Month: November 2006

Last night, I received an invitation to tour the New York Times website for a week during what is called Free Access week over at the newspaper. Since free is about the price I’m willing to pay for a lot of stuff, I zipped right over to their Technology section to see some of the latest stuff from David Pogue, their technology columnist.

I’m not sure whether his stuff is usually behind a firewall, but I took advantage of the chance to look through some of what he’s been posting lately. He’s one of those “names” that seem to carry a lot of weight in the technology community, so he’s usually worth a read.

One of the items that jumped out at me was A faster Web – for free which told how anyone can speed up their web connection, using a service called OpenDNS. Pogue claims that just by starting to use it, his access times for getting web pages to load in his browser were dropping at an amazing rate.

Frankly, it sounded a little too good to be true. It’s free, for one thing, and there’s no software to install, and no sales people are going to call. You don’t have to register, or give away your email address or anything…can this be for real?

Well, I got my router switched over to start using OpenDNS’s servers and it really does seem to work. I can cruise around the Web a lot quicker (judging from my own non-scientific clicking), and it works for every computer in the house, just by switching a couple of options on the router.

Try it for yourself. It really works. And thanks, Mr. Pogue, for pointing it out to all of us.

Jaime is at the Canadian University Championships (CUR) this weekend in St. Catherines, Ontario. Her UVIC lightweight womens’ four is the defending national champion.

But on Saturday, they had to give up their crown, as they finished third in the four, losing to perennial rival Queens and upstart Western. Western also won the overall title, the first time they’d done so.

While third in the nation is nothing to sneeze at, I know that Jaime and her team are disappointed not to have won for the third year in a row. The good news is that they’re a young team, and they’ll all be back for another year, so they should be even stronger next year.

UVIC’s coach Rick Crawley wrote up the results of the regatta here for the UVIC website.

Jaime was also rowing her single for the first time at the CURs. She came fifth overall. UVIC was the only womens team to place a boat in every final race, but they only came away with one win, in the women’s lightweight double. Jaime wasn’t in that boat this time.

Now Jaime is off to Welland for the first-ever National Rowing Championships which is a new, invitation-only gathering of some of the best rowers in Canada, put on by Rowing Canada. She’ll be rowing Sunday, Monday and Tuesday out there, before heading back to Victoria.

UPDATE — Jaime recovered from the disappointment on Saturday with a huge effort in the time trials at the NRC’s on Sunday. She finished ninth out of all the lightweight women, and first among the Under 23’s. She’s qualified for more racing on Monday and Tuesday.