|||moved|||

Friday,  01/13/12  11:57 PM

Well I'm moved.  And I now have FIOS!  And I like it; it's seriously faster than the DSL I had before.  And after two days of unboxing and messing around and running cables and configuring routers and ... whew, my servers are back up, and the bits you are reading right now came from deep inside a closet of my new house.  Yay. my new blogstation Also yay: the Tivo HD is up and online via FIOS without any problems.  And the AppleTV is up and running too, with HD movies now streaming in realtime.  All good. I shall have more to say "soon" - assuming I ever get back to blogging, that is - please stay tuned...

 

(((((moving)))))

Sunday,  01/08/12  05:24 PM

Hi there!  I'm still in my self-imposed exile from blogging, but I thought I'd poke my head out for a second and say "hi"...  I haven't forgotten you.  My deeply nested yak shaving as I reconfigure my blogging regime continues, and I must tell you many other things have interfered with my recovery.  Not least of which, is: I'm moving!  This is the last post I will ever make from my old house, in which I have lived for ten years.  It's kind of sad, and kind of exciting, and kind of a lot of work. Ah, the life at sea ... actually it's just a little lake.  But I'm looking forward to living on it :) I live in Westlake Village, and there is a Westlake Lake, and it has an island, and as of tomorrow I will be living on it.  Among all the things I'm moving is my 11-year-old-PC-turned-into-a-webserver, on which this blog is hosted.  So there will be a disruption in the force, and if all goes well I'll be back on the air in a day or two.  Stay tuned, I will keep you posted, assuming I make it there :)

 

Happy New Year!

Sunday,  01/01/12  12:12 AM

Happy New Year! Wow, 2012 I'm tempted to say a lot about 2011, but it's late, and I'm ... well ... let's just say I was at a friend's house and we celebrated with a little wine tasting.  So maybe I'll just say best wishes to all of you for an amazing 2012.  We can't change the past, but we can make the future whatever we want it to be.  Choose wisely!

 

Merry Christmas!

Saturday,  12/24/11  04:30 PM

 

extreme yak shaving

Thursday,  10/20/11  12:07 PM

Hey y'all it's been a couple of weeks since I posted about "stuff"; just wanted you to know I am engaged in some extreme yak shaving.  (Also, I had the slight interruption of riding the Furnace Creek 508 :) I've been loving my iPhone for a while, and more recently have begun loving my iPad too.  Although it wasn't immediately apparent why anyone with a smartphone and a laptop would want a tablet, I've slowly begun realizing the tablet form factor makes it nice for "occasional" computing in alternative locations, like my backyard, my bathroom, and ... my bed.  I can read just about anything on the iPad; emails, web pages, RSS feeds, etc., and can compose email, send messages (with IOS 5 and iMessage), and do some light editing.  But I can't blog :( The problem isn't fundamental; it's perfectly possible to blog from an iPad.  But when *I* blog I do it in a certain way, and that way involves tools that are only usable from within Windows: SharpReader to read feeds, Photoshop to edit pictures, and Citydesk to update the blog.  This mechanism dates back eight+ years to when I started blogging, and in the intervening time I've thought about overhauling the whole thing a few times.  Now I'm biting the bullet.  My plan is to do it all from email, so I can blog from anywhere, on any device, at any time.  Of course this requires a bit of work (!) with several nested levels of things to build, and so in the meantime I'm not blogging at all.  Except to report that I am engaged in some Extreme yak shaving.  Please stand by :)

 

