A Different Kind of Pigeon Race

I'm a UNIX systems administrator - a computer geek. I also raise and race pigeons. So, this article really grabbed my attention! It was an article about racing pigeons on one of my tech/geek blogs: SlashDot. Evidently, someone wrote an RFC (technical documentation) for the Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers. That is, sending data using racing pigeons! Of course, this has been done (for a couple millennium) but they are now applying the standards of TCP/IP (the Internet Protocol) to the data. That is, how do you handle packet loss? (Such as interception by Prairie Falcon). Although, it was meant as a joke, they were able to use it. In one example they sent a 4GB SD card by pigeon in 48 minutes.

So now, a company in New Zealand is sponsoring a race between ADSL and Winston the Pigeon. The link details the race and you can win Samsung Netbook NC10 (with built-in 3g networking). Pretty wild!