Stephen Mizell

Here's a quick peek at one of my pictures I've taken while I've been in Las Vegas. This is a pic of the fire/volcano show at the Mirage Resort. It was cool... I guess. Nothing too special.

So I'm here hanging out in a Wi-Fi hotspot at a Telecom Conference in Las Vegas, bumming some free internet which would cost me $9.95 in our room. I've been able sit in on some of the sessions here at the conference and listen to some impressive speakers. I've enjoyed the sessions with Itera the most so far, mainly the one with a man by the name of Bob Schroeder from Qwest. He talked about where the telecom industry is going and how we're getting there. He knew his stuff, that's for sure.

Las Vegas as a whole is pretty crazy. Lights, casinos, shows, fancy cars... they're all over the place. Even McDonald's is in bright lights. With the good, though, also comes the bad. Smoking is always allowed, no matter where you go or what you are doing (even in elevators). Also, it seems as though I missed the memo that wearing no undershirt and not buttoning the top five buttons of your shirt is cool. Strange people roam these streets, and if they're half as strange as they look, we're in for quite a week.

PS - I just got an invite from Wordpress.com. I might check it out, I might not, but if anyone wants it, let me know.

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.