Well I really am back - spent the day catching up, on email, on RSS feeds, on status reports, on pretty much everything. And I'm not caught up entirely yet. My life takes a lot of work just keeping up with all the inputs :)
One thing, I happened upon my BOO! post of 10/31, in which I summarized a wild and unpredictable October. I cannot believe that was only two weeks ago! I guess it was the week in Brazil because even the week before that seems like months ago. Weird how time passes so slowly when you're in the moment, and so fast in retrospect.
The fires around here are terrible: Los Angeles ringed by wildfires. The scenes of homes burning just tear at your heart, don't they? Thinking about all that is being lost... just horrible.
An old post from John Robb that bears rereading: Very interesting times. "Ben Bernake: 'We have lost control. We cannot stabilize the dollar. We cannot control commodity prices.'" This was posted on 9/18, just before I became aware that something was happening, but quite a bit before the magnitude was apparent. Huh.
Michael Yon, from Baghdad: "The war is over and we won". Great news, although a bit, er, under-reported.
Drudge reports Senate will take up $25B auto bill Monday. Boy, I sure hope they don't do it, the automakers are in trouble because they don't make cars people want, the unions are out of control, and their retirement plans are draining all the cash out of them. It has nothing to do with this economy. If they go bankrupt, so be it; that's how the market is supposed to work. Bailing them out would be wrong.
Can this be right? Obama considering Hillary for Secretary of State. No way. Right?
Well, well... Obama meets with Hillary. Maybe they were just catching up on old times. Yeah, right.
I love this [Photoshopped] picture from Sailing Anarchy: The Uninvited. Referring of course to the meeting of America's Cup challengers held in Geneva, which did not include BMW Oracle, the renegades of the group who have created the Trizilla trimaran and are threatening to race it in the next contest, alleging that "anything goes" in the boats' design.
And speaking of which, here's a great shot of Trizilla sailing in San Diego, flying along in just 12 knots. Wow is that thing powerful.
CNet reports T. Boone Pickens may stall wind farm plans. If they aren't economically feasible because of a down economy, then they aren't worth doing in any economy. Wind power is like solar power, it can only be deployed with government subsidies, because it is fundamentally more expensive than other sources of electricity.
American airlines are experimenting with 2D barcodes on cellphones as boarding passes. How cool is that?
I guess this was predictable: Engineering suddenly sexy for college grads. As opposed to, say, financial services?
Here we have failing hard drive sounds. [ via Daring Fireball, who comments "some of the most terrifying noises known to man" ] More proof, if any were needed, that you can find anything at all on the Internet. Anything.
I'm back! |
|
Hi y'all... well, I'm back. Whew. Back from a whirlwind trip to Brazil, culminating in a wonderful incredible party last night celebrating our 50th birthdays!
So here's what's going to happen, you get a peek behind the curtain. When I blog, I use a WYSIWYG tool called Citydesk. I create pages, and then sync them to my server. When you access pages, there is a little additional logic that happens dynamically on the server which adds all the trim - the header up at the top, the navigation bar at the right, etc. Sometimes when I'm traveling I create pages but can't sync them right away, so stuff appears kind of out of order. And so it will be now, because I have a weeks' worth of stuff queued up! Posts about the world, which didn't hit pause just because I was out, and posts about the blogosphere, which never stops, and posts about my experiences in Brazil.
So.
Please stay tuned, and watch this space for updates :)
- Monday 11/10/08
-
- Tuesday 11/11/08
-
- Wednesday 11/12/08
-
- Thursday 11/13/08
And so now we're up to date, whew, no more queued posts.
Friday was spent in Salvador, and that night I flew back, arriving yesterday morning (five hours to São Paulo, ten to Dallas, and three back to L.A.); fortunately I managed to sleep (!), and in between I picked up email, read blog posts, and delighted in my Kindle. Upon arriving I managed to squeeze in a little ride - my first in a week! - and then it was on to preparing for the great 50th birthday party, as we celebrated our "Midway point" with approximately 50 of our best friends.
We now resume our regularly scheduled blogging...
And so the Ole filter makes its daily pass, from Salvador, and this time well rested...
Brad Feld has a few requests for President-elect Obama:
- Appoint Some High Profile Republicans to Your Cabinet.
- Veto The First Pork Laden Bill.
- Continue Being Confident But Not Certain.
It's a good list, I agree with all of them. It will be interesting to see who he does appoint to his cabinet, that will determine much else that happens...
John McWhorter: What Obama means for black America. "The issue is not only the emergence of the new but the eclipse of the old." This is all good, really good.
- "The studious black teen will no longer be tarred as 'thinking he's white.'" Yeah, who's cooler, Barack Obama or Fifty Cent?
- "The illusion that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are black America's leaders is now officially dispelled." I never thought they were, now they don't, either.
- "The idea that for black people, underdoggism is higher awareness is obsolete." Excellent, the culture of victimology totally bothered me.
Maybe I'm going to end up glad Obama won, even though I was afraid he would. (In the end I suspect his effect on the economy will determine how I feel, not his effect on "black America". Still.)
Powerline on the bailout situation: More to come. "Given the latest announcement by Secretary Paulson that none of the $700 billion appropriated by Congress will be used for the originally-stated purpose of purchasing distressed financial assets, it seems clear that neither the administration nor those in Congress who voted for the bailout had any idea what they were about." Ugh.