no joy in Baker

Saturday,  10/15/11  11:20 AM

Well, I didn't make it.  No shame, but I am disappointed. Sunday night at 9:30, having left Baker and on the road to Kelso, I stopped riding and got in the van.  After having born pain in my feet for two days, it suddenly became unbearable.  I wasn't so much as decision as an acknowledgement; I was again unable to finish the Furnace Creek 508. This picture was taken Saturday midnight in Stovepipe Wells, icing my feet as I had about ten times during the day.  Wondering if I was going to make it. If you're a friend or frequent reader you know, I rode this race in 2009 and made it 300 miles. This year I made it 400 miles. That feels like progress, but in one sense this the race is binary; you either go 508 miles and finish or you don't.  And I didn't finish then and I didn't finish now. The reasons were very different but the high-level result is the same. And yet it doesn't feel the same at all. Here's a profile of the race course; the red lines are the time stations which delimit the race stages, the blue arrow shows how far I made it in 2009, and the green arrow shows how far I made it this year. In 2009 I got off to a flying start and cruised into Death Valley four hours ahead of schedule.  Then the winds started to howl and my head blew up and I just couldn't take it.  After resting for a bit in Furnace Creek I struggled in the dark for a while before abandoning in Badwater.  Almost immediately I wished I'd kept trying, and in the two years since I've promised myself there would be a next time, and when there was I wouldn't stop.  This year I got off to a terrible start, lost my GPS unit and fifteen minutes searching for it three miles into the ride, and had my feet start hurting almost immediately.  By California City I was in serious pain, and switched bikes, pedals, shoes, and everything else to deal with it.  Icing my feet in a cooler seemed to be the only thing that worked, and that only for short periods of time.  I made it Randsburg, iced, made it to Trona, iced, made it through Panamint Valley, iced, and then vowed to summit Townes Pass.  I climbed it - in fine style, if I may say - and then descended down into Death Valley.  Yay; after more ice and a longish rest, onward into day two!  But day two brought more pain, lots more ice, and lots of lost time while icing.  By the time I reached Shoshone I was running out of time and wearing down.  I vowed to reach Baker, and did.  From there I had 10 hours left to ride, with 120 miles and 7,000' of climbing.  Just barely doable.  I took off for Kelso, and suddenly I couldn't do it anymore.  The exhaustion and strain brought down my threshold of pain to the point where I couldn't continue.  Boo. I will make a longer post with many of the great pictures which were taken but I must not end this one without thanking my amazing crew, Mitch Albo, Mark Elliot, and Gene Smith.  I also have to tell you about my new bike which was incredible, and about the van, which worked out perfectly, and so many other things ... please stay tuned!

 

riding the 508

Thursday,  10/06/11  11:02 PM

I'm off!  Tomorrow I head out to Valencia for the start of the Furnace Creek 508, a 508-mile race from Santa Clarita up into and through Death Valley, and thence out into the Mojave Desert before finishing in 29 Palms, climbing 35,000' along the way.  The race starts at 7:00AM Saturday morning, and I will finish sometime Sunday night / Monday morning; the deadline is 7:00AM on Monday.  Here's an overview of the course, please click to enbiggen for more detail: I will have a crew of three in a camper van behind me all the way; you can follow our progress on our Facebook page or via our Twitter feed.  Every competitor has an animal "totem"; mine is Rocky the Flying Squirrel :)  Please stay tuned and wish us luck!

 

Wednesday,  10/05/11  10:13 PM

In the home stretch heading into the 508 this weekend... trying to take it easy, eat, drink, sleep... and blog a little. Still thrown by the news of Steve Jobs passing.  Stay hungry, stay foolish. Neal Stephenson: Innovation Starvation.  "The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable."  An interesting rant by a great thinker. So yesterday Apple announced the iPhone 4S - Tim Cook's first product announcement since taking over as CEO - and I gather it went well.  IOS 5, faster processor, spiffy new camera, and (yay!) dual-band support, now supported by Sprint.  The last is the most important to me; I've loved my iPhone, but I haven't loved Verizon, and I'm *so* ready to switch back to Sprint.  I'm hoping to get out of my two-year contract based on the consistently poor reception I've experienced at my house; fXf!  With all the rumors swirling, it was good to get the concrete announcement, whew. Here's a review of the announcement ... in 90 seconds.  Great job of editing it down :) This looks cool: Researchers transform iPhone into microscope.  And that was the old 5Mp iPhone 4, imagine what could be done with the new 8Mp iPhone 4S?  They've already disrupted low-end cameras, maybe they'll disrupt low-end microscopes too. Science: Women who make more decisions have less sex.  Not sure about the causality here, could it be that women who have less sex [have to] make more decisions? Saw and enjoyed Moneyball.  A great movie made from a great book.  It couldn't have been easy to boil down the entire book into one movie which captured the essence, but that's what they did; similar in fact to what Michael Lewis does when he writes in the first place. New York Magazine: It's good to be Michael Lewis. Tesla Model S prototypes are out and being shown, and apparently there will be a sportier version of the all-electric sedan, too.  Wow I can't wait.  This could be our next car.  We have a 10-year old Jaguar sedan which is mostly used for tooling around town... With the advent of the new Kindles (including the Fire) I've been ruminating on ebooks.  What's interesting is that ebooks are potentially a disruptive technology; could be the "publishers" who are successful in ebooks will be different from those who were in pbooks. That's what is happening with music.  Perhaps there will be a Pandora-like service to find us new books? Wired ran a great flashback article: 10/3/47, Birth of Palomar's 'Giant Eye'.  The 200 inch mirror took 10 years to polish - by hand!  I've visited the observatory and seen the telescope itself, quite amazing, especially when you consider the technology available when it was built. Fran Tarkenton imagines the NFL run like our public schools: "Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster."  Communism never works. Related: The Jobs Agenda.  "I don’t know what Steve Jobs’s politics were, I don’t much care, and in any case they are beside the point. The late Mr. Jobs stood for something considerably better than politics. He stood for the model of the world that works...  Once you figure out why your cell phone gets better and cheaper every year but your public schools get more expensive and less effective, you can apply that model to answer a great many questions about public policy."  Indeed.  Highlight is mine. ZooBorn of the day: a baby Langur.  Apparently they are born bright orange, and turn black within six months.  How excellent.  Interesting to wonder about this adaptation; is this so their parents can easily find them when they're lost? And so tomorrow is the Big Game.  Yeah, you know ... Westlake vs Oaks Christian.  Go Lions!

