The good news is, there is hope! I have taken the time to compile a few good (entertaining) resources for your Valentine’s Day benefit. From witty tech-themed cards to the quantification of love, these are sure to brighten your day. Please share in the comments below if you come across any others!

• Witty Valentine’s Day cards for the Technology Geek. While it may be too late to order them, who says you can’t get a good laugh or be inspired to create your own card. “♥” can go a long way.
• Poem Generators. When the wonders of today’s technology can create such beautiful poems as the one below, why would you ever need to invest in another card?

  Internet, you mean so much to me,
  With you I really feel free,
  You are my sweetheart day by day,
  I hope you will never go away.

• Proof That We are Soulmates. This perfectly nerdy infographic quantifies just how hard it is to find “the one” and how lucky you are if you do.
• The Google Doodle. Keeping in tradition, today’s doodle features a universal love story that will warm the heart.

In fact, the most popular searches on Google during the game were (in order of popularity):

• Madonna
• Halftime show
• Patriots
• Tom Brady

In addition, Super Bowl marketers did fairly well–integrating ads with online landing pages and posting full ads or teaser ads days in advance of the big game. In fact, according to YouTube, super bowl ads or ad teasers were watched 30 million times before the big weekend.

For a complete recap and the full version of all the Super Bowl ads, check out the post from AdAge.

I think Facebook or Google could quite easily take over the world. With content being king, and the billions of dollars thrown into the marketing furnace every year, nobody could stop them from selling their own cloud computing product on a massive global scale, and they would be able to market it for free. I know Google’s internal corporate model is “Don’t be evil”, I just hope they stick to what they believe in. I know I personally have a few gigs of email they could rummage through if they wanted to learn more about old BLT.

As the graphic below demonstrates, domain registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs) grew by 8.9% since Q3 2010. The .com and .net domains saw a 8.2% increase from Q3 2010 to Q3 2011. With the introduction of the new .brand generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs) in the near future, we are left to wonder how this will effect the dynamic of the domain registration industry.

To read the full report, check out Verisign’s page.

Congressman Connolly,

I am writing you with regard to the recent proposed SOPA and PIPA bills that are intended to stop online piracy and protect IP.

I am the President at a company called InfoRelay Online Systems, Inc. that provides high-bandwidth Internet hosting solutions, including server colocation, bandwidth, Cloud services, and managed IT support services in multiple markets nationally.  We recently relocated about 18 employees to our new office and data center in Fairfax County (Herndon), and we are in the process of hiring multiple additional staff members.  In addition to our major local presence, we also have locations on the West Coast, and we employ staff in other markets nationally as well.

While the goals of SOPA and PIPA are admirable, and are something that we as a company support, the proposed methodology for achieving the intended goals leaves a lot to be desired.

Many of our clients are small businesses.  We have seen one-man companies blossom into 10 and 20 person teams.  They have begun by hosting one or more servers on our network, and through innovation and hard work they have been successful.  They have fed the local economy.  They have created jobs.  We have succeeded based upon their success.  We have in turn created more jobs.

SOPA and PIPA will make it more difficult for many of our clients to operate their businesses.  The cost of defending themselves legally in the event of an issue will be enough to put many of them out of business.

As someone who has been in this business for a while, I can tell you that the majority of US-based Internet and hosting providers already act in good faith to remove any illegal content.  We receive pressure from law enforcement and our upstream providers to make the right decisions.  And we do make the right decisions; not only based upon this pressure, or what the law says to do, but also based upon what we feel is right.  We comply with all DMCA takedown requests.  We have worked with, and continue to work with multiple law enforcement agencies to investigate and identify individuals that are using our services (or the Internet in general) for illegal purposes.

I urge you to consider the potential impact of these bills, which I believe will be very grave.  Fairfax County and Northern Virginia’s economy are heavily fed by IT companies.  This bill will place unnecessary barriers in the way of doing business, and in practice, I believe it will do very little good in terms of accomplishing its intended goal.

