Stephen Mizell

Since the beginning of 2005, I had the opportunity to live with a good man named Ben. We had quite a bit of fun while under the same roof and entertained a long list of important guests. But, alas, the small-town life could contain this giant no more and he had to move to the big city. So this roasting, I mean tribute, goes out to you, Ben, wherever you are.

Here is a list of things I'll miss about the man.

1. Trash and Dishes - While living with Ben, we were very lucky to have a large quantity of trash and dirty dishes. He knew taking out the trash was not important, and having a clean dish to eat on was no big deal, and he cherished these ideals. Sure, the smell was overwhelming at times, but when you got it this good, why fix it?
2. Wake-up Call - Boy, when you have it like I did, you don't miss it until it's gone. Ben had this cell phone alarm that was just music to my ears. He did a marvelous job of setting it for early in the morning and turning it up loud for all to hear. Most people would be rude and turn it off, but not him. He would let it go all morning and not let it bother him one minute. If I had gotten to sleep that extra time, I might have missed something.
3. Lunchtime Fun - There were days at work when I was going to lunch and really had nothing to do but eat food. Ben always had some way to take up time during our lunch periods. He allowed me to tag along with him to pick up some dip, or even sit in the barber shop while he got his hair trimmed. Most people would complain Ben was ruining their lunches, but not me. Lunch was always very nice.
4. Spider Traps - As many know, Ben had a problem with spiders, so he did everything in his power to catch them. He set up these spider traps that were made with super-duper-sticky glue that could trap the largest of creatures. He caught all kinds of spiders, even poisonous ones. Sure, we constantly stepped on the traps with our shoes and got them stuck, then had to touch these deadly spiders to remove them, but it was worth knowing we were a little bit safer.

In all honesty, I'm kidding about this stuff here, and Ben knows that. It was a good time living with him and working with him, and I'll have some funny stories to tell my children one day because of him. He's a guy you just can't replace. Thumbs up man.

Thursday and Friday I got a chance to visit the network operating center for the Abilene network with ATSM. They were strutting some pretty fancy technology, and that's no joke. The picture above is a 3D picture of me they took with this super special camera, in which my entire face was mapped in 3D in less than a half-second. They are showing off my impressive profile on a display screen that consists of eight 52 inch monitors. I could tell most of the women in the room were a little taken back by what they saw on the screen. Also note the map behind my picture, which is the entire city of Murray zoomed in on Google Maps.

Some researchers were able to send over 850Gb of data from California to Switzerland in 17 minutes over their network. To put that into familiar terms, if a person is downloading movies that are 500Mb a piece, they could download 1700 movies in 17 minutes. That's 100 per minute, or over one a second... which is crazy. Of course, downloading movies is illegal, so this would never happen.

On a funnier note, the Big Cheez is about to come out with a music video for his hit song "Cool College Kid." I'm pretty sure I inspired this song, but we'll not get into that here. The video will be at http://coolcollegekid.com.