 

ISS views Earth

Wednesday,  10/05/11  09:05 PM

Check out this photo essay: ISS' breathtaking views of Earth.  Here's one of the ISS itself: Looks like something from a science fiction movie, huh?  I think my favorite shot was this one, of Hurricane Earl: Anyway click through and check 'em out; pretty awesome!

 

Steve Jobs 1955-2011

Wednesday,  10/05/11  05:09 PM

Wow I am so saddened, truly, this is the passing of a hero he has left behind an immense legacy not least of which is teaching us to Think Different He will be missed

 

EOQ!	Friday,  09/30/11  10:29 PM

Wow, end of September, end of Q3, end of ... summer.  And now onward into fall and the holidays and so on, all the stuff that happens in Q4.  Next weekend I have the Furnace Creek 508, which I've been thinking about all summer, and so that feels like the real end of Q3, but here we are.  Today was quite a day; started out driving down to Vista for a planning meeting, then drove up to the Valley for another meeting (and yes, it rained, and yes, I had mega traffic), and finally made it home in time for a nice dinner :)  Yay.  Meanwhile, it's all happening... Don Draper pitches the Facebook Timeline.  This is great, but I'm not a big fan of the timeline.  Actually I don't mind the timeline, I mind that my News Feed isn't in chronological order anymore.  Anyway. John Gruber's take on Amazon's New Kindles is much the same as mine.  "It’s all about the content, though. That’s the difference that other tablet makers missed. Motorola, Samsung, RIM - they seem to be chasing the iPad on specs, building the best tablet they can manage at the same starting price of around $500. But they have no clear message telling people what you can do with them." Apparently Amazon are considering bringing Silk to Windows, Mac, and Android.  Not surprising. Meanwhile: Finally, the tablet to make HP and RIM feel better.  "On NBC's 'The Office,' the fictional Dunder Mifflin team was forced to sell a triangle-shaped tablet, dubbed the Pyramid."  Hey you never know, with the right content... This is just fantastic: Life of George melds Lego bricks with IOS for 'digital-to-physical' gameplay.  Apparently you build stuff with the Legos, then take a picture to get credit inside the iPhone App.  A whole new category. Mike Arrington takes a look back one year to AOL's acquisition of TechCrunch, which blew up spectacularly in recent weeks, leading to Mike's departure.  Too bad because there has been so much interesting tech news of late, and news about news isn't so interesting. Check this out: $40M Solar Sailboat for Eco-Conscious Yachtsman.  Does it actually sail?  Well yeah, apparently.  And it's so pretty! I can *so* relate to this:  My non-linear work stream.  "In the era before Blackberrys, iPhones, instant messaging, social networks, and blogs, I had a predictable day."  Eliminating all the interrupts and focusing is hard. I'm gonna wrap with a couple of most excellent pictures, first, here we have one from a surf-city surf dog competition held in Huntington Beach: And here's my picture of the day quarter, a bunch of Giant Panda cubs, all taking a nap:

 