TechCrunch notes a scary line has been crossed for VCs... "money going into VC funds is now more than the money coming out of VC funds. That line was crossed last June and there is no going back anytime soon. The big institutional investors who tend to put the most money into venture funds as limited partners are hurting right now. They’re other investments have gone south, they are over-leveraged, and there is buzz that some are pulling back from their commitments to venture funds." And that is why there's a credit crunch for funding startups.
A cool new Dutch coin. Really cool.
Ted Dziuba reports Valleywag dies, takes Internet celebrity with it. "Now, Valleywag is going to be relegated to a column on Gawker.com, where it's going to be abundantly obvious that nobody cares about a group of well-to-do twenty-somethings going on vacation to Cyprus. This is actually Web 2.0 coming full circle. In the beginning, nobody cared who you were, and in the end, nobody cares who you are." The crocodile tears are flowing :)
The Sea Orchestra, an animated United Airlines commercial. Beautiful! I watched it several times running, to take it all in...
Tim Bray on discipline and his 2 1/2 year old daughter. I love it.
from Salvador |
This is coming to you from Salvador, and I must tell you I finally got a good night's sleep! Yay. Today began in Rio, and I had half a day to be a tourist before flying on to Salvador and took full advantage; I visited the famous Jesus the Redeemer statue which overlooks the city.
Jesus the Redeemer; sandstone 120ft tall, 635 tons, erected in 1931. Wow.
The statue itself is amazing, but even cooler is the view of the city you get standing up on Mount Corcovado, where the statue is located.
Panorama of Rio from Mount Corcovado; click for larger version
(my hotel was just about the fingertip :)
Off I went to Salvador, a city of 3.5M people (larger than Chicago!) located almost due North of Rio on a peninsula that encloses the Bahia de Todos Santos. Here's a map; small children are born knowing all this, but then, those are Brazilian children; you and I need Google.
Brazil - map showing São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador
Once in Salvador we checked into our hotel and explored the seafront a bit; we walked to the Forte de Santo Antonio da Barra, which encloses a lighthouse at the Southern-most tip of the city.
the Forte de Santo Antonio da Barra silhouettes the sun
Then it was back to the hotel for a beautiful Brazilian sunset - enjoyed from the pool deck, of course, and finally on to an excellent African-inspired seafood dinner.
Salvadorian sunset, as seen from the pool deck
I can recommend the shrimp with the pepper sauce, although you’ll need to have a fire extinguisher handy, or at least a Caipirinha. Yes, more cycling to do…
Elise Aparecido, Leila Vecchio, James Wells, Sandra Martins-Boyte, Ole Eichhorn, Flavio Santos
And so ends day four! Tomorrow, another presentation / demo, and then tomorrow night I fly home!
Today's filter pass on the blogosphere, again from Rio, and still without enough sleep...
Dave Winer wonders Is Obama truly world-wide? As someone presently in Brazil, the fifth largest country, I can unequivocally answer Yes. It is amazing to see how many Brazilians followed the U.S. elections, and how glad they are that Obama won. And how much they expect from him and the U.S. as a result.
Ronald Bailey argues No New Energy Czar (we've been down this policy dead-end before). [ via Glenn Reynolds, who asks "have we ever solved a problem by appointing a 'czar'?" No. ]
Inhabitat: Californians vote yes on 800 miles of high speed rail. Yes we did. "According to the High Speed Rail Authority, California is the 12th largest source of greenhouse gas emission on earth, 41% of which come from transportation. Traveling at 220 miles per hour, the trains will reduce greenhouse gases by up to 12.7 billion pounds annually, the equivalent of removing 1 million cars from the road each year." So that's all very exciting, and I would ordinarily be very excited, but in these times we have to ask, can we pay for it?
Sprint's Now dashboard... OMG how cool. Really you must click through and see this for yourself... [ via Daring Fireball ]
Tim Oren has some questions for Jerry Yang's successor at Yahoo. "If the Yahoo board is evenly vaguely doing their job on behalf of shareholders, they are searching for a successor. So here's a gratis list of questions they ought to asking a CEO candidate, who should either have defensible answers walking in, or develop them as part of his or her diligence process, before agreeing to take the hot seat." They're good questions...
Photos of unexpected buildings - which don't actually exist. But they should... Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin makes images of unexpected buildings; he "combines photographs of parts of buildings into new, fictional, architectonic structures." I love it.
Eric Raymond has more on 'moogly', his Google G1 phone. "My more considered verdict is this: HELL YEAH! The iPhone should be feeling teeth in its ass right…about…now. It’s not any one feature that makes me say this. It’s that the gestalt, the entire experience, is so comfortable and pleasant. I enjoy using my phone." Not to mention (and he doesn't), it has a real keyboard. Some people say it has a crummy real keyboard, but still...
RAID explained! Thanks to these guys for this excellent explanation.
(For RAID 6, simply add one more bottle to the RAID 5 example :)
The Cleveland Clinic have unveiled their annual list of top 10 innovations in medicine; interestingly, #4 is multispectral imaging in pathology...
Apropos my current location, the Breezy, Beautiful Brazilian leaf-house. This house is outside Rio, can't be that far from where I am!
Pretty different to the favelas (Brazilian slums) I passed today... wow, what a study in contrasts.
Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) finds his voice. "Here's an update on my voice, in case anyone is curious. Thanks to surgery in July to correct my exotic voice problem (Spasmodic Dysphonia), I now have a virtually normal voice... This is a life changing event for me... However unpleasant you imagine it is to be unable to speak, I can assure you it was worse. But thanks to one surgeon, Dr. Berke at UCLA, apparently my problem is solved." How excellent.
more from Rio |
This is coming to you from Rio de Janeiro, my second day here, and I still haven't slept very well. The effort of concentrating on Portuguese conversations while tired is significant, whew...
