Archive for October, 2004
I am dog-sitting Niska the wonderdog for a couple of weeks. She is a gorgeous and very sweet Siberian husky mix. While she is generally loving and affectionate, she can also instantly transform into a snarling raised-hackle wolf-cross when faced with an aggressive dog or for that matter, ANY dog in her territory (yard, home, [...]
I just downloaded Ecto2 for Mac OS X. Version 1.x was a disappointment so I was eagerly awaiting version 2. I had a long posting here which I removed because it is easier and better to just summarize the horrible experience I had with Ecto2 this afternoon, which prompted me to once again remove it [...]
More election humour from the U.S. (Thanks Dan Gillmor for the tip.)
Check out Global Vote 2004, a (purportedly) non-partisan, (purportedly) non-spamming simple voting site designed to allow the rest of the world to vote on the US election, since we’re all going to be affected by it anyway. They are planning on releasing the vote count to the media 48 hours before the election. UPDATE Nov. [...]
Okay, so it has to use human poop to attract the flies and it still can’t actually catch the flies – it has to have them fed to it’s little mouth – but all the same, the interesting parts of this equation are: • it is self-powered • it uses microbial fuel cells to generate [...]
I love this woman. It just goes to show you that once you know how to make money, you can do it anywhere. Martha Stewart is forbidden from working on her Martha Stewart Living empire while in prison but that can’t stop her from writing her memoir and making $1 million per month for 5 [...]
See this link with lots of detail over at Macintouch, including some sleuthing from my friend Trevor Inkpen at Quill Services. Smells fishy so far….
I’m pretty sure that I did not get 27 referrals from www.diamondweddings.com yesterday but that’s what my Blogware is reporting. So I checked out their site and they seem to be some sort of aggregator that points to other sites and it is plastered with a row and a column of Google ads. The whole [...]
Back on August 11th, 2004, I prognosticated about the next generation iPod, using the technical disclosures from the prospectus of the iPod’s primary chip designer and manufacturer. In short, they had disclosed that the existing chip-set could also handle bluetooth, ethernet, and color LCD display (but not video.) Well, it seems that Apple is indeed [...]
Am I the only person who seems to see the connection between the Wikipedia and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From the current Wikipedia definition: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a “copyleft” encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to standard “encyclopedic” knowledge, [...]
A small company company called Cherry OS is in the midst of it’s Warholian 15 minutes of fame. It has released an emulator that lets people run Mac OS 10.3 on their PCs. It was apparently slashdotted and now their website is overloaded. Good for them. I’m thinking that this means that if people could [...]
This looks like a blast! Check out the video of somebody goofing around on the prototype Centaur. It uses the Segway balancing technology to allow the user to do perfectly balanced wheelies. What a blast this would be to have around town! (I’m thinking that the posties will like this one WAY more than the [...]
It has been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows, but a more current turn of phrase would be that standards wars make for strange alliances, orphan code, and gouged customers. For this story to be relevant to you, we need to recap: • Apple hit it big with iPod – REALLY big. • Apple [...]
Finally, somebody I can relate to in the whole work-life balance discussion. Keith Hammonds has written an article in this months Fast Company magazine on the myth of work-life balance. I agree with Keith wholeheartedly that balance may be a false god or idol – something people aspire to and then fail, causing only more [...]
Here is Martin’s brief overview of the most important themes that are coming out at the Web 2.0 conference. In short, he says that the most prevalent themes seem to be: • the web is moving towards being a platform for computers and humans, not just humans; • search has a long way to go; [...]
The whole Martha Stewart débacle fiasco pisses me off. That’s the most eloquent way I can put it. The larger macro-trend is that the government has been under pressure to “do something” about corporate malfeasance. So do they do something about people who are really committing heinous crimes and defrauding people of millions of dollars? [...]
I am in the camp of people who think that nanotech will not be a “market” but that it will influence all other existing markets instead. Sure, there will be a market for nano-tech tools but even those will be broken out into vertical market toolsets and technologies so textile manufacturers will not be buying [...]
Fast Company has a brief article on the rise of social entrepreneurship and how that is being reflected in the courses that are being designed at the various MBA programs. QUOTE: More young people “want to make money and produce profits, but they want their work to have meaning and a social mission.” As awareness [...]
Damon Darlin at the Business 2.0 blog pointed me over to the Musicplasma site which I think is one of the coolest social networking mapping web-apps ever. Type in a artist name. Hit SEARCH. It maps out the connections between that artist and all other artists in a great visual map. Click any other artist [...]
This new 2 minute clip on how the Republicans have managed to distract Americans despite an entire four years of failure is almost as brilliant as This Land. Look for web-reports that the author of this will surely exceed bandwidth limits on his/her Earthlink site soon.
I am extremely interested in this field of bio-energy and am excited by all the possibilities of using microbes to convert solar power into useable hydrogen as well as to store energy similar to traditional batteries. Here is a great Wired Magazine article on some of the upcoming possibilities.
Here is yet another example of the nano-bio convergence that is happening, although this time it is the disciplines themselves physically converging in a new research facility. This can only help accelerate the interesting developments between the two sciences.