Thursday,  09/29/11  09:54 PM

Whew, what a long eventful week, and it isn't over yet; heading back down to Vista tomorrow for a meeting there, and have a meeting back in the Valley in the afternoon.  But I also have a backlog of things to blog about... Oh, and I have a most happy daughter; Meg is taking a video editing class, and we got her a new video camera.  (Yay, that such classes exist!)  Actually we got her a new camera, period; a Canon T3, which is an awesome 35mm digital camera and a cool video camera, all in one.  (Yay, that such devices exist!) Have you ever wondered at your brain's ability to remember music?  It is truly incredible how many songs you know, how many songs you can recognize within just a few notes, and how much of the song you can remember.  Just today I was driving listening to Classic Rewind on XM and the Moody Blues' Music to the Story in Your Eyes came on.  I haven't heard that song for 100 years but I recognized it instantly, and was able sing along without any problem.  (Well, I can't sing, but I can try :)  Amazing. Who would have thought?  Record-low SAT scores a wake up call.  "SAT reading scores for the high school class of 2011 were the lowest on record, and combined reading and math scores fell to their lowest point since 1995."  While everyone struggles to rationalize these data points, we should accept them for what they are; evidence of Unnatural Selection. Interesting: Do users change their settings?  No.  The power of defaults is strong and must be respected. A fascinating article in the New Yorker: Laboratory Conditions, in which architects re-imagine the science laboratory environment.  It turns out extraordinary work environments can yield extraordinary results. This is way cool: Augmented Reality's Disruptive Potential.  "One of the most interesting apps that someone produced was a virtual tee-shirt shop. It was placed in the 20 most expensive shopping streets in the world, selling tee-shirts. Stop and think about that for a minute. He built a virtual shop where a real one already existed."  Excellent! In thinking about Ray Kurzweil's talk about how things develop exponentially when you expect them to develop linearly, augmented reality is a good candidate for a technology which is set to explode. Another candidate: Rapid Ramp in full-genome sequencing: 30,000 in 2011.  Ray actually mentioned this one; the day is nearly at hand when everyone's DNA will be sequenced. This is excellent: Wooden desk hides a pipe organ and fluidic computer.  Don't you just love non-electric mechanical devices?  Me, too.  I don't know why, but this is ever so much cooler than a desk which accomplishes the same things with electronics. Duplicating blogger Jason Kottke with software: Robottke.  You can imagine that while it isn't quite as good now, it could get better, and eventually maybe even better than Kottke himself.  This is sort of a weird Turing Test, huh? I'm not buying this: Neutrinos clocked faster than light.  Anything faster than light would violate causality, and that is logically impossible.  The interpretation of the experimental results must be wrong. Tap tap, crash: "'We don't allow faster than light neutrinos in here' said the bartender.  A neutrino walks into a bar."  :) Man, I shouldn't have done this but I did; I ignored the world cycling championships!  Congratulations to Tony Martin for upsetting Fabian Cancellara and winning the world time trial championship, and congratulations to Mark Cavendish for outsprinting the field and winning the world road racing championship.  (I must say, I think the organizers of the worlds should always have a course which breaks up the field and doesn't result in a field sprint, but what do I know...) Dirk Schmidt: Visualizing the Steve Jobs era.  "From a value creation point of view, it’s hard to think of a better performance from anyone, ever."  And related, hard to think of anyone who will have left a bigger impact on the world of technology and business. This is pretty amazing: Volkswagon's New Beetle page, "just scroll".  HTML5 gone amuck!  Definitely not your father's web page, celebrating a car which is not your father's beetle.  BTW works in IE 9 (yay), but not under IOS (boo). Stuck for a Halloween costume?  You could always be an Angry Bird.  I love it :) Finally, celebrating Rosh Hashana, Google brings the Dead Sea Scrolls online.  L'Shana Tova!

Posts in the last four months:

01/13/12 11:57 PM -	|||moved|||
01/08/12 05:24 PM -	(((((moving)))))
01/01/12 12:12 AM -	Happy New Year!
12/24/11 04:30 PM -	Merry Christmas!
10/20/11 12:07 PM -	extreme yak shaving
10/15/11 11:20 AM -	no joy in Baker
10/06/11 11:02 PM -	riding the 508
10/05/11 10:13 PM -	Wednesday,  10/05/11  10:13 PM
10/05/11 09:05 PM -	ISS views Earth
10/05/11 05:09 PM -	Steve Jobs 1955-2011
09/30/11 10:29 PM -	EOQ!
09/29/11 09:54 PM -	Thursday,  09/29/11  09:54 PM
09/28/11 11:08 PM -	on Fire
09/27/11 06:57 PM -	the Earth in 60 seconds
09/26/11 09:54 PM -	seeing Ray Kurzweil
09/26/11 08:59 PM -	vs fifteen years ago
09/25/11 09:34 PM -	Knoxville Double
09/23/11 10:02 PM -	cyclistes 1947
09/23/11 10:29 AM -	from Vacaville
09/18/11 11:23 PM -	Blue Gavel
09/17/11 07:33 PM -	Reginald is not amused
09/17/11 07:24 PM -	what's inside red wine
09/17/11 06:42 PM -	back to work

For older posts please visit the archive.