awkward.org T & M - Thoughts & Musings

We had a snowstorm yesterday afternoon. It started snowing around 1:00pm, by the time I got home at 2:30 we had 2-3 inches. Since I haven’t yet invested in a snow blower I went out again at 4:30 and cleared about another 3-4 inches of snow. It finally stopped around 9:30 last night. Measuring the snow on the patio table this morning it looks like we had 11 1/2 inches of snow in the 8 1/2 hours. Today’s a nice sunny day (cold this morning - but supposed to warm up).

Saturday night/Sunday morning is supposed to be another fairly large storm, and probably not so pleasant with a mix of snow -> ice -> rain and probably high winds too. Unlikely to be anywhere near so photogenic.

Posted under Personal

My little brother was amongst the lucky crowd for the reunion gig last night. He wrote it up here.

In fact he was ‘extra lucky’ since he got his ticket in the second lottery drawing they made after the first gig was cancelled due to Jimmy Page’s finger injury.

Posted under Personal

Earlier this year Larry Lessig gave a presentation at the TED conference in Monterey.

The video of the presentation is now available :

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/187

It’s a great presentation that ‘nails’ in about 20 minutes so much of what is wrong with the current stances on copyright and creativity.

Posted under Personal

Hulu started it’s beta testing yesterday.

Hulu is NBC (and other media companies) attempt to provide video programmes to individuals outside of the iTunes environment (in other words this is NBC’s answer to it’s break up from iTunes).

The Hulu blog post on the opening of beta testing has some particularly choice comments.

It seems like this service (rather than iTunes) is not designed for the individual - rather it’s designed for the corporate entity that created it, poor implementation details, and geographical restrictions on what you can watch depending on where you’re connecting from.

Posted under Personal

Jason Fried has a nice article on ‘Why Enterprise Software Sucks‘ with which I agree entirely.For the last 10 years I’ve worked entirely on projects that individuals use - indeed the lack of the individual focus was why I left two previous employers. If I decide to move on from my current position I suspect that a shift away from focusing on the individual will be part of the reason why.One of the great things about the iOnTV project is that it’s entirely individually focused and I think this is also a driving force behind many of the ‘indie’ developers out there today for the Mac. I really don’t think Gus Mueller had the large art department in mind when he wrote Acorn, and Wil Shipley clearly doesn’t design Delicious Library for ‘libraries’. Both of these folks (and so many, many more) are focused entirely on the individual. 

Posted under Development, Personal

See here. Funnily enough the last time I went to the Microsoft Campus I got sick too - only this time I did eat there. I can’t be sure whether it really was the lunch (catered for the event I was at - I didn’t eat in one of the cafeterias) or what I ate that evening off campus for dinner.

Whatever it was - by about 3:00am the next morning having had about 4 hours of continual throwing up I decided to go to the local emergency room. They gave me some compazine and a ton of IV fluids to re-hydrate me and luckily by about 5:30 I was able to go back to the hotel.

Why lucky ? Because this all happened in the early hours of February 28th 2001 - a few hours after I left the Emergency Room it went into full disaster mode because of the Nisqually Earthquake

Posted under Personal

Sigur Ros have a new concert/documentary movie coming out (when I’m not quite sure) called Heima. It’s largely shot on a recent tour of Iceland - sort of a ‘coming home’ tour, ‘Heima’ is Icelandic for Home.There’s a trailer here - even if you’re not a fan of Sigur Ros’ music it’s got some wonderful photography of Icelands great landscapes and scenery. It bought back some great memories of the short trip Michele and I had there a couple of years ago.

Posted under Personal

Seem’s like Verizon is in a bit of a battle over a FIOS installation that went wrong in Needham.

My install was nowhere near as complicated (or incendiary). You’d think that the tech would know to be careful when drilling, after all in nearly every home the Phone (Fibre), and Electrical house ingress points are very close to each other.

Posted under Personal

I think I can scoop my brother with this one New Sony Bravia TV Ads to feature multicolor bunnies

Posted under Personal

Virgin America received permission to begin operating in the US recently. Artur Bergman at O’Reilly has an article about the tech in the planes.

Although they’re currently only offering a limited service between San Francisco, LA, Las Vegas, Washington DC and New York I’m definately looking forward to Boston being added to that list. Virgin fairly well shook up the UK airline industry and I’m looking forward to them doing something similar here in the US, more competition (even for JetBlue whom I really like) is always a good thing.

Posted under Personal