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Jerry Jones, owner of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, has encouraged his architects to make the new Texas Stadium a bigger, better facility.

The new facility still has the rectangular hole in the roof, although it can be covered by a set of sliding doors. The wind makes a fierce howl as it whips through the construction site. In this YouTube video, the howl is audible over the freeway noise.

Beneath the hole is a set of 4 HDTV monitors that are suspended 110 feet over the football field:

The board will run from the 20-yard line to the 20-yard line — measuring 180 feet in length and 50 feet in height - making it the largest video board installation in the world.

There’s more information in this article from the Dallas Morning News, including a graphic that compares the board to city buses (Stack 4 large city buses. Repeat 6 times!), as well as the stadium’s web site.

Image of the stadium construction site courtesy of Brandon Cripps through a Creative Commons license.

One of the country’s largest web hosting companies, The Planet, is still down after a fire knocked out their main data center’s transformer. To their credit, Planet managers have been providing regular updates on a web forum. Here’s update #2, which is a good example:

Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. [CDT], a transformer in our H1 data center in Houston caught fire, thus requiring us to take down all generators as instructed by the fire department. All servers are down.

The Houston Fire Department ordered Planet staff to shut down the data center’s electric generators. Approximately 7500 9000 web servers and 9000 7500 customers are affected.

One reason that I use DreamHost.com to host billso.com is the incredible level of transparency that DreamHost provides. DreamHost is employee-owned, which helps explains their reporting policy. I’ve never had a major problem with DreamHost, but I know that I can check the status reports for the data center and most of their servers at any time, on the Web or with RSS

See Center Networks for more comments about the Planet fire. I agree with Allen Stern - given the number of servers and clients affected, I expected to hear much more on the blogosphere this morning. The outage affects Planet’s Server Command, ResellOne, and legacy EV1 customers.

The Hosting News posted an excellent article on 29 May 2008 about several recently completed projects at The Planet. It’s tempting to think that this project and the fire are connected, but there’s no indication of that yet. The Planet used to be known as EV1. I remember EV1 from from my years in Austin, when that company offered cut-rate dial-up internet service and web hosting. Their radio commercials were just awful.

The Register and Broadband Reports have posted very brief reports, and here’s the Wikipedia page for EV1.

First, the good news: crazy rasberry ants are smaller than fleas, but they will eat fire ants. I hate fire ants, and I don’t miss them at all.

Now here’s the bad news: these ants also eat plants, and they like to get into electronic equipment, including network cable and hard drives, according to CRN. That’s a recipe for failure.

Pray that paratrenicha species near pubens don’t come to your neighborhood.

See the Associated Press, Texas A&M’s web page and BoingBoing for more information and links.

Updated 16 May 2008: here’s the New York times article about the crazy running ants.

Update 16 June 2008: I added this YouTube video from Houston’s FOX news report.

Photo courtesy of Texas A&M University.

Related posts on billso.com

• 26 August 2004: Killer bees reach Oklahoma
• 13 August 2004: Giant mutant ants in Australia

The annual SXSW (South by Southwest) music show has wrapped up in Austin, Texas. The New York Times has a great article about the show. When i lived in Austin, I never went to SXSW. The crowds and traffic around downtown were insane.

The record companies look more and more like they are waging an endgame battle. When buyers no longer want or need what an industry offers, companies must reinvent themselves or die. Lou Reed tells a packed conference hall that bands need the Internet more than a record label. Daniel Lanois raves about his ability to sell music the day he recorded the session. REM performed its entire new album at a listening party, and no one questioned whether the songs would be posted to file sharing services. The only question was how long it would take before the tracks were freely available.

Bits vs atoms

Something smells inevitable here, and it’s not teen spirit. It’s the ubiquity of digital distribution, and how quickly North American and European consumers have embraced the new business model. Consumers still buy CDs, but sales volume continues to drop while legitimate online sales volume grows every quarter.
There’s another Times article this weekend about free music downloads, with these two quotes:

“Of course a panel on online music-business models was going to degenerate into a food fight,” wrote Joseph Weisenthal of paidContent.org.

The stew boiled over when Ted Mico, the head of digital strategy at Interscope/Geffen/A&M records, declared, “I need more marketing and promotion on the Internet like I need a root canal without anesthetic.”

With an attitude like that, I’m sure Ted was thrilled that blogger Perez Hilton hosted his own listening party at SXSW this year. According to this article on the AP, Perez merely attended last year’s conference. This year, he’s an industry player who may announce his own marketing and promotion deal with Warner soon. That’s another sign of endgame desperation. The day I need Perez Hilton to pick my music will be a sad day indeed.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s an interesting idea: the University of North Texas is using Facebook to post lists of lost-and-found items. Facebook users at the university can join a group and see these lists.

UNT has partnered with a for-profit service called Trace.com, which in turn is part of another web service called MyThings.

I’m more familiar with another service called StuffBak, which sells adhesive labels imprinted with serial numbers. Users apply a sticker to an item, and then complete a registration form on the company’s web site. I wrote a brief article back on 20 September 2006 about the service.

An online inventory

MyThings has a broader set of features, including document archiving for receipts and invoices, as well as a database of manuals and documentation for products. It makes sense for universities to offer product registration and recovery services to students, who often bring high-value electronic devices to campus each day.

Linking the service to a popular social network may spur students to try an online registration and inventory service. Over time, campus police departments can use these services as another tool to manage and reduce theft on campus. Theft is one item that US universities must report to the US Deaprtment of Education each year, as required of the Clery Act and discussed at Security on Campus.