DreamHost downtime delivers digital dexterity

When I was a kid we played conkers, at least during the part of the year they were available. We also played marbles, various card games, collected Star Wars (Episode IV of course) bubble gum cards and any number of other weird things. In my early teens the Rubik Cube showed up and my brother bought a book on solving it, and taught me one of the simpler methods - I think my best time was about three minutes. Sometimes my hands would fly so fast the cube would fall apart mid move and all would be lost. Not many other kids had mastered the cube at my school and you couldn't just get on the Internet to learn the moves back then (yes the Internet did exist when I was a kid!). So for a brief while I enjoyed a bit of notoriety, but being the resident brainbox at my school (in America I would probably have been labeled a nerd or geek) that was deemed perfectly normal - all I really did was just read a book and learn the moves.

Later on in my early twenties I got slightly hooked on juggling having been taught the three ball cascade by an old school friend. Three balls lead to four which lead to five, the peak of most amateur juggler's achievement. I can assure you five balls is hard but given a couple of weeks of practice most people could nail it. The juggling community is rather oddball (pun intended) and overlaps with all kinds of fringe activities. I also ended up riding a unicycle, doing fire juggling, pair club juggling, ball spinning and attended a vaudeville convention. Overall juggling and unicycling was good fun, worked wonders for my hand-eye coordination, balance and was quite pivotal in getting me, a shy nerdy kid, out of my shell.

However, none of the aforementioned youthfull activities prepared me for my discovery today of something called "cup stacking", also known as "speed stacking" or "sport stacking". It involves stacking cups about the size of a pint glass in pyramids against the clock and is now apparently all the rage among kids across the USA and Europe. Although cup stacking has been around for twenty years one person Bob Fox has been promoting it in schools across the country and selling the specially modified cups and timing equipment from his web site Speed Stacks, presumably cleaning up a large stack of cash in the process. It should also come as no surprise that his two kids are also world champion cup stackers. Fox claims that stacking promotes hand eye coordination, improves left and right coordination and is good for the athletically challenged because its not physically demanding. He promotes it for teaching in gym classes to give the non-jocks something to excell at.

Although it was amazing to watch cup stacking the first time - see Emily Fox's recent world record on video - it does seem like a very limited and non-creative activity. There really aren't too many variations and it looks like a case of RSI just waiting to happen. As one TV presenter quipped to a young cup stacker, "So you do this to train for a career at McDonalds?". If nothing else I expect it may introduce kids to other non-physical activities like juggling which at least has some variety and opportunities for teamwork and self expression far beyond that of sport stacking.

The story of how I found out about sport stacking was a great example of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. As this blog entry title suggests it all started with downtime of my new hosting provider DreamHost who was off line yesterday, taking this blog's website with it. It turns out DreamHost was caught up in yesterday's Los Angeles blackout and although their building backup generators fired up just fine, someone belonging to the building management meddled with the power systems locally causing the generators to fail. This was quickly followed by failure of all their UPS systems, ultimately blacking out hundreds of servers and thousands of hosted websites - this one included.

Anyway, while looking at the DreamHost website and reading customer complaints today I found a lot of people mentioning a hosted website called Rocketboom which apparently had not come back to life earlier in the day. I checked out Rocketboom and it turns out to be a daily video blog. Watching today's entry at Rocketboom I noticed a segment on Chris Hardwick solving a Rubik's cube one handed in under 30 seconds, now that's what I call nerdy and of course it took me right back to my own Rubik cube obsession decades ago.

So while looking at Chris' page I spotted a link to "speed stacking" which I had never heard of and, well the rest is history. Then I came across the Superhandz website that has stuff on all kinds of weird hand activities (no, not what you're thinking!). Check out their video page for stuff on pen spinning, coin flipping, card manipulation, card juggling, "extreme digits" and yes folks, the elusive Cobra cut.