Archive: April 16, 2011

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(w)here am I?

Saturday,  04/16/11  01:12 PM

Hi y'all sorry for the interruption in service; Kansas City, Westlake, Edmonton, Vancouver, Vista, Chicago, (w)here am I?  Will try to get caught up but have more travel ahead.  Sigh.  Having fun but it is better when you can actually unpack :)

Are you sitting down?  Holding any sharp objects?  I've discovered I *like* using my iPhone.  While in Canada my Sprint Palm wasn't able to roam freely, so I started using my Verizon iPhone.  I still don't like not having a physical keyboard but with daily use found the virtual keyboard was okay; you have to develop a friendly relationship with auto-correct and then things go better :)  I love the iPhone's camera!  Wow.  With the iPhone I do NOT have to carry a separate camera, it's that good, and it's connected so you can email / text / Facebook pictures in realtime.  Love that.  I also like the iPhone's screen (wow) and the speed (wow wow) clearly better than the Palm.  Still webOS is nicer; prefer its search its contact integration and having multiple things running at once.

I want to leave you with some samples from the awesome modern art collection here at the Hotel Intercontinental:

Inclined

Connections

Floatation

Oh, PS, Atlas Shrugged is out!  The critics hate it and the people who've seen it love it.  Can't wait to see it myself, please stay tuned.

PSS have been wearing my Reardon Metal bracelet, it is a *sure* conversation starter.  So many people have heard of Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, but fewer know what the fuss is all about, and fewer still have read the book, or at least, have read it since college :)

 

views from Chicago

Saturday,  04/16/11  11:16 PM

I am in Chicago today*, after day one of the CAP Futurescape conference, and I am blogging...

Are you having trouble naming your unborn baby?  Why not let the baby itself decide?  There's an app for that :)  

Augmented reality comes closer to reality.  As searching with pictures improves... will make searching with text seem quaint within five years. 

Stunning augmented reality stargazing arrives on the iPad 2.  And so it continues... 

Are you a short sleeper?  "'Short sleepers'...typically turn in well after midnight, then get up just a few hours later and barrel through the day without needing to take naps or load up on caffeine."  I keep wondering if I am, or if I'm just kidding myself. 

Climbing Hyperion, the world's tallest tree.  Awesome.  The tree is so tall and the surrounding trees are so dense, you really can't even get a sense of how tall it is, just that the climber is working his way up and up and up.  What amazes me more than anything about trees is that they can live, I mean, how does water get from under the ground to 380' above the ground? 

Ohad Samet thinks PayPal is about to get a bruising from Facebook and Square.  Nope, don't think so.  Payments is hard, and PayPal's network effect combined with their fraud sophistication make them hard to compete against.  Stay tuned, we'll watch this play out together. 

PS remember when Google launched Google Checkout?  Lots of people thought that would be a threat to PayPal, but it hasn't even made a dent.

Here we have the Wave Disk Engine.  Cool.  I love that people come up with this stuff, but they never seem to work as well as the inventors say :) 

John Newman quotes Mark Andreessen: "First and foremost, a start-up puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced... The level of stress that you're under generally will magnify things to incredible highs and unbelievable lows at whiplash speed and huge magnitude. Sound like fun?"  Yes! 

Awesome, congratulations!  Johan van Summeran wins Paris-Roubaix.  And Fabian Cancellara made a brave charge after him to finish second.  I love it when a journeyman like van Summeran has a "white swan" day and kills the field.  Fabian will have [many] other days but maybe this was Johan's only one, and he made the most of it.  And then he proposed to his longtime girlfriendYes! 

The scary reality of a real-life Barbie doll.  I agree with Ann Althouse: "The reason the Barbie doll has to have such a small waist relative to the size of the breasts is that Barbie is designed to look good in doll clothes, and when you make doll clothes, you have to use normal fabrics, and you have to make seams and double the fabric over in a way that gets very bulky, especially around the waist. The doll's unreal proportions become much more real if you put the clothes on."  I've always liked Barbie :) 

Philip Greenspun with some interesting perspective on the federal budget deficit: "We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

Next up from Pixar: Cars 2.  Start your engines! 

Awww....  babies of the day, little hummingbirds in their nest.  Yeah they're cute but then notice the housefly in the foreground, and they get cuter... 

*actually I'm in Rosemont, about 35 miles from Chicago.  Onward!

 

 
 

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