So a week ago I ordered a brand spanking new camera and it arrived just in time for the last game of the boys basketball season. Of course I had to test it out at the game and capture some pictures.

We had originally only planned on Andrew playing basketball since he had such a good time with it last year but after going to one of Andrew’s practices Alex pleaded with us to play as well.

We gave in since it was the church league with the goal of coaching basketball fundamentals and having fun instead of high pressure competition and winning at all costs. They both had lots of fun and said that they wanted to play again next year.

• Andrew Basketball Pictures
• Alex Basketball Pictures

Off the top of my head I wasn’t sure but thought I remembered hearing a long time ago that antidisestablishmentarianism was the longest but I wasn’t sure.

So, like all good puzzlers I turned to Google and eventually ended up on the Wikipedia page dedicated to the Longest word in the English Language.

Like with just about everything in the English language it turns out that the longest word depends on the rules you want to use.

The longest word in a major dictionary is Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, which is defined by Oxford English Dictionary to mean “a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.” In case you haven’t taken the time to count it contains 45 letters. This is classified as both a “technical” and “coined” word.

There are actually two technical words, both longer then I care to reprint that are 189,819 letters long which some appear to believe isn’t a word at all, and the longest published word at 1,909 letters long. I’m discounting these since they are technical words.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the word that started all of this, comes in at 34 letters long but is just a made up so in our quest continues.

The longest non-coined word in an English dictionary, but still a technical word is Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism with 30 letters.

The first non-coined, non-technical word I came across was in fact Antidisestablishmentarianism with 28 letters.

Of course at this point my curiosity got the better of me and Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the longest words in other languages. I know in German you can make big words by stringing together smaller words and leaving out the spaces.

For example whole numbers are written as one word so, Siebenhundertsiebenundsiebzigtausendsiebenhundertsiebenundsiebzig, 777,777, is pretty darn long at 65 letters. (And just for Doug, using his favourite German number, fünfhundertfünfundfünfzigtausendfünfhundertfünfundfünfzig, 555,555, but that’s only 57 letters). Imagine being in grade school and having to write out the expanded notion of numbers on a test, you’d run out of time or get writers cramp.

Anyone have any favourite long words?

This has been done in protest of two bills currently in consideration by congress. H.R. 3261 “Stop Online Privacy Act” or SOPA and S.968 “Protect IP” or PIPA which could drastically alter the landscape of the internet as we have come to know it.

The EFF has a good summary of what these bills will do.

Big media and its allies in Congress are billing the Internet blacklist legislation as a new way to battle online infringement. But innovation and free speech advocates know that this initiative will do little to stop infringement online. What it will do is compromise Internet security, inhibit online expression, and slow growth in the technology sector.

As drafted, the legislation would grant the government and private parties unprecedented power to interfere with the Internet’s underlying infrastructure. The government would be able to force ISPs and search engines to block users’ attempts to reach certain websites’ URLs.

Let me jump in here. This would be done using DNS filtering the same technology that repressive regimes like China and Iran use to prevent their citizens from freely surfing the internet. In fact supporters of the bill provided a list of countries where this DNS filtering technology already works which includes, China, Iran, Bahrain, Myanmar, Syria, and others.

I would like the think that we in the US hold ourselves to a higher standard then these countries when it comes to censorship.

In response, third parties will woo average users to alternative servers that offer access to the entire Internet (not just the newly censored U.S. version), which will create new computer security vulnerabilities as the Internet grows increasingly balkanized.

It gets worse: the blacklist bills’ provisions would give corporations and other private parties new powers to censor foreign websites with court orders that would cut off payment processors and advertisers. Broad immunity provisions (combined with a threat of litigation) would encourage service providers to overblock innocent users or even block websites voluntarily. This gives content companies every incentive to create unofficial blacklists of websites, which service providers would be under pressure to block without regard to the First Amendment.

Service providers would be forced to monitor and police their users’ activities as well, threatening the DMCA safe harbors that have been vital to online innovation over the last decade. SOPA gives the government new powers to go after sites that provide information about tools that might be used to bypass the blacklists — even though these are often the same tools used by democratic activists around the world to bypass Internet censorship mechanisms implemented by authoritarian governments like Iran and China.

If you believe that this is extreme consider the lawsuit that Viacom is trying to revive against YouTube/Google. Under the current law, the DMCA, there is a safe harbor provision which shields a website from liability of copyright infringement of users activity if they are not aware of it and they remove the offending content once notified by the copyright holder.

This means if I upload a video to YouTube that contains copyright material the copyright holder has the right to notify YouTube who must then remove the video. If they comply with the takedown notice YouTube would not be liable for copyright damages. A judge granted summary judgement to YouTube as they had complied with all takedown requests in a timely manner. Viacom believes that YouTube needs to do more and wants it to screen all content for copyright infringement before it is allowed to be posted.

Under SOPA/PIPA YouTube and all other user content driven sites, would now be liable for copyright infringement of it’s users and any user that links to that content would also be liable for copyright infringement.

Have you ever posted a link to a YouTube video on your blog, Facebook, Twitter that you didn’t know specifically who owned the copyright and if the content was posted legally?

