, countless presidents, and many many loving grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She is pictured above with her great-granddaughter Avery.

I grew up in Columbus Ohio, and was able to see her and my grandfather quite a lot, but after having moved to Los Angeles in 2003, I wasn't able to see her as much. I was very fortunate to come home recently and spend a few days talknig with her. We sat for hours and I told her about my life in Los Angeles and she told me about hers in Ohio. I had such an amazing time learning things about her childhood and her family.

I can't describe the amount of love, respect and admiration that my entire family felt for such a wonderful woman.

I love you Grandma Ruse, and I'll miss you.

Traffic shaping for p2p

I feel like p2p technology like bittorrent is a valuable way of sharing information, as well as allowing indie media developers/musicians/writers/artists in general distribute. I don't think companies like comcast have the best interest of it's users in mind when they use packet inspection and throttle back on p2p transfers. If there is a general bandwidth shortage problem, why don't they charge accordinly for internet access and use those profits to invest in more backbone infrastructure or newer faster transfer methods? Instead, there are companies who are deceptivley restricting bandwidth for customers who are paying for the services they use.

Also, does anyone know if you surf the web while running bittorrent or some other p2p application, does that cloud the ability of isp's to discern p2p traffic from "normal" web traffic?

I'm really curious.

Josh@Joshmills.net

p90x plus!

John McCain's Personal War

Watch this, and please vote in November. It's never been so important. If you agree with the war in Iraq or not, you cannot deny that it has taken an enormous toll on their country and on ours. Please watch this and email me if you disagree, agree, or just think this is left-wing propaganda.

I know where I stand, and agree or not, I am standing up to be counted.

Josh
Joshuatmills@gmail.com

Barack Roll

Earthquake '08

So as many of you know, we living here in Southern California recently experienced a larger earthquake.  I say larger not because it did any damage, but because we actually have a lot of seismic activity in the area around Los Angeles and most people don't feel it.  This however, was a 5.4 centered on Chino Hills, a mere 26 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. Personally, I have been living in Los Angeles since April of 2003 and haven't felt a single quake since moving here. I guess that makes me lucky, but I always kind of wondered what it would feel like to experience one.  Well, now I can say I felt one.  You could say I was lucky that I was working at the time and sitting on the 4th floor of an office building that was fitted with rollers that ensured that instead of breaking from the shaking, the building would gently rock bath and forth, absorbing the force of the quake.  I kind of do feel lucky, in that the damned building didn't collapse around my ears.  On the other hand, being high up in a building that is on rollers kind of feels like the world that seemed so solid a second ago, is not only now insubstantial, but undulating  in large sickening waves that might pitch you out the window to the ground below.  My guess is that what I felt was a little more dramatic than it would have been had I been standing on the  street, but since it was ultimately safer, how can I complain?  Later that night I went to an appointment in a very tall building in my neighborhood, all the way up on the 27th floor.  I can say that it made me think twice about aftershocks before getting in the elevator and riding to the clouds, but knowing that these buildings are built to withstand the shaking, made me feel comforted. Phew.  Although, they say the "big one" is still coming in the next 30 years, so we'll see how good those rollers really are.  *fingers crossed*