For breakfast this morning, Gretchen made waffles with maple syrup. I also had a glass of orange juice and two cups of coffee. We normally would not have waffles during the week but Gretchen wanted to find out what would happen if you made waffle batter with soy milk instead of cow’s milk. The waffles were nice and light, though that may have been because she beat the heck out of the batter. They were also not quite as dark a brown as normal, but otherwise they were excellent. I weighed 155 pounds.
For lunch today I went to the Penn State Forum’s presentation Prospects for the Internet by Douglas Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2. For those who are not familiar with Internet2, this is how it describes itself.
Internet2 is a consortium being led by 205 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow’s Internet. Internet2 is recreating the partnership among academia, industry and government that fostered today’s Internet in its infancy. The primary goals of Internet2 are to:
- Create a leading edge network capability for the national research community
- Enable revolutionary Internet applications
- Ensure the rapid transfer of new network services and applications to the broader Internet community.
In other words, Internet2 is the next generation of the Internet. It is currently a physically separate network from the one on which you are most probably reading this post. Large parts of it are purely experimental. It is designed to be much faster, and with much greater potential. You think your cable modem or DSL is fast? From my desktop at the Pennsylvania State University, I can sustain a 98.6 Mbps transfer to the University of Indiana — and my connection is not one of the “really good ones.” You think listening to streaming audio is pretty cool? I can watch C-SPAN broadcast live from Northwestern University. Unless you have a direct Internet2 connection, I would not suggest clicking on that C-SPAN link. The application for viewing it is included in the stream itself and then the video feed is 2 megabits per second.
Internet2 is looking for new challenges, but first… lunch!
The thing about buffet lunches is that you get a chance to sample a bunch of dishes. Today I tried anduille and sweet potato soup. Mmmm… Spicy! I would not have said that I would enjoy a sweet potato soup, but I really enjoyed this. The sausage was quite spicy. I followed that with a small green salad. Then there was bow tie pasta casserole, sautéed zucchini and summer squash, turkey and dressing, and roast beef with fried onions. Dessert was a slice of apple pie and I washed it all down with some iced tea.
After the buffet, Mr. Van Houweling spoke. As I just mentioned, Internet2 has significant bandwidth in mind. The speaker was around for the discussions of the original Internet as well and talked about the heated discussion about whether the new “world wide web” application should allow images to be transferred because of concerns over the amount of bandwidth that would be required.
He also mentioned that several corporations turned down the opportunity to take the original Internet commercial. In his words, “Only those in higher education can understand that good things can happen, even when no one is in charge.”
A little while ago I posted a link to Nigella Lawson’s recipe for Vegetarian Chili With Corn Bread Topping in the New York Times. Well, tonight we tried it, and I can say, “It is good.” I washed down two servings of the chili with three glasses of Bolla Cabernet Sauvignon.
In the interest of full disclosure, I do not know how the original recipe tastes. You see, I am one of those people who feels that you have to follow the recipe — at least once — or else you do not know how the recipe tastes. Gretchen, on the other hand, likes to look at a recipe and immediately say, “I don’t like cardamom, I’m going to use cloves,” and “There is no chili powder in this chili, I’m going to add a teaspoon.” So when I say, “It is good,” I mean with those changes. I suppose the original is pretty good, too.