Take time to educate yourself on these bills and let your representatives know how you feel.

Resources:

• American Censorship – http://americancensorship.org/
• Inforgraphic from American Censorship – http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
• EFF – http://blacklists.eff.org/
• Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn_more
• Google – https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
• Reddit – http://www.reddit.com/

Website

It didn’t feel like I did very many updates to the website last year but looking over it I added 20 new pages. Last year it was 23 and in 2009 there was 21 so I wasn’t that far off from previous years.

I used to really keep track of how many different people were visiting the website but I have to be honest, this site has a really narrow focus,  namely, people who want to find out what is going on with the McEachern family so I’ve really stopped caring how many people are visiting the site, though I still like looking at some of the other statistics.

The top visited pages specifically for 2011 were

1. Andrew’s birthday party.
2. Trip to Sea World San Antonio.
3. Andrew Baseball
4. Alex’s birthday party
5. Florida Trip

However, these pages were not the most visited pages on the website. The top two were

1. Newfie Jokes – “newfie jokes” also happens to be top search term used to find the site.
2. Statue of Liberty – “statue of liberty” is the 3rd most popular search term that brings people to the site.

One of the reasons these are the two most popular is that I prevent search engines like Google and Yahoo from indexing any pages outside of the blog so random people who find the site will be directed there.

The other stat I like looking at is where people are visiting the site from. Last year people visited from a total of 76 unique counties. The United States and Canada were obviously the two most popular followed by the UK, Brazil (hey Jesse and Otto), Australia, and Germany. The green shaded countries below are where people visited from, the darker the green the greater number of visitors.

There were also visitors from 950+ unique cities and this graphic shows where the top 250 of those cities are located. The larger and darker the circle the more people.

Swimming

I kept up swimming this year and like I’ve been doing since I was a teenager I’ve been keeping track of everything I do in the pool. Over the past five years this year I swam farthest.

I set myself of goal of going 300 miles which was pretty aggressive since in the past five years the most I had gone was around 250. I managed to just squeak over the goal with 305 miles.

September was the longest month and I was just short of 40 miles. I have masters swimming logs from 2006 and since that time I’ve gone 1,260 miles/ 2,027 km, a total of 2,217,448 yards.

On a map that brings me from my door step to about 30 miles short of London, Ontario somewhere on highway 402.

Reading

I made an effort to try and read more books this year. I’m really jealous of Jen who can speed though piles of books while I plod though at a snails pace,heck even Alex is a faster reader then I am.

Despite my slow reading ability I got through 12 books last year. I read the first two books in the Kurt Wallander series by Henning Mankell. These were originally published in the early 90′s but I had never heard of them until I read a review for the latest book in the series that was published last year and they compared it to Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” books. They were similar in that they are by a Swedish author, take place in Sweden, and they are novels about violent crimes. Overall I was very pleased and will probably read more in the series when I have time.

Next up I read two books by Jo Nesbo from the Harry Hole series. These were also part of my Scandinavian author kick though these are set in Oslo Norway and not Sweden. For Christmas I received the latest book in the series so I’ll have that to read this year.

During the summer Alex checked out “The Mortal Engines” by Philip Reeve from the library and it sounded interesting so I decided to read it. It was the first book in the “Mortal Engines Quartet” about a time in the future where the world has been totally devastated after the sixty minute war and technology that we have has been totally been lost. Nations as we know them no longer exist and they have been replaced with the “Tractionist” and “Anti-Tractionist” movements. Traction cities are mounted on huge moveable platforms and the cites move around the continent eating up smaller cities. It all sounds very strange but it was a really good series and according to what I have seen on the internet Peter Jackson will be directing and producing a 3D version of story.

For the new year I already have 5 books on the pile so it looks like I’m set until June.

Movies

We are Netflix subscribers and this year the company took a lot of heat for raising their prices fairly substantially and then in an attempt to try and smooth things over they announced they were going to split the company in two. One for users who get DVD’s by mail and another to serve users streaming content. We have both the one DVD out at a time and the unlimited streaming service. I wasn’t so upset about the price hike, that’s the cost of doing business, but splitting the company in two was going to be a pain since I would have to manage my movie lists in two different places.

After much pressure Netflix scrapped the idea of forming two different companies and kept everything under the Netflix name. This is great because for Christmas we got an internet enabled TV with Netflix and we can stream movies right to television without having to hook it up to a separate system.

Looking back through my DVD history we went through 31 movies, mostly stuff for the kids. I only streamed 16 films to my computer during the year but since we got the new TV with build in Netflix we have already gone through 10 movies.

I would say my favorites for the year would be the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series, the Swedish versions. I thought they stuck very close to the book and the actors did a great job. I have it on my todo list to see the Hollywood version but haven’t yet had the chance to do that.

Andrew just finished up with his soccer season and those pictures are here.

Alex is finishing up with his fall lacrosse and fall soccer.

Enjoy.

Here are the Halloween Pics.

The boys worked hard on their pumpkins as well but unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the finished pumpkins. I’ll see if I can get any tomorrow night.