As someone who understands the technical infrastructure of the Internet and what is possible, it is likely that those wishing to pirate software will remain successful in doing so; even within the US.  There are relatively easy ways to proxy data through other networks, and encrypt this data, making it difficult or nearly impossible for US networks to police this traffic or prevent this from happening.

Because it would likely be difficult if not impossible to enforce SOPA and PIPA in foreign nations; especially those that are not cooperative with the US, it is likely that this bill will feed the economies of these nations; they will effectively become “safe havens” for hosting data that may be considered “too risky” for US corporations to host.

There are many, many other arguments to be made against SOPA/PIPA, including the fact that they will serve to limit our free speech.  Social Networking sites, if they are able to remain in business, would have to police all content that is posted, as the legal consequences of having certain data posted could be extreme.  It is likely that they would place automated filters on the content that could be posted.  We would have a diverse array of corporations “policing” the Internet; using their own judgment as to what is appropriate and what is not appropriate, with the excuse that they are doing so in order to protect themselves legally.  While I have always been a fan of empowering small businesses, businesses have no place in law enforcement.

When considering all of the facts, SOPA and PIPA are likely to hurt the Internet and the US economy more than they will help.  I urge you to vote against SOPA and PIPA.

Robert Zemeckis may not have been far off in his predictions in Back to the Future Part II, set in 2015. Nike has already come up with the Air Mag shoe, though they have yet to be self-lacing (I have faith in the Nike engineers, there’s still time!).

As 2011 draws to a close, companies are finding time to reflect on the past year and plan for what’s to come. Here are my top four selections for the most interesting technological predictions:

4. Top 10 Predictions for 2012 by PC Magazine

22 years and running, Tim Bajarin’s annual predictions appear to be spot-on. More corporate-focused than other lists, this list features predictions like Apple TV ushering the era of Demand TV and the emergence of vertical social networks to replace all-encompassing Facebook community.

3. Integrate Everything: Top 10 Predictions for 2012 by Forbes

Written by Mark Anderson, editor of The Strategic News Service, Forbes’ predictions seem to be spot on with other lists. Notable forecasts include the growth of TV in the tech universe as other devices find their niches, continued infatuation with Siri and voice

recognition technology, as well as the growth of the cloud in the consumer landscape.

2. Top 10 Tech Trends in 2012 by Mashable founder, Pete Cashmore

This eye-catching list written for CNN features some of Pete Cashmore’s predictions for 2012. Based on current trends that shaped the latter half of this year, his predictions feature ideas such as the evolution of social gestures, or “frictionless sharing” on social media, and the growth of mobile payment.

I personally can’t wait for #9 on the list: the use of flexible screens. Both Nokia and Samsung have hinted they may release phones with bendable displays in 2012. Say goodbye to screen cracks!

1. IBM’s 5 in 5

Every year, IBM puts out a “5 in 5” prediction of five innovations that will alter the tech landscape within five years. The most notable prediction on this year’s list is the idea that mind reading will no longer be science fiction. According to IBM, their developers are working on technologies that will be able to link your brain to your devices such that you will simply have to think about doing something and your devices will respond. A primitive version of this technology is already being used to help people with disabilities.

Other predictions include using the kinetic energy created by people (such as moving around your house) to power electronic devices, and the use of biometrics to replace passwords.

Sales on Monday hit $1.25 billion—a 22 percent increase from last year. That’s not to discount Black Friday, which saw a 26 percent jump in online spending over last year.

Early results from Akamai showed a surge of online traffic at midnight on Black Friday, hinting at the abundance of mobile deal-seekers and “couch commerce” shoppers out for a virtual door-buster deal. Here is a great article covering the early effects of the shopping holidays on Internet traffic by Data Center Knowledge.

A significant portion of the shopping was done Monday while at work, much to the chagrin of many bosses. This has sparked a bit of a debate, leaving some of us wondering if such behavior is appropriate for the workplace.

