Archive for the 'Uncategorized' category
John Lasseter and Pixar
May 23, 2006 10:07 pmWhat are the odds?
May 16, 2006 10:16 pmWhat are the chances that a real earthquake would hit at exactly the same time as an earthquake warning test? More importantly, is this some increase in activity in the ring of fire? Yikes!
The latest, a magnitude-5.8 earthquake Wednesday morning, rattled Tonga at the same time that emergency authorities on the country’s islands were broadcasting simulated earthquake alerts as part of the Pacific-wide simulation.
Chron.com | Earthquake Strikes Near New Zealand
Seattle Mind Camp 2.0 Brain Dump
May 2, 2006 4:04 pmIn semi-chronological order from this past weekend:
Jack Bell says that Vivace on Capital Hill has the best coffee. Apparently, the guy/owner there “wrote the book” on espresso. The secret? Fresh roasting. Jack showed us how to roast our own beans during Coffee Hacks 2.0.
Learned about the Kids Programming Language (KPL). Open-source, freeware (at least for version 1.0), and pretty neat. Not sure Alex (he’s 6) is quite ready for this, but someday. The demo of the texture mapped 3D spaceship written in <50 lines of code was slick.
Two links from the random whiteboard : Dorkbot Seattle and HackerFriendly.
During our session on “Del.icio.us Inside the Firewall“, we discussed the “del.icio.us lesson“. Personal (selfish) use comes before shared use (which leads to personal value). Dave had some comments here.
A random hallway chat with H.B. Siegel from IMDB.com educated me that Shred-it hosts hosted a “community shredding event” at local Walmarts. Hope they do this more often - besides backing up our data and computers, shredding our personal docs (and random credit card solicitations) is one of the most important things we don’t do…
During a great dinner-time conversation with Lion Kimbro we discussed:
- The CommunityWiki is working to implement direct save-to-wiki via SVG. Very cool.
- “Lion’s Timeline from 2004″ and how its playing out now. We also talked about Kevin Kelly, and his Long Bets site.
- Lion recommended reading “Manna” by Marshall Brain. That’s next on my list after I finish “Blink” and “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.
The “Good Thing Rapid Discovery Slam” was great:
- A very cool video on “multi-touch interaction experiments” from Scott Berkun.
- An example of harmonica beatboxing.
- A great short video entitled “Cubic Tragedy”.
- Computer drawing/music/performance art mashup from Ario.
- I talked about how I love Orb, and demo’d it on my SMT5600.
During our session on GTD software/solutions, we talked about:
- Is there a way to leave yourself voice notes and have them “magically” turn into text? Personally, this is a bit of a holy grail for me (and others voiced the same desires). I think the speech-to-text capabilities are close, but maybe not all of the way there. We talked about Evoca and GotVoice during this conversation.
- We talked about idea/task collection strategies, and Buzz suggested stamping blank 3×5 cards with your personal data. Then you can give them away with notes to other people. Another idea was to use a highlighter to color-code the edges of your 3×5 cards to denote categories. A color-coded HipsterPDA!
- Buzz also commented that he would like to “meet” the guy who designed Outlook to only support 1 Exchange server for a single profile (as in “meet in a dark alley…”). I’d like to participate in that - I don’t grok the limitation, and it’s a royal PITA!
- Mike Wilkerson showed us his GTD solution using MindJet MindManager and ResultsManager. Looks great - wish I had won one of the licenses they were giving away at the end of MindCamp…$350 is a bit steep for me at the moment. Guess I’ll stick with the GTD Outlook plug-in…
During Alex’s session on Attention we talked about:
Then, Sunday morning at breakfast, we discussed how to use Tor to support access to Gmail outside of a corporate firewall (among other uses).
At the geolocation/mapping session hosted by Brady, we talked about getting topo data for a Google map mashup from WAGDA.
I also noted these sites:
The Go Game looks like something to investigate too.
Finally, Dave Winer told us that OPML 2.0 is getting closer, and feeds.scripting.com is going to make a comeback.
(Also, Chris Pirillo told me that gada.be was working on a very-cool-earth-shaking new piece of functionality, but wouldn’t give details. Guess I just have to wait…but if you need a beta-tester Chris, just holler… 
That is all. Good times, and I’m looking forward to the next one. Big props to Andru, Stuart, Justin, Nancy, etc etc etc for pulling this together.
Technorati Tags: mindcamp2.0
Seattle MindCamp 2.0
April 30, 2006 5:22 pm20 Years
April 27, 2006 11:03 pmIt’s been twenty years since high school. 20 years. I got the class reunion directory for the class of ‘86 from Taft today. Lots of names, lots of memories. The ending was tough, but the rest of the time is something that I will never forget. I kinda wish I could make it back East to see everyone again, but I know that you just “can’t go home again”. Hope everyone has a great time - let me know how it goes…
quine ‘quine’�
April 24, 2006 12:29 pmJosh Rouse at Neumos
April 22, 2006 8:55 amWe went to see Josh Rouse at Neumos last night - what a great time! First, it’s always fantastic to get out with Anne as “real people” and not just parents, plus Sharon came along. Then, the show was very entertaining. John Roderick of The Long Winters opened up, and not only was it great to hear the tunes acoustic, John is also a very engaging guy on stage.
After a nice set from John, Josh came out with his acoustic guitar, backed by a string quartet (he called them the “Crimson Quartet”, but Anne recognized them from the Seattle Symphony). Josh put on a great show - some new tunes from Subtitulo, and all of the tunes I love from Nashville and his New Year’s Eve 2003 show DVD.
Although he was on stage for just over an hour for his main set, he came out and did a nice encore, including “The Man Who Doesn’t Know How to Smile” as a duet with his girlfriend Paz Suay from Valencia, Spain, where Josh is living these days (and where he wrote Subtitulo in a week after arriving from Nashville).
Here’s a link to a Q&A with Josh with some more info on him. I loved the string quartet backup, and hope that next time he comes through he’ll bring a band.
btw, you can get all of Josh Rouse’s music on eMusic - tell them that I sent you (or tell me first, and I’ll refer you).
ps : John opened with this tune from The Long Winters’ new album. Thank you Anne for giving me the gift of never having to look back and call myself stupid…
Baby News and Experiments
April 19, 2006 4:13 pmCongratulations to my fantastic sister Emily and the family for the birth of my newest niece : Charlotte Michelle Paynich.
When I went over to visit the other day, I mentioned this wacky Japanese video to her, in which much success was had with making babies stop crying by gurgling noises with water. Must experiment…
Neatorama How to Instantly Stop a Baby from Crying.