So today was amazing; we spent most of the day at the INCA (Instituto Nacional de Cancer). The INCA has a long history – commemorated in various Brazilian stamps...
INCA – Instituto Nacional de Cancer
I must say INCA is in a horrible section of Rio, right near the commercial port. The taxi ride over was like entering a war zone. There is an armed guard at the entrance, covering a bulletproof front door. You begin to realize that Rio is like a movie set; the beaches and the tourist hotels are amazing, but behind the scenes there is a lot of poverty and strife. There are 6M people in Rio - it is, for example much larger than Los Angeles - and a significant number of them are literally dirt poor; they live in the favelas, the Brazilian slums, which are shanty towns of corregated steel shacks and dirt floors. Everyone warns you not to get near them, they are rife with drug dealing and gang warfare.
I present Aperio's image analysis solutions to a room full of pathologists...
Anyway my presentation went well, attended by 45 people (as with São Paulo, more than expected), and afterward we walked to lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall nearby. I must tell you I was pretty uncomfortable with that area and would not walk through it again. Wow. For the first time I transitioned to thinking of Brazil as “third-world” instead of pseudo-European. The restaurant featured an interesting innovation, apparently common throughout Brazil; a buffet where you pay by the pound. My total for a surprisingly good meal was R$5.50, a little over $2. Seems like an idea that would work in the U.S.; no food is wasted, and you pay according to how hungry you are…
After lunch we had a nice tour of the pathology lab; pretty cool, an interesting mix of old and new technology, e.g. human cover slippers and a spiffy new German tissue processor. The lab processes about 1,000 slides per day, all [suspected] cancer cases. The highlight for me was the basement where they store slides; the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was vividly brought to mind. Check out all the slides and tissue blocks spread out on tables for sorting...
Sorting slides preparatory to filing them in the archive…
Later we returned from the “war zone” back to our first-class hotel in the middle of Copacabana Beach; a pretty weird transition. And still later we walked down the beach to a wonderful seafood restaurant. Yet another meal which will require a weeks’ riding to work off, sigh, but it might possibly have been worth it :)
Yes, that is Sevruga, and yes, I ate a lot of it :)
So ends day three! Tomorrow we travel to Salvador, Brazil's third-largest city...
The Ole filter makes a pass, from Rio de Janeiro, still with very little sleep...
Slate says don't count Matt Drudge out. Okay, I won't. In fact, I wouldn't think of it; although I rarely visit drudgereport.com, I am subscribed to their feed and it is one of my best sources of breaking news...
BusinessWeek ran an interesting article about Reid Hoffman, CEO and founder of LinkedIn and my old colleague at PayPal. Not only is LinkedIn a major player in the valley (with so many layoffs, a lot of people will be looking to use it to network their way into their next job), Reid is a prolific angel investor and is involved with a lot of Web 2.0 startups. He must be one busy guy, but then he always was anyway...
This is pretty amazing: New MRI screening technique differentiates malignant breast tumors. "Latest results from researchers at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in Portland demonstrate that 'shutter-speed' computer analysis can distinguish malignant from benign tumors 100 percent of the time in breast cancer screening, a method likely to reduce or eliminate unnecessary biopsies. Their findings are published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences." 100%? Wow. That is amazing.
Here we have the five strangest Kuiper Belt objects. They are all strange - the whole Kuiper Belt itself is pretty weird - but these are especially interesting. And you probably wouldn't have expected it but Pluto is one of them :) The one that threw me for a loop was... Triton! Neptune's large and weird moon is really another Pluto, captured by Nepture's gravitational field. It doesn't even rotate the right way around its planet...
Check out this Task Manager picture, of an HP SuperDome64 Itanium, Dual Core, HyperThreaded = 256 Logical Processors. Wow, how cool is that?
Speaking of parallel processing, Parallels 4.0 is supposedly 50% faster than the previous version. This is of course a virtualization solution which allows Windows to run on a Mac under OS X. I like Parallels better than VMWare but I have to admit, it wasn't as fast, so I can't wait to try the new version!
Want to upgrade your Mac? No problem!
Global Warming update: Snow arrives early at Snowbird. I know specific examples don't prove anything, this could be an insignificant outlier, but I still think it's fun. When the shoe is on the other foot the media are all over it...
The New Yorker has a new online Digital Reader; I have just started experimenting with it. It is free to all print subscribers, and provides access to all their archives as well as all the material of their current issue. A pretty ballsy and cool thing they did... [ via Jason Kottke, who loves it but does say "Sadly, the actual reading interface is the worst part of the DR." ]
Going back to how the Kindle really rocks, the most rocking thing about it is that the reading interface is excellent. Brings to mind the comment of Steve Jobs when introducing the iPhone: "the killer app for a phone is making phone calls". :)
The New Yorker's Digital Reader
from Rio de Janeiro |
This is coming to you from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where my sleep deprivation experiment continues; not having adapted to the [six hour] time change I didn't sleep until 4:00AM, and had to get up at 7:00 for a meeting with Ambriex, Aperio's Brazilian distributor. After a good discussion which continued over lunch we flew to Rio de Janeiro, had an amazing dinner, and here I am.