Were you brave enough to face the brick-and-mortar midnight openings many of the major retailers decided to thrust upon us on Black Friday? In my family, it’s a tradition to go Black Friday shopping, but this was the first time I decided to bundle up and stand in the long lines at 10pm, waiting for a chance to grab the last 42” LCD TV at Best Buy for $200.

Long story short, they only had 16 of the TVs in stock, and being number 413 in line (I was in the front half of the line, believe that!), I had no chance. Props to Best Buy for their sneaky marketing tricks.

Best Buy: +1, me: 0.

Probably should have gone to Walmart and grabbed me one of those $2 waffle makers.

I will leave you with a closing video of a woman almost crushed to death by Walmart shoppers on Black Friday:

I have worked at InfoRelay for a couple of years now, and am grateful for every second of it. I have co-workers that I have formed lasting friendships with, a good company to work for that always strives to improve upon yesterday’s work, and most of all, great clients that I have formed a friendship with over the years at InfoRelay.

The information technology industry has come a long way as well, and blessed us with copious amounts of nerdy gifts that most can appreciate. If you are reading this, you can be thankful for having Internet access, whereas only 1 in 10 persons in Africa have the ability to read this post (source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). I also know more than a few people that can state their thanks for the evolution of cloud computing. Such an incredible technology has and will change business as we know it.

The IT industry is a beast in itself—ever changing and shifting with the advancement of technology and its implications in our daily lives. For all the things I am thankful for in regards to IT, there will be many more as the years progress that I can’t wait to discover.

To everyone that I work with, clients and co-workers, and on behalf of the entire InfoRelay team, we are wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a prosperous new year!

Speed test websites are one very common way to test your speed. The common speed test websites are great when you want to check a residential broadband connection’s speed rating. They are also useful in the data center environment to check to make sure that there are no errors on a link after running a new cable because the generate a lot of data consistently. There are a few drawbacks to this, however.

First of all, you are relying on the network between you and the remote site. Between your installation and that network, there could be a slow link, a congested link or a high latency link. Any of these factors could cause results to be slower than actual performance. In addition, most speed test services are running servers on 100 Mbps ports which means you cannot see any speed above this. In addition, these are shared resources so if more than one test is going on at a time, the server’s maximum value will be lower than what you could possibly get.

Your network provider can only control and guarantee speeds within its own network. Once it leaves their network to the rest of the Internet, any number of factors could influence speeds. For example, if a user in London contacts a server in Los Angeles, the packets must travel around 8,000 miles. For most types of Internet traffic, your server will think this means that the link is congested and will prevent data from being transferred quickly.

So what is the best way to test your connection speed? The answer is to make your traffic like real Internet traffic. You should be able to test your connection by sending and receiving the traffic to and from multiple locations. This is very easy for download speed—you can start multiple downloads from multiple locations at the same time and add the values together. For example, you can use mirrors of a particular ISO to perform multiple downloads.

Testing upload speed is a bit more complicated but it works much the same way. You can have multiple users from multiple networks try to download a file that you are offering at the same time. You can watch your outbound bandwidth to determine the actual throughput. Another option is to use a UDP-based protocol to send data to a few remote locations. This will let you see the peak performance with fewer servers.

Below are some links I found useful that may help you in your quest for improved speed.

• http://www.speedguide.net/articles/the-tcp-window-latency-and-the-bandwidth-delay-2678 A technical discussion of latency’s effect of speeds and how to tune your TCP in your OS to get better performance.
• http://www.babinszki.com/Networking/Max-Ethernet-and-TCP-Throughput.html Contains a table of maximum transfer speeds with a 64kB receive window. Highlighted in blue is the range one generally sees when doing coast-to-coast transfers.
• Another paper that helps calculate maximum throughput.
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAN_optimization An article on devices/techniques to help improve the maximum throughput on a high-latency link.

As you can see, speed testing is a common need with some difficulties that need to be considered. With a little time and planning, you can do the right kind of speed test for your needs.