Category: Uncategorized

Apparently our friends at NASA are sitting on a report that clearly details the true state of air safety in the United States.

NASA Sits on Air Safety Survey

I want this report, NOW!

Technorati Tags: NASA, air safety, FOIA

My colleague Roger went on his first business road trip last week.
It was from hell. He spent some time detailing the whole hellish experience here.
On November 14-15, I am travelling with Roger to Columbus, OH. I have promised to make it a much more…enjoyable experience.
Technorati Tags: travel, business, bad trips, Los Angeles

Samantha’s second Samsung A560 died last week, so I got mad and called Sprint to try and get out of the contract. No way — a kidney and my eldest child is the only way to get out of this deal with the devil.

So, until March 2008, the phone will be powered down and stuck in a drawer. We will grudgingly pay the bill, knowing that we can then tell them to take a long walk off a short pier and not re-subscribe.

On Sunday, we added Samantha to my T-Mobile plan and she now has several fine phones to choose from out of my existing collection. I really don’t see us going back to a CDMA service…ever.

Got my T-Mobile Rizr Z3 unlocked yesterday and it is now running the stock Z3 Software…looks like for Malaysia! 🙂

I hated all the extras that came with the T-Mobile Software. Now, I am happy.

I have a problem: I like to collect GSM phones. Right now, I have seven.

From left to right.

• MOTORAZR V3
• MOTORIZR Z3
• MOTOSLVR L7i (current phone in use)
• Motorola V188 (running V220 software)
• Sony Ericsson K700i
• Nokia of some description
• Samsung T619

Ugh.

GrabPERF returned to service at approximately 17:30 GMT (13:30 EDT — 10:30 PDT) September 20 2007. The database server was on all night, but an esoteric choice of primary interfaces (i.e. the least obvious one!) meant that it was taking to empty space.

Have fun and enjoy the data!

The boys wanted a fire last night, so we fired up a pressed log, and all was well.

This morning, Samantha prepared the fireplace for a repeat tonight. We kept smelling the remnants of last nights fire smoldering, so we just lit the thing.

Guess the logs were lined up wrong.

Living Room full of smoke, billowing out the front of the fireplace.

I love home ownership.

This morning, the Canadian Dollar was briefly worth more than the US Dollar on international money markets.

Skating on the River Styx, anyone?

GrabPERF has been offline all day, and will likely be offline for the remainder of the day as Technorati relocates the servers to their new datacenter.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

In today’s Boston Globe, there is an article discussing why Facebook went to the Valley instead of staying in the Boston area (article online).

Having now lived in both areas for nearly equal amounts of time, I can tell you that there are substantial differences between them. People from Boston may violently disagree, but I have found that the innovative spirit of the Valley, the one that drove the creation of the commercial Internet, does not exist here.

I am, however, someone who now laughs at the insular culture of the Valley, a place that still considers itself the center of the Internet innovation universe. I had a chance to meet with a growing Internet firm while I was out there on business last week (not Technorati), and I found the hubris and ego in the meeting that I attended laughable.

I was not laughing at this firm’s success, which has been great. I was laughing at the fact that the mid-level managers that we met with had the gall to effectively state that having their name on our customer list entitled (and yes, entitlement is also a large part of the culture) them to demand a deal that none of our customers get.

I can’t be sure what the sales guy I went with thought, but I left the meetings laughing. This company, which is younger than my youngest son, thought it had more pull with us than the multi-hundred billion financial firms we deal with daily. Thought that it had more pull than the large, first-generation Internet companies that we work closely with.

Yes, Boston does not generally fund and encourage a culture of innovation (yes, there are always exceptions). But those who seek to take the next great idea to the Internet should beware the hubris of the Valley.