Sugar Loaf mountain from the air - looks just like the pictures :)
Lunch was so nice we missed our flight to Rio de Janeiro. We booked on the next flight, and then missed that one too while chatting directly next to the gate. Some things cannot be explained. Fortunately there seems to be a regular bucket chain of planes between Sao Paulo and Rio and the third try was a charm.
The 50-minute flight into Rio was cool; as you land you can see the hills of the city (including the famous Sugar Loaf) and fly over the bay and islands, then land at the an airport which is itself an island. Interesting factoid: Santos Dumont airport, named after a famous Brazilian aviator, is noted for having some of the shortest runways of any commercial airport in regular use.
Copacabana Beach - the view from my hotel room. Wow. That’s just about all I can say.
We checked into our hotel and discovered that the rooms set aside for us had flooded and were unavailable. The hotel graciously booked us into another hotel at the same rate, a much nicer hotel, in fact the tallest and nicest hotel in all of Copacabana Beach. How great was that?
Leila Vecchio, Sandra Martins-Boyte, and me: dinner in a great restaurant
at Copacabana Beach in Rio with two Brazilian women. Life on the road.
To top it off, I had an amazing dinner with Sanda Martins-Boyte, Aperio's South American channel manager, and Leila Vecchio, a Rio-based sales rep for Ammriex, at the Skycab restaurant at the top of our hotel. Another meal which will require a week’s riding to compensate.
And so ends day two! Tomorrow we are meeting at INCA (the Instituto Nacional de Cancer) and giving another presentation / demo... should be fun.
The Ole filter makes a pass, from São Paulo, without sleep...
Obama and Bush meet! "The Bushes welcomed the Obamas to the White House on Monday, offering a symbolic glimpse of what's in store for the country: a new first family along with a new administration. President Bush and President-elect Obama met in the Oval Office, their first face-to-face session, while first lady Laura Bush and Obama's wife, Michelle, held their own meeting in the White House residence." [ via Glenn Reynolds, who comments "They all actually look happy. Well, heck. Obama's glad to be President, and Bush is glad to leave." ] It is early but the transition appears to be amiable, good for Bush, and good for all of us.
I must tell you Obama is very popular in Brazil, not least because it is a racially mixed country, but also because they don't/didn't like Bush and want change as badly as the American people. We tend to forget that our relationship with the people of other countries is asymmetrical; they care about us and what we do much more than we care about them.
Obama to use executive orders for immediate impact... "President-elect Obama plans to use his executive powers to make an immediate impact when he takes office, perhaps reversing Bush administration policies on stem cell research and domestic drilling for oil and natural gas." So be it. Immediate action may be called for, and certainly enabling stem cell research would be good.
This is amazing: AmEx becomes a bank. "Seeking shelter amid a global credit crunch and consumer spending slowdown, American Express announced Monday it is becoming a bank." Wow, may you live in interesting times, indeed.
Huh, the iPhone is now the best selling phone in the U.S., with 6.9M sold in the last quarter. Who would have expected that? Well, okay, a lot of people, but I wasn't one of them. They do seem to be everywhere now...
PZ Myers with a nice post on entropy and evolution. "One of the oldest canards in the creationists' book is the claim that evolution must be false because it violates the second law of thermodynamics, or the principle that, as they put it, everything must go from order to disorder." Great timing for me as I read Dawkins' fantastic The God Delusion. Really until you grok the details, you don't realize just how compelling the case for evolution has become.
The trailer for Up is up (Pixar's next movie). Jason Kottke thinks "this seems like the first Pixar movie that won't appeal to adults and kids at the same time." He hopes he's wrong, and I do too...
On Slashdot: Halliburton applies for patent-trolling patent. Sadly, I am not making this up.
Kindle really rocks |
The other day I concluded Kindle rocks, after having received one as a present. So now, having flown for a cumulative 15 hours, I can tell you it really rocks. This is the perfect "book" to take on an airplane. It is small, light, easy to read, and of course the equivalent of 200 books when fully loaded, so you have a ton of content. The battery life is excellent, especially with the "whispernet" turned off (which of course you must do on an airplane anyway). Pleasingly the flight crews treat it like a book, not an electronic device, so you can use it during takeoffs and landings and while taxiing (actually I think they didn't know what to make of it; YMMV).
I found myself continuing to look up a lot of words in the dictionary - that's an unexpectedly useful feature - and also switching between books some; I found myself reading The God Delusion and The Black Swan more or less interleaved, for some reason. The reading experience is really good, you do "disappear" into the experience, as intended. I have not yet gotten used to the big next page button on the right, however, it is convenient, but a little too convenient, it is too easy to push when you don't mean to. At this point I doubt I'll get used to that, it is just a not-perfect implementation that you would think might have been exposed during beta-testing, and will no doubt be addressed in version two. Another not-perfect thing is the "back" button because it is not matched with a "forward" button. Sometimes I hit "back" when I meant "previous page", but when I did there was no "forward" to easily recover. Another thing for the next version. But these are quibbles because otherwise I like it a lot.
As you might expect it is a bit of a conversation starter; people see you reading, and either know what a Kindle is and want to see it, or don't know what a Kindle is and want to see it. I may have sold a few en route :)
Now that I'm in my hotel, it still rocks, because I can go to bed and read easily; the smallness and lightness and easy-to-read-ness are all still important, as is the fact that I have all this content from which to choose. Awesome, I love it.
from São Paulo |
This is coming to you from São Paulo, Brazil, where I must tell you I am running a sleep deprivation experiment; I left my house on at noon Sunday, flew to São Paulo via Dallas, arrived Monday morning (there is a six hour time difference from L.A., up from the usual five because Brazil is on their daylight savings time, as it is late Spring here), gave a presentation / demo for customers and prospects at Diagnostika, a Brazilian reference lab, and then went out for a fabulous dinner at a Brazilian steak house. And am now blogging.
São Paulo - a mix of old and new and BIG
First impression - São Paulo feels much like a European city, perhaps in Spain somewhere, although it is huge, bigger than Madrid, bigger than you could even imagine (well, certainly bigger than I had imagined). I am told 10M people live here. Wow. That is way bigger than Los Angeles, even including all the environs. Another impression: I'd always thought I never really got anything out of having studied Spanish in high school, based on my trips to Spain, but now I realize it truly did help, because here, where everyone speaks Portuguese, I know nothing at all. Not even yes (sim) or no (não). Not even hello (olá) or thanks (obrigado) or please (por favor). Or sorry (descuple). I had to learn all this today, on the fly :)
Diagnostika - a reference lab and Aperio customer - in an old Turkish home
I made a presentation (in English) along with Aperio's South American channel manager, who is/was Brazilian, and who translated where necessary, and it went great, and then we did some demos, and they went greater; it is always fun to see pathologists and lab managers socks flying when they see digital pathology in action :) We had over thirty people attend, nearly twice what we'd expected, and overall it was a big success.
A Brazilian steak house - they slice joists of meat right at the table
Wrapping up we had dinner at a Brazilian steak house, a fixture in the South apparently, where they bring a continuous stream of joists of meat right to your table, and slice them to order. Really amazing, accompanied by a delightful Chilean Cabernet. I believe I will have to ride for a week to compensate.
And so ends day one! Tomorrow I move on to Rio de Janeiro, stay tuned...
Checking in after a quiet day... worked mostly, while feeling guilty for not packing for my trip to Brazil :) and squeezed in a nice ride (last for a week, I'm afraid...) And now I have just enough time to see what the world is up to, and then it is off to a party... and tomorrow off to Sao Paulo. My next post will be from South America - who knows, it could be upside down :)
If you're not tired of the Presidential election yet, you might enjoy these election maps... the one at right depicts state-by-state results, with the areas of each state skewed by its population. You can see just how not-close the election was... [ via Brad Feld ]
Dave Winer: changing the way we do news. "What didn't change in the 2008 election is the way news flowed. This is a big disappointment to me and something that causes great concern. I see the newspapers dying, and the broadcast media failing to do news, and I want to evolve to the next thing, but it doesn't seem that's the way it'll go." Dave and I disagree on a lot, but on this I agree with him completely.
Philip Greenspun thinks we should let G.M. go bankrupt. Me, too. The longer this federal bailout period is taking, the more I think the whole thing was a mistake. Markets work, if you let them. And bailouts by the government is the opposite of letting them work.
Speaking of bankrupt, here we have $1B Zimbabwe dollars. Yes, that is a real note (thanks Adam Curry) and yes, it is basically worthless. Actually I think it might have value as a collector's item; I wouldn't mind having one :)
Mark Cuban has some good advice for Obama: Entrepreneurs will lead us out of this mess. Talk to Them. "Your current group has no one with 100pct of their networth on the line. I promise you that the possibility of losing it all will provide a completely different perspective than any of the “knowledge” the esteemed, learned members of his current advisory team offer." Indeed.
This is really cool: Scientific American has pictures of the International Space Station. The other day I linked the five most plausible sci-fi movies; well this ain't no movie, but it would fit right in with 2001's Discovery, don't you think? I remember the old joke, it would cost less to send a man to Mars than to make a move about it, but that wasn't true; space travel is really expensive, especially when [non-expendable] people are involved. But when you see the ISS and such, it such seems worth it...
Sadly, it appears NASA have lost contact with the Phoenix lander as it freezes in the Martian North. It's mission did last five months, nearly twice as long as the projected three months, and there is still a little hope...
Surfing picture of the day, or any day; Kerby Brown takes on a monster... unbelievably, the wave closed out and slammed him, but he survived...
Here we have fifty strange buildings of the world. And they are truly strange, and quite amazing. There is a such a variety represented it is hard to pick my favorite... but I did, and here it is :) YMMV!
Kindle rocks |
My wife Shirley gave me an early birthday present yesterday, in advance of flying to Brazil for a week: A spiffy Amazon Kindle! After charging it over night, this morning I made time to play with it. I can say unequivocally, Kindle rocks.
First I must tell you all the pictures you've seen don't actually do it justice. It is smaller and thinner and prettier than you would think; you have to be holding one to evaluate the "look and feel" properly. The screen is wonderful, high contrast and high resolution. The brighter the light you shine on it, the better; take it outside, no problem. The buttons on the edges take some getting used to, because you have a tendency to click them inadvertently; I'm guessing I'll get used to that, but we'll see. The feel of the buttons is fine - nice little clicks - and the keyboard is just fine also (despite what you may have read). It also comes with a really nice book-like cover, very cool.
|
|
|
The user interface is a bit different to what you might expect at first - it isn't a handheld computer - but once you start using it the whole interface makes sense, it is consistent and very "booklike". To start with no content ever extends "down"; there is no such thing as scrolling. Content which doesn't fit on one screen is divided into multiple pages, and you simply page forward to read it. There's this thing called a "cursor bar" which adjoins the screen to the right (click the thumbnail above to see a high-resolution version of my Kindle, you'll be able to see it). Below the cursor bar is a "select wheel". To select stuff, you scroll the select wheel to position a little silver indicator in the cursor bar adjacent to whatever you want to select, and then click the select wheel. This is how you make menu selections, and otherwise tell the Kindle what to do. It feels strange at first because it isn't like the computer menus you're used to, but after ten minutes you get it and from that point it is really intuitive. What's nice (and I suspect the reason they did it) is that you can select anything you happen to be looking at and do things to it: look up words in the dictionary, create bookmarks, make notes, etc.
The Kindle uses an e-ink display, which is where it gets its resolution and contrast, but one drawback to e-ink is that it is slow. So while displaying static pages works great (again, click the thumbnail above to see my Kindle at high-resolution), it can't do any kind of animation. Including presumably scrolling a selection in a menu. So the cursor bar was a clever solution.
The interface includes a Back button so you can "nest in" and then get back to where you started easily. On the keyboard are buttons for Home and Search; at any time you can search the whole Kindle for any text, which works nicely.
As I started reading I was surprised how useful it was to be able to look up words in the dictionary; there are a lot of words I sort of know, but now I can look them up to get exactly the nuance. Not only does the author's meaning come through more clearly, but your vocabulary expands :)
So far I have downloaded a few books, and it was really easy, and really fast. The Kindle uses something Amazon calls "whispernet", which is a combination of EVDO (where available) and 1XRTT (where EVDO is not). At my house, on EVDO, it takes less than thirty seconds to download a whole book. Pretty impressive. Books seem to be about $10, roughly half their paper cost. I have chosen a few books I've been meaning to read for my trip: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Halting State, Thirteen, and The God Delusion. I also downloaded a Brazilian travel guide :)
Anyway so far I am really impressed and delighted. It was a great gift (thank you Shirley!) and I think it will be a wonderful traveling companion. I'll have more to say about it after my trip I'm sure, stay tuned...
I'm still basking in the glow of my perfect day yesterday. Today wasn't perfect, but I still felt great feeding off the momentum. My fun with gravity this morning didn't hurt either :)
One cool thing I did today was setup a new server in a datacenter, from the comfort of my chair in my office. Thank you Rackspace. Armed only with a web browser and a credit card, I was able to contract for a spiffy new 2x2 Opteron with 1GB RAM and 256GB of disk, running Win03. Two hours later I was RDPed into the box, and four hours later I had a new test system up and running. I love it.
{
It was not always so; I can remember in a previous life setting up my own datacenter, complete with raised floor, Halon fire protection, backup generator, network hardware, peering relationships with several network providers, and of course a bunch of servers which had to be babysat 24x7. This is better :)
}
Curious about Windows 7? Here's a guided tour of the Win7 taskbar from Microsoft...
[ Update: This post was half-posted up to this point for a couple days while I few to Brazil. The full version and several other posts were trapped in the amber of my blogging tool, Citydesk. All is now well :) ]
Here we have the five most scientifically plausible sci-fi movies... 2001 Space Odyssey heads the list (as it should!)
Everybody has linked this but it is too cool not to mention; real-life Photoshop. How excellent is that? Very.
NewScientist reports Plucky Mars rovers on the move again. "The arrival of spring in southern Mars is reviving NASA's two venerable Mars rovers as deepening autumn in the arctic north slowly freezes the Phoenix lander. After hibernating for the winter on the northern edge of a plateau called Home Plate, the Spirit rover moved uphill in October to collect more sunlight. On the other side of the planet, the Opportunity rover, which climbed out of a large crater called Victoria at the end of August, has completed the first month of a 12-kilometre trek towards an even bigger crater called Endeavour. That journey is expected to take more than two years." How excellent, those robots are the Energizer bunnies of space exploration.
From Wired: AV Receiver porn, the new Denon AVR-889. "Denon delivers a lot to love at an excellent price. For well under a grand, you get features that just a few years ago were available only in flagship models. That includes 1080p upscaling from analog sources, Neural Surround for XM-HD radio, and Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD. And don't think Denon tacked on fancy formats at the expense of power: At 100 watts per channel, it manages to be Nascar-loud yet ballet-beautiful." Fortunately they had the decency not to show the back panel :)
Wrapping up, I must note along with Scot Tempesta that the ACC boats are back! There are of course the American's Cup Class boats in which the last America's Cup was sailed; the way things are going, it really will be the last one (the next one appears tied up in court) and it really doesn't appear that the ACC boats will ever be used in it again, whatever happens. In the meantime they're gorgeous expensive awesome incredible machines, and it is nice to see them back on the water racing in the Trofeo Desafío Español.
fun with gravity |
This morning I emailed my friend Tim, asked him how he was doing (he has two new babies, a boy named Pi and a girl named Persiphone, how cool is that :), and he told me he was talking a little jaunt up La Tuna Canyon and asked would I like to join him? Sure! Nothing like 4 miles at 10%, that's what I always say, especially when there is a nice 15% section in the middle.
And so it was that I found myself having fun with gravity. Of course the reward for climbing the hill is looking back down...
Bright clear day, you can see Palos Verdes peninsula, directly ahead, and to the right in the haze, Catalina Island. You can also look up the hill to scare yourself...
On and on and one, at 10%+ it is... a struggle where you peg your granny gear and just try to keep the pedals ticking over...
Yep that is Tim in the middle of the 15% section, having fun with gravity...
And when finally you make it to Saddle Peak, you look back, and ... wow! Amazing and beautiful.
All the leaves are brown, on a winter's day, I'd be safe and warm, if I was in L.A., California dreaming, on such a winter's day...
Of course the real fun with gravity starts on the descent, and because I wanted to live, I did not take any pictures. However this YouTube video will give you a flavor for the descent. Especially excellent is the fact that the street is one-way downhill, so that as you're descending at speed there are no oncoming cars...
Wrapping up my perfect day, the Ole filter makes a pass, and finds it's all happening...
I meant to call this out earlier because I think it's important and it has soaked up a fair amount of think time from me: Josh Newman's observations about Confidence and Comfort, as he slips into something more. I'll probably post more about this; right now I'm confident that confidence matters, but still trying to get comfortable with the idea of comfort :)
Related: trying to figure out how humor fits in... I've always felt like a good sense of humor was an essential part of being attractive to investors, women, or anyone, and yet somehow while humor is compatible with confidence (especially self-deprecating humor), it seems a bit at odds with being comfortable. A lot of humor is a bit edgy and derives from discomfort. Some humor even causes discomfort...
The Economist notes the axeman cometh:
… current wisdom among axe wielders is that in the last downturn, joints were allowed to sit idly for far too long before they were carved. This time, they intend to cut early, expecting it will buy them the freedom and legitimacy with their board to expand quickly once recovery begins—when unemployment will be high enough to prevent prospective employees from being too squeamish about their new boss’s past enthusiasm for axe wielding. This augurs a fairly rapid rise in unemployment.
On the other hand, many firms are already stretched thin, with vastly more efficient human-resource management than in the past, so big reductions will not just remove fat, they also risk damaging muscle, unless accompanied by some significant and well-designed organizational restructuring—which is never easy to do right at a time of intense budget pressure.
Yahoo reports jobless rate bolts to 14-year high of 6.5 percent. "The nation's unemployment rate bolted to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were cut, far worse than economists expected and stark proof the economy is deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid pace." Sadly, this is a snowball rolling down hill; as more people are laid off, the economy declines further, forcing more companies to cut more jobs.
The market is down incredibly since the election, and Instapundit ponders whether it's fair to blame Obama. Yes, it is.
In this economy, self-sufficient is the new sexy. At the personal and business level...
Change you can believe in? President-elect Obama launches change.gov. There is a "blog", but they're confused; it looks like it is really a stream of press releases. Sigh. [ via Ars Technica ]
David Pogue reviews the Pico projector - wow, how cool! Definitely a new product category and one destined for major adoption... Please Santa, I've been a good boy :)
Well this sucks - the uber-cool "Mexican walking fish" nears extinction. It is too cool, surely evolution cannot be so heartless?
Did you see this? California gives green light to high-speed train. "Voters in California this week agreed to bankroll a multi-billion dollar high-speed railway system, with technology to come from either Japan or Europe... The train would connect San Francisco to Los Angeles and would cost some 45 billion dollars, according to news reports, which said the measure was approved by a vote of some 52 percent to about 48 percent." It would be cool, but don't hold your breath. That $45B is bound to double before the first track is laid...
Wired News with a blast from the past: November 7, 1932: Radio Enters the 25th Century. "1932: Space adventurer Buck Rogers debuts on CBS radio. The science fiction show, eventually called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, will delight loyal fans over a span of 15 years and inspire aficionados for decades more." What a different time that was, can you imagine how strange and amazing it must have been to contemplate space travel in 1932?
And so here we have the five awesomest TV and Movie spaceships... not a bad list, but sadly incorrect, as it completely omits the Enterprise! What? I have to agree with the Romulan warbird choice, however, that is kickass-looking...
a perfect day |
Today was a perfect day. I can't tell you all the reasons why, but it was... among other things the weather was perfect; sunny, warm, light breeze, clear, the kind of day on which you realize why you love living in Southern California.
And the kind of day on which you realize why you love cycling; in the afternoon I had a wonderful ride from Carlsbad up through the marine base at Camp Pendleton.
On the way up I passed the Oceanside pier, and stopped to admire the, um, scenery. The sun was shining, people were out and about, it was great. I met a couple from Montana out here on vacation - they asked me to take their picture - and they told me it was snowing at their ranch. They asked if it was always like this out here, and I said... yes, of course :)
The Camp Pendleton base is always cool; lots of military hardware on display. (Yes, they let cyclists ride through the base, all you have to do is show your drivers license. I love it, the kids who work there are as impressive as their toys.) Today was especially great because just as I was heading back, my ride was interrupted by a convoy of tanks and troop carriers crossing the road. Perfect timing. The cool thing about these tanks, they make no noise! Only the sound of their treads on the concrete. Spooky.
I headed back down the coast with a tailwind, flying along at 25mph, and stopped at the Oceanside pier again just in time to catch the sun setting. How perfect was that?
A beautiful ride on a beautiful day. And at the end, an awe-inspiring nightfall with amazing colors stretched across the sky. Perfect.
more reactions |
More reactions to the Obama victory and our new President...
Powerline: Ten thesis on President-elect Obama. And later: "The Greatest Irony of the just-concluded Presidential campaign, as I've said before, is that both John McCain and Barack Obama began the primaries as candidates whose main focus was on foreign affairs. Obama was the antiwar candidate, McCain the national security hawk. By yesterday those positions, which largely drove the early primaries, had become almost irrelevant. McCain proved right on the surge in Iraq, but because he was right the war has pretty much been won and therefore is no longer a compelling issue." Yep, the defining issue in this election became the economy; who knew?
