Monkey See, Monkey Do

imagine the efficiency and know how of a modern military with the mission to respond to disasters and humanitarian crisis. it would be a long view of national defense, that by creating good will and stability through rapid responses to crises we would avert terrorism and conflict. pretty reasonable idea actually.

well at least for now you can play the game based on this kind of principle, downloadable for free and for mac and windows. (thanks kathy!)

i could easily see myself living in a pre-fab house; especially when i think about retiring or the unknown future fortune or misfortune that i will encounter. leaving on the cheap is everyone’s concern.

i don’t think i really need that much. just a small stove for the tea kettle and a couch to sit on. running water and some climate control would be nice, but even my current eichler is usually on the cold side.

but if i can get into one of these super-cool new german pre-fabs i would still feel like i was living the high life. they’re gorgeous. (thanks boingboing)

many times over the last twenty years have people foretold the coming of electronic books and the demise of paper. it seems however that each year i have more and more paper.

some have even suggested that we should grow up with an electronic book at our side from an early age.

dan has a nice review of the sony librie just released and comments on what i always found to be problematic with previous attempts - the screen resolution. when i tried to read e-books on my powerbook years ago i developed painful eye strain after just a chapter or two.

speaking of powerbooks, the thin form factor powerbook duo was code named “DB Lite” during development. at first i thought this was a nod to alan kay’s dynabook concept, only to learn that the engineers had named it after dry becks light - a beer that had done one of them in after a night of serious partying.

time is flying…

decided to rent star wars six last night, as a run up to episode three coming out in exactly three weeks. i was startled to find that in the very last scene - where luke leaves the ewok party and looks upon the ghost (tibetan: sambhogakaya) forms of obi wan, yoda, and anakin - that hayden christensen had been inserted into the movie. instead of the ghostly form of actor sebastian shaw we find the ghostly form of the teen idol. it was jarring for me, as shaw was around 78 years old when he played the unmasked form of darth vader. confronted with hayden’s youthful curly locks i couldn’t help feeling cheated.

but i have to credit hayden for part of that; he has developed the role of an arrogant and ill guided anakin skywalker in episode two so well i have a real dislike for his character. i’m excited to see what he does in episode three to transform the character further into the control freak that is vader.

one technical note that i’m also curious about. there is a scene in episode six where luke asks leia if she remembers her mother and what she remembers of her. i didn’t think in episode three that padme would live long enough to rear a child that long. guess i’ll have to wait and see.

growing up i really enjoyed creative writing. it’s easy to remember the feeling of creation, making something from nothing, weaving and story telling. i find that feeling now when i create software. i didn’t follow my writing passion much, and my writing is as terse and choppy as my internal, distracted mind. but i still like to write. you my reader are the unhappy victim of my unpracticed prose.

things have changed so much. to publish as a lad, i submitted writing to a school journal. today it is trivial to create a web page thanks to blogging sites. to be fair, it has been possible to publish a web page for many years, but blogging sites has made it much easier to do.

i read someone’s estimate this week that there are now 30 million blogs worldwide (though maybe half are active), and that number is increasing at an incredible rate each month. (since blogging is really only a couple years old, you can guess the rate) before blogging, you could buy pagemaker and tools like that, and manage ftp clients and the like. but the ease of use (and perhaps the cheapness now of hosting sites) has enabled a mass movement of people creating their own web sites.

and so much creativity has been unleashed. from fan fiction like this well written first person blog by darth vader to photographic journals more extensive than museum collections. all overnight. i’m really excited to see what the next ten years brings.

some random study found school children’s IQ drop more significantly from email usage than from smoking marijuana. twice the drop in fact.

here’s another news item about the munich university study of 100,000 students, written by san francisco’s andrew orlowski.

today was my last day as a full time employee at Mirra. I’m leaving to work on my own project for awhile. I’m very excited about this, and perhaps naive that I can build something interesting. but it seems like a good time to try.

i was responsible for the user experience of Mirra’s product and more recently also spent much of my time implementing our web service. when you use a Mirra to back up your computers, you can also remotely access your files while traveling and share large files and photos easily over the internet, using the free web service. i’ve learned a lot about implementing scalable web services. Wired News wrote this about our product, “The best part about the Mirra is that it’s a snap to use.”

it has been immensely fun working at Mirra and i have high hopes both for the product and also the category of device that Mirra is creating - an “always on” platform for the home that augments our portable and “sometimes on” devices. especially one that’s so easy to setup and requires no networking expertise.

looks like a company called cycorp will hook up their artificial intelligence onto the web for everyone to interact with. and it will learn from us…

via we-make-money-not-art

found a post card shared secret site today. a more expressive form of group hug perhaps. i wonder if the added effort required to decorate a post card changes the kind of statements compared to the web only site. i also noticed the terms of service of the post card blog explicitly mention that they may publish a book with the content.

scientists at oxford are now using infra-red satellite imaging technology to unlock the secrets of the oxyrhynchus collection of lost hellenistic and roman texts. they may find more lost christian gospels as well. the scraps of papyrus in this collection were found a hundred years ago, but now suddenly their secrets will be unlocked with the technology. very exciting.