The Horses's mouth: A first for the United States (The first President(elect) who is a body surfer from Hawaii :)
Steven Den Beste (!): Not the end of the world. "I think this election is going to be a 'coming of age' moment for a lot of people. They say, 'Be careful what you wish for' and a lot of people got their wish yesterday. And now they're bound to be disappointed. Not even Jesus could satisfy all the expectations of Obama's most vocal supporters, or fulfill all the promises Obama has made." Steven is a thoughtful voice, I miss him!
Fred Wilson: Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States. Fred lists six things he thinks we'll get from an Obama administration: 1) A world class management team, 2) Honesty, 3) A steady hand, 4) Diplomacy, 5) Fairness, 6) Leadership. I hope he's right, especially about Honesty and Fairness. We'll see. [ via Brad Feld ]
Dave Winer: Sarah we hardly knew ya. "When she was announced as a candidate I was virtually alone in believing the choice wouldn't age well. When I turned out to be correct, I didn't want to gloat, because the election wasn't over, and there was no way to be absolutely sure. Now we are... Palin is no longer a candidate, she's a punchline." Ouch! I liked Sarah, and still do. It will be interesting to see if she remains a player on the national stage or is reduced to a footnote. In their effort to elect Obama, the MSM sure did a number on her, it might be hard for her to recover. But you could have said that about McCain, too :)
Condoleezaa Rice reacts... Man, I really like her. I still think it was too bad that association with the Bush Presidency prevented her from being considered as John McCain's running mate. She would have been perfect - smart, experienced, articulate, balanced... oh yeah and the most powerful black woman on the planet.
CNet: John Doerr's advice to Obama: Bill Joy. "The VC endorses the idea of appointing a CTO for the country who could focus on energy and green tech." Huh, I like Bill Joy, but he seems like too much of a theorist. How about Meg Whitman :)
Economist: the economic challenges facing Barack Obama. "He had always planned for the economy to be his priority. Just not this economy." His choices for the economic leaders in his administration will be crucial.
Posts and articles in the last month:
11/05/08 10:20 PM - Wednesday, 11/05/08 10:20 PM
11/05/08 08:05 AM - what matters II
11/05/08 07:16 AM - what matters
11/05/08 06:07 AM - reactions
11/04/08 07:40 AM - the big day
11/03/08 11:11 PM - Monday, 11/03/08 11:11 PM
11/03/08 07:21 PM - the world's dumbest installer
11/02/08 10:38 PM - Sunday, 11/02/08 10:38 PM
11/02/08 10:07 PM - the big Five-O
11/01/08 10:30 PM - Saturday, 11/01/08 10:30 PM
11/01/08 08:46 AM - the morning after
10/31/08 12:31 PM - Ole votes
10/31/08 09:17 AM - BOO!
10/30/08 05:30 PM - Thursday, 10/30/08 05:30 PM
10/30/08 09:18 AM - Firefox realtime address-bar search
10/29/08 11:51 PM - Wednesday, 10/29/08 11:51 PM
10/29/08 11:32 PM - whew
10/27/08 12:54 PM - Midway
10/26/08 11:56 PM - thank you unknown Hyatt person
10/25/08 09:58 PM - Saturday, 10/25/08 09:58 PM
10/25/08 11:15 AM - relatively deprived
10/24/08 08:54 PM - Friday, 10/24/08 08:54 PM
10/23/08 09:40 PM - Thursday, 10/23/08 09:40 PM
10/22/08 11:21 PM - Wednesday, 10/22/08 11:21 PM
10/22/08 11:15 PM - smokey
10/21/08 09:39 PM - Tuesday, 10/21/08 09:39 PM
10/20/08 10:59 PM - Monday, 10/20/08 10:59 PM
10/20/08 10:09 PM - (New Yorker 10/20/08 - Red Scare)
10/19/08 09:02 PM - Sunday, 10/19/08 09:02 PM
10/19/08 11:25 AM - when new versions suck
10/18/08 10:47 PM - Saturday, 10/18/08 10:47 PM
10/18/08 03:12 PM - I am Joe
10/18/08 01:30 PM - Riding the Wild Sierra
10/17/08 07:47 AM - loudest bands?
For older posts and articles, please visit the archive.
Home
Archive
One Year Ago
Two Years Ago
Three Years Ago
Four Years Ago
Five Years Ago
All Articles
Re:Cycling
Re:The Book
Re:Software
Re:Philosophy
About Me
W=UH
Email
Search
Greatest Hits
Correlation vs. Causality
The Tyranny of Email
Unnatural Selection
Lying
Aperio's Mission = Automating Pathology
On Blame
Try, or Try Not
Books and Wine
Google and Blogs
Emergent Properties
God and Beauty
Moving Mount Fuji
The Nest
Rock 'n Roll
IQ and Populations
Are You a Bright?
Adding Value
Confidence
The Joy of Craftsmanship
The Emperor's New Code
Toy Story
The Return of the King
Religion vs IQ
Most Spectacular Photos of 2003
In the Wet
the big day
solving bongard problems
visiting Titan
unintelligent design
Shorthorn
the nuclear option
second gear
On the Persistence of Bad Design...
Texas chili cookoff
the inflection point
almost famous design and stochastic debugging
may I take your order?
paper art
triple double
China's olympic gardens
New Yorker covers
Death Rider! (da da dum)
how did I get here (Mt.Whitney